Feminist Theory Flashcards
“I made quite sure he…
spotted me/Sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink” - ‘Little Red Cap’, Carol Ann Duffy
“What little girl doesn’t…
dearly love a wolf?” - ‘Little Red Cap’, Carol Ann Duffy
“I took an axe…
to the wolf/As he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat”- ‘Little Red Cap’, Carol Ann Duffy
Toril Moi - “feminists have to be… the
pluralists: there is no pure feminist or feminine space from which we can speak.”
Toril Moi - “try to make the poIitical context and implications of their work…
explicit, precisely in order to counter the tacit
acceptance of patriarchal power politics’.”
Toril Moi - “by stressing our right, aggressively if necessary, to appropriate…
other people’s ideas for our own political purposes, we may avoid a defeatist analysis of the situation of intellectually and culturally active women.”
Toril Moi - “Although crucially shaped by its anti-patriarchal emphasis on…
female experience, feminism as a political theory cannot be reduced to a reaction or a product of that experience
Toril Moi - “the angel and
the monster, the sweet heroine and the raging madwoman, are aspects of the author’s self-image”
Toril Moi - we can now define as female, writing by women, bearing in mind that this label does not say anything at all about…
the nature of that writing; as feminist, writing which takes a discemible anti-patriarchal and anti-sexist position; and as feminine, writing which seems to be marginalised (repressed, silenced) by the ruling social/linguistic order
Woolf - “Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women…
how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare would be allotted to them, how literature would suffer!”
Woolf - “Poetry ought to have
a mother as well as a father”
de Beauvoir - “the myth of women
the “division of humanity into two classes of individuals - is static myth”
de Beauvoir - “There is no reason working should
take away a woman’s sex appeal”
de Beauvoir - “woman’s independence successes are…
in contrast with her femininity, since the “true woman” is required to make herself object, to be the Other”
Cixous - “it is by writing, from and toward women, and
by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than…silence”
