Feminist Criticism & Gender Theory Flashcards
How patriarchy functions (Woolf)
‘When the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with that inferiority, but with his own superiority’
Woolf interlinking Marxism
‘Genius like Shakespeare’s was not borne labouring, uneducated, servile people… genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes.’
Quote about lost novelists (Woolf)
‘When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed… even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor’
Biggest change towards end of 18th century for Woolf
‘The middle-class woman began to write.’
Jane Eyre quote by Woolf
‘Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot…. women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do’
Woolf on the sentence
‘there was no common sentence ready for her use.’
‘That is a man’s sentence.. it was a sentence unsuited for a woman’s use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.’
Woolf on the letter ‘I’
‘The worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter ‘I’ all is shapeless as mist’
Capital letters Woolf
‘One blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy’
What is fatal for Woolf
‘It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple… in any way to speak consciously as a woman’
Judith Butler
Published Gender Trouble 1990; critiques feminine identity as having a concrete form
Simone de Beauvoir quote
‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, .’
Gender as an act
‘Gender is an “act” broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological inferiority’
‘Gender is in no way a stable identity…
It is an identity tenuously constituted in time - an identity instituted through a stylised repetition of acts’
Butler on punitive social consequences
‘Culture punishes or marginalises those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism’
Toril Moi
Essay ‘feminist, female, feminine’
- Feminist - political position
- Femaleness - a matter of biology
- Femininity - set of culturally defined characteristics
What are Butler’s insightful critiques of
Lacan ; Freud (chapter 2) - she argues that in Freud’s system of bisexuality the taboo of bisexuality creates heterosexual dispositions, thereby making the Oedipal complex possible
Nancy Cott on feminism
‘Feminism is nothing if not paradoxical. It aims for individual freedoms by mobilising sex solidarity. It acknowledges diversity among women while positing that women recognise their unity. It requires gender consciousness for its basis, yet calls for the elimination of prescribed gender roles’
Luce Irigaray ‘Women on the Market’ 1985 main argument
She argues for a separation of women from men, so that Female ‘commodities’ who are traded by men to establish homosocial bonds can have their own identities, and their own lives among themselves.
