Feminism

A movement turned into a theory which deals with the idea that women should have
same economic, social and political rights as men. It examines ways which reinforces or
undermines women’s oppression.
Aristotle’ “the man is superior by the nature and women is inferior. One ruler and other
is being ruled.”
Marry Wollstonecraft’s started opposition of this ideology and broke the stereotypes by
writing “A Vindication of Women’s Rights ” (1792). Later on Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of
one’s Own” (1929) which is based on her lectures regarding a women should have her
own room and money to write literature. Furthermore in early twentieth century women
stepped forward to produce such literature which articulates rights of women and their
role in a society and infers that women are not inferior to men. For instance, Simon de
Beauvoir‘s Second Sex, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own and moving
towards female oriented fictional texts of Jane Austen, Bronte sisters, George Eliot and
many more. Such literature stimulates the significance of female that they must
acknowledge themselves and lead the way in male-dominant society.

Post colonialism
A movement turned into a theory which analyses and responds to the cultural legacy of
colonialism and imperialism. It bespeaks of European external control and economic
exploitation on natives and their lands. This theory rejects the dominant western way of
looking at things and superiority of western culture and provides a new lens and voice
to marginal (colonized) identities.
Few concepts regarding this theory: binary oppositions
Colonizer: the one who colonizes others
Colonized: the one who is being colonized by colonizers.
Occident: westerns (who consider themselves superior)
Orients: non-westerns (who are considered inferior e.g Eastern world on a broader level
and women on narrow level)
Racial binaries such as black/white, male/female, self/other, West/East.

Few postcolonial texts

 Edward Said’s Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism .
  Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (book); Third Space, Hegemony,
Hybridity, Mimicry, Ambivalence and ethnic cleansing (conceptual terms)
 Frantz Fanon also contributed in postcolonial lit for the matter of identifying
inferior subjects.

Marxism
Karl Marx is the proponent of this theory.
It deals with class and social relations which determines our consciousness.
These concepts work under Marxism: Capitalism and Marxist
Capitalism: An economic and social system in which a country is being ruled by
industrial owners rather than a state.
Marxist: Marxists believe in social change; they want to analyze social relations in order
to bring change or alter it as whatever they see are injustices and inequalities created
by capitalist economic relations.
 Historical materialist view of the world
“The mode of production is how a particular society organizes itself economically”.
 Mode of production involves two parts to organize a society
Instrument: It includes the means of economic production like tools, machines,
factories, and resources like land, and so on, along with human labor power to increase
economy. It is also called forces of production.
Relations: The mode of production also includes relations between people in terms of
economic production, like who owns the factories and who works at them. In this
process one operates the tools of production.

Works of Karl Marx alongside Friedrich Engels

 The German Ideology
 Das Capital
 The Communist Manifesto
Louis Althusser
He believes that the prevailing ideology forms the attitudes of the people in the society
through a process he calls interpellation. He provides two ideological apparatuses:
Ideological State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatuses
Ideological state Apparatus 
A term developed by Althusser to denote institutions such as education, the churches,
media, and law, which were formally outside state control to interpellate those
individuals affected by them and to maintain order in a society.
Repressive State Apparatus
???

Michael Foucault’s Panopticism includes in Marxist Criticism which is a way to

illustrate the tendency of disciplinary societies subjugate its citizens. He describes the
prisoner of a panopticon as being at the receiving end of asymmetrical surveillance: “He
is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in
communication.”