Feminist Criticism Flashcards
Feminist Criticism focus
Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women.
Patriarchy
Any culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles.
Traditional gender roles
Cast men as rational, strong, protective, and decisive; they cast women as emotional (irrational), weak, nurturing, and submissive.
Sexist
The promotion of the belief that women are innately inferior to men.
Biological Essentialism
Biological differences between the sexes that are considered part of our unchanging essence as men and women.
Sex
refers to our biological constitution as female or male
gender
which refers to our cultural programming as feminine or masculine
Patriarchal ideology suggests that there are only two identities a woman
If she accepts her traditional gender role and obeys the patriarchal rules, she’s a “good girl”; if she doesn’t, she’s a “bad girl.” These two roles—also referred to as “Madonna” and “whore” or “angel” and “bitch”—view women only in terms of how they relate to the patriarchal order.
This is one reason why I believe that feminist theory will never become stale
it constantly incorporates new ideas from other fields and finds new ways to use old ideas
Subjectivity
The way one views oneself and others, which develops from one’s own individual experiences.
French Feminism
believes in the importance of social and political activism in order to ensure equal opportunity and equal access to justice for women.
Materialist feminism
Is interested in the social and economic oppression of women.
French materialist feminism
examines the patriarchal traditions and institutions that control the material (physical) and economic conditions by which society oppresses women.
Most important autor of french materialist feminism
Simone de Beauvoir
What did Simone de Beauvoir said?
She said that men are considered essential subjects (independent selves with free will), while women are considered contingent beings (dependent beings controlled by circumstances). Men can act upon the world, change it, give it meaning, while women have meaning only in relation to men. Thus, women are defined not just in terms of their difference from men, but in terms of their inadequacy in comparison to men. The word woman, therefore, has the same implications as the word other.
What did Christine Delphy said?
offers a feminist critique of patriarchy based on Marxist principles. She focuses her analysis on the family as economic unit. Just as the lower classes are oppressed by the upper classes in society as a whole, she explains, women are the subordinates within families. As such, women constitute a separate oppressed class, based on their oppression as women, regardless of the socioeconomic class to which they belong. For Delphy, marriage is a labor contract that ties women to unpaid domestic labor. Patriarchy defines women in their domestic roles as nonworkers. Delphy argues, that all relationships between men and women are based on power: patriarchal men want to keep all of it; nonpatriarchal women want power to be equally distributed.
Colette Guillaumin said this
observes that men are defined primarily and referred to primarily in terms of what they do. Women are defined primarily and referred to primarily in terms of their sex.
Direct physical appropiation
the reduction of women to the state of material objects
Sexage
Occurs, in four main forms: (1) the appropriation of women’s time, (2) the appropriation of the products of women’s bodies, (3) women’s sexual obligation, and (4) women’s obligation to care for whichever members of the family can’t care for themselves as well as for healthy male family members.
Psychoanalytic feminism
Concentrate’s on women psychological experience. Its focus is on the individual psyche
the site at which most of the psychological subjugation occurs
Language
Two great findings of Helen Cixous
Patriarchal Binary thought
patriarchal binary thought
seeing the world in terms of polar opposites, one of which is considered superior to the other.
écriture féminine (feminine writing)
feminine language that undermines or eliminates the patriarchal binary thinking that oppresses and silences women
Observations of Irigaray
men have defined femininity in terms of their own needs, fears, and desires. Irigaray posits, women have only two choices: (1) to keep quiet or (2) to imitate patriarchy’s representation of herself as it wants to see her. The way to get beyond patriarchy is by means of the same vehicle that programmed us within patriarchy: language, what she calls womenspeak.
Male Gaze
The man looks, the woman is looked at. And it is the one who looks who is in control
Observation of Kristeva
the feminine can’t be defined because there are as many definitions of the feminine as there are women. We can, however, know this about femininity, Kristeva asserts: it is marginalized, oppressed, just as the working class is marginalized and oppressed.
Two dimensions of the language for Kristeva:
Symbolic and semiotic
Symbolic language
the domain in which words operate and meanings are attributed to them.
Semiotic language
That part of language that, in contrast, consists of such elements as intonation, rhythm, and the body language that occurs as we speak, which reveals our feelings and bodily drives.
Sisterhood
psychological and political bonding among women based on the recognition of common experiences and goals
ethnic cultural feminism
concerned more with the particular female cultural values of their own ethnic group rather than with those of women in general
Topics of gender studies
1) patriarchal assumptions about gender and gender roles that continue to oppress women, (2) alternatives to the current way we conceptualize gender as either feminine or masculine, (3) the relationship between sex and gender, and (4) the relationship between sexuality and gender.
The American gender system
A binary sistem
The way Native North American societies tended to define gender
(1) women; (2) female variants, or variant gender roles adopted by biological females; (3) men; and (4) male variants, or variant gender roles adopted by biological males.
Intersexed
have some combination of male and female reproductive organs, genitals, chromosomal and/or hormonal makeup. 1.7% of all children born in a year are intersexual.
Transgender activists say that there are really five sexes that occur naturally
(1) female, (2) female intersexed, (3) true intersexed, (4) male intersexed, and (5) male
Gender Identity
implies that one’s gender may not match one’s biological sex.
Androgyny
tells us that, regardless of one’s sex, one’s gender identity may consist of some combination of feminine and masculine behaviors.
Questioning
opens the door both for people who feel unsure of their sexual orientation and for people whose “sex and gender identification . . . may not [have] an existing label”.
Cross-dresser
one who adopts the attire of the opposite sex but who behaves in a manner associated with one’s biological sex.
Gay Transvestite
One who adopts both the attire and the behavior of the opposite sex, usually in an exaggerated manner.
Misogyny
Hatred of women
Gynophobia
Fear and loathing of woman as sexual and reproductive beings.
New Woman
Women of the 20s that broke the perception of conservatives and gain the right of voting in the U. S.
Hegemony
Is a dominant power imposed by consent and not by force.
Patriarchal Bargain
A decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power one can wrest from the system. It is an individual strategy designed to manipulate the system to one’s best advantage, but one that leaves the system itself intact.
Patriarchy
Gender construction of masculinity and femininity.
Femininity
Dependence leads to indulgent and reverence while independence leads to dislike and rejection.
phallocentric
denotes the (false) assumption that maleness is the natural, and in fact only, source of authority and power.
The name of the father (Nom du pere):
the massive configuration of authority that works through language. It recognizes the patriarchal character of our social arrangements.
Marxist feminism and the concept of interpellation (Althusser)
Ideology addresses us in a certain role and draws us into a conspiracy that is ultimately aimed at ourselves.
“the solidarity of logocentrism and phallocentrism”, by Cixous
never-ending privileging of the masculine that damages us all, females and males alike, because it curbs the imagination and is therefore oppressive in general.
