Gender Flashcards
Two main branches of feminist criticism
‘Anglo-American’ (literary realism, close reading, liberal humanism with focus on historical data/non-lit material)
‘French Feminism’ (Builds on post-structuralism, deal with language, psychology, representation before dealing with literature).
What is images of women criticism? Name some of its scholars?
The search for female stereotypes in male writing and criticism e.g. Mary Ellmann
What is ‘thought by sexual analogy’?
Comprehending all phenomena in terms of our original, simplistic sexual difference - all forms are subsumed by our concept of male and female temperament.
Who proposed eleven major stereotypes of femininity? give some examples…
Mary Ellmann - passivity, instability, spirituality compliance, irrationality, figures of the Witch and Shrew.
What is the explosive tendency?
Each stereotype has a limit, after which it explodes, leading to vulgarization and reorganization of the advantage, now in fragments, around new center of disadvantage e.g. Mother stereotype slides from idol to castrating and aggressive and controlling.
What does Simone de Beauvoir link to woman’s identity as Other?
Alienation to her body, particularly her reproductive capacity, which features draining physical events that tie women to their bodies in a way that men are not.
Why did de Beavoir recognize that the decision to strengthen masculine rational faculties/critical powers, to exist as a pour-soi (a transcendent subject that constitutes her own future by means of creative projects) is anxiety-inducing for women?
According to de Beauvoir, women’s independent successes are in contradiction with her femininity, since the ‘true woman’ is required to make herself object, to be the Other’.
What was the main hypothesis put forward in Betty Freidan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique’?
Women suffer under system of false values under which they’re urged to find personal fulfillment vicariously through husbands/children. This restricted wife-mother role usually leads to sense of unreality/spiritual malaise in absence of genuine, creative, self-defining work.
What is ‘standpoint theory’ and who proposed it?
What one knows is affected by one’s subject position in society - Dorothy E Smith.
What is ‘bifurcation of consciousness’ and who proposed it?
Subordinate groups are conditioned to view world from perspective of dominant group. Dorothy E Smith.
Which two subjectivies or ‘worlds’, did Smith reflect on from her own life in the development of many of her sociological theories?
The dominant, masculine-orientated, ‘abstract’ world of academic and ‘concrete’ world of wife/mother.
Who extends Smith’s standpoint theory and in what way?
Patricia Hill Collins, by focusing on particular epistemological standpoint of black women.
What is matrix of domination theory and who proposed it?
One’s position in society is made up of multiple contiguous standpoints, rather than just one essentialist standpoint - Patricia Hill Collins.
Why is matrix of domination not a dichotomous, top-down theory of oppression?
Unlike top-down models, which propose power operates from top by forcing unwilling victims to bend to will of more powerful superiors, Collins proposes that individual can be oppressor, oppressed or both at the same time, as each person derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from multiple systems of oppression that frame everyone’s lives.
According to Collins, on what three levels can individual resist/experience oppression?
Personal biography
Group/community level - race, class, gender
Systematic level of social institutions
From which approach does French feminism move away after 1968?
Beauvoir’s aims at equality, which was seen as a covert attempt to force women to be like men.
What occurs during the Oedipal crisis according to Lacan?
Father splits the dyadic unity between mother and rest of world, this marks entry into the Symbolic Order, which is synonymous with the acquisition of language and the Primary Repression, which in it itself leads to the opening of the unconscious.
What is the Primary Repression?
Repression of the desire for Imaginary unity with the mother
Outline the main argument put forward in Butler’s ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’
Assumption of lesbian identity not only affirms, but also constrains, legislates, determines and specifies identity in homophobic ways and so argues for the subversion of gender and sexual identity by destabilizing categories that make them up.
Gender is an original for which there’s no original - tries and fails to reproduce its own ideal image of itself and ‘natural’ sex/gender is only social performance and psychic scripting.
According to both Butler’s theory of psychic mimesis and Freud’s of melancholic incorporation, how is the self/gender constituted?
Through differentially gendered Others, which means that gender can never be fully self-identical.
Melancholic incorporation of other as result of loss into self is what leads to self’s incapacity to achieve self-identity, as it will always be disrupted by the Other, which is the very condition of the self’s possibility.
What is the main way in which heterosexuality naturalizes itself?
By setting up illusions of continuity between sex, gender and desire and placing itself as the origin of a causal sequence to which homosexuality is portrayed as a derivative, a failed mimesis.
How does Chodorow’s ‘object relations theory’ differ from Freud’s approach to psychoanalysis?
Agrees that sexual orientation and gender are ‘made’ not ‘born’, but situates innate drives in context of interpersonal relations not sexuality (‘relationship-seeking’ over ‘pleasure-seeking’)
How does gender identity form according to object relations theory?
Symbiotic relationship to primary caretaker and the dissolution of this relationship through differentiation and individuation.
According to object-relations theory how does the formation of male and female gender identity diverge?
Boys achieve identity through separation from mother and the world of emotional intimacy that she represents and therefore have later difficulty dealing with emotions as they are seen as ‘feminizing’ and so threatening and the denial of the Oedipal love for mothers leads to misogyny.
Girls on the other hand don’t need to seperate from mother in order to achieve adult gender identity and so continue intense mother-daughter bond, this leads to unconscious desire to form attachments which means women suffer greater dependency needs, as their self-identity is tied to their relationships with others.
