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.
3 Questions
- The Role of Theory
- the Nature of language
- The value or otherwise of psychoanalysis
Quote Irigaray
‘The society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women’
Levi-Strauss
Women are ‘scarce commodities… essential to the survival of the group’
When was the Newly Born Women written?
1975
When was Woman on the Market written?
1985
Simone de Beauvoir
the Second Sex (1949) - ‘One is not born a woman; rather one becomes a woman’
Anglo-American feminist critics (1970s)
literature as a series of representations of women’s lives;
- Elaine Showalter
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
- Patricia Stubbs
English feminist critics (mid 1980s)
‘socialist feminist’
- Cora Kaplan
- Catherine Belsey
French feminists
- Julia Kristeva
- Hélène Cixous
- Luce Irigaray
Dale Spender ‘Man Made Language’
language is ‘masculine’ - role as the instrument through which patriarchy finds expression
écriture feminine
transgressive, rule-transcending, intoxicated; facilitating the free play of meaning; loosened grammatical structures; Cixous’ heightened prose
Cixous quote on bodies
‘Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions’
Essentialism is hard to square with feminism…
which emphasises femininity as a social construct, not a given entity
Juliet Mitchell Psychoanalysis and Feminism 1974
defends Freud - female sexuality formed by early experiences so gender roles must be malleable and changeable
Kate Millett Sexual Politics 1969
condemns Freud as primes Bruce of the patriarchal attitudes against which feminists must fight
Gilbert & Gubar Wuthering Heights
records a process of ‘anxious self-denial’ - ‘social castration’
Gilbert and Gubar WH name
‘What Catherine, or any girl, must learn is that she does not know her own name, and therefore cannot know either who she is or whom she is destined to be’
Gilbert and Gubar Cathy castration
symbolic castration; phallic guard-dog ‘purple tongue hanging half a foot out of its mouth’
Gilbert and Gubar - doubleness
the Grange - home of ‘concealment and doubleness’ - she learns ‘to adopt a double character without exactly intending to deceive anyone’ —> fragmentation (Heathcliff ‘her rebellious alter-ego - ‘more myself than I am)
Cixous Newly Born Woman
1975 - describes the tradition of gender representation as an oppositional one in which all that connotes women is portrayed as being secondary to male rationalist principles
Cixous ‘oppsoition’
‘Thought has always worked through opposition’
Cixous argues that there is no ‘general’ or ‘typical’ woman
she focuses her study on what women have in common; a history of exclusion and a legacy of limited agency and visibility
Butler on drag
‘In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency’
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics 1968
‘Marriages are financial alliances, and each household operates as an economic entity much like a corporation’
Tegan Zimmerman ‘Revisiting Irigaray’s essay
women occupy a ‘permanent position as a commodity, a product of the intersection between capitalism and patriarchy’
Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex woman is negated through marriage quote
‘because she owns nothing, woman is not raised to the dignity of a person; she herself is part of man’s patrimony, first her father’s and then her husbands’
only in 1991 that rape within marriage became recognised as a crime in English law (Mary Beard)
‘the law has never successfully managed the transition from rape as a crime (of theft, from the Latin rapio) committed against the woman’s warden or guardian, her husband or her father, to rape as a crime committed against the woman herself’
JS Mill ‘The subjection of Women’ (1869)
position of wives aligned to the position of slaves; Mill declared that ‘the wife is the actual bond-servant of her husband; no less so, so far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so-called.’
