Feminism

To speak of "Feminism" as a theory is already a reduction. However, in terms of its theory (rather than as its reality as a historical movement in effect for some centuries) feminism might be categorized into three general groups:

1. theories having an essentialist focus (including psychoanalytic and French feminism);

2. theories aimed at defining or establishing a feminist literary canon or theories seeking to re-interpret and re-vision literature (and culture and history and so forth) from a less patriarchal slant (including gynocriticism, liberal feminism); and

3. theories focusing on sexual difference and sexual politics (including gender studies, lesbian studies, cultural feminism, radical feminism, and socialist/materialist feminism).

Further, women (and men) needed to consider what it means to be a woman, to consider how much of what society has often deemed inherently female traits, are culturally and socially constructed.

Suggestions:

• Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970)

• Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977)

• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)

• Teresa de Lauretis's Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984)

• Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land (1975), or

• Judith Fetterly's The Resisting Reader (1978)

• Helene Cixous ("The Laugh of the Medusa")

• Gilbert & Gubar ("The Madwoman in the Attic")

*These are just a handful of the many critiques that questioned cultural, sexual, intellectual, and/or psychological stereotypes about women.

Key Terms

Androgyny

- '...suggests a world in which sex-roles are not rigidly defined, a state in which ‘the man in every woman' and the ‘woman in every man' could be integrated and freely expressed'. Used more frequently in the 1970's, this term was used to describe a blurring, or combination of gender roles so that neither masculinity or femininity is dominant."

Écriture féminine

- Écriture féminine, literally women's writing, is a philosophy that promotes women's experiences and feelings to the point that it strengthens the work. Hélène Cixous first uses this term in her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in which she asserts, "Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges the anti-linear, cyclical writing so often frowned upon by patriarchal society' (Wikipedia).

Gynocentrics

- "a term coined by the feminist scholar-critic Elaine Showalter to define the process of constructing "a female framework for analysis of women's literature [in order] to develop new models [of interpretation] based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt to male models and theories'"

Jouissance

- a term most commonly associated with Helene Cixous (seek-sou), whose use of the word may have derived from Jacques Lacan - "Cixous follows Lacan's psychoanalytic paradigm, which argues that a child must separate from its mother's body (the Real) in order to enter into the Symbolic. Because of this, Cixous says, the female body in general becomes unrepresentable in language; it's what can't be spoken or written in the phallogocentric Symbolic order. Cixous here makes a leap from the maternal body to the female body in general; she also leaps from that female body to female sexuality, saying that female sexuality, female sexual pleasure, feminine jouissance, is unrepresentable within the phallogocentric Symbolic order"

Patriarchy

- "Sexism is perpetuated by systems of patriarchy where male-dominated structures and social arrangements elaborate the oppression of women. Patriarchy almost by definition also exhibits androcentrism, meaning male centered. Coupled with patriarchy, androcentrism assumes that male norms operate through out all social institutions and become the standard to which all persons adhere"

Phallologocentrism

- "language ordered around an absolute Word (logos) which is “masculine” [phallic], systematically excludes, disqualifies, denigrates, diminishes, silences the “feminine”

The Bluest Eye

The Other