Feminism

First-wave feminism

 The first wave was most explicitly concerned with political and legal reform, dominated in Britain
for example by the activities of the suffragists and suffragettes campaigning for women’s right to
vote.
 contributions from writers including (in the US) Kate Chopin and (in the UK) Katherine Mansfield,
Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf.
‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) Woolf argues that female creative expression is limited by
women’s material circumstances, which frequently deny them the opportunity for either the
space or time to explore their creative and intellectual capacities. The need, then, for a ‘room of
one’s own’ is symbolic of both the literal and psychological freedom that is denied by patriarchal
culture. Later feminist writers would pick up on Woolf’s concern; for example, Doris Lessing in her
short story ‘To Room Nineteen’ would in 1963, almost 40 years later, explore similar territory to
Woolf and examine how women’s self-expression continues to be thwarted by even seemingly
‘progressive’ marriages and domestic arrangements.
Second-wave feminism

 Lessing’s story is in part a critique of the idea that making women

conscious of their own oppression is enough to combat it. Her central
protagonist is well aware of feminist debates, considers herself to have
shaped a marriage informed by these, and yet she ultimately finds herself
imprisoned nevertheless. Lessing wrote “To Room Nineteen’ in the wake of
the second wave of the feminist movement which concerned itself
precisely with these kinds of ‘consciousness raising’ activities designed to
empower women to act against oppression in their marriages, workplaces
and social lives. The
 Second Wave of Feminism

 The Beginning point for this second wave is debated, with some critics citing the 1949
publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and others dating the shift to
the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
Given de Beauvoir’s interest in woman’s self-definition, it is more useful perhaps to
see her work as tentatively marking the beginnings of this second phase, which
challenged the limited ways in which women had been and were being thought
about. In The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir argues that woman is not a biological
fact but a concept created by long-entrenched social values and expectations. This
introduces the idea of socialization: that gender identity is not inherent but
something developed through the individual’s introduction into a set of rules and
acceptable behaviours to which society shapes them to conform. Female identity,
then, is not natural but constructed.
Simone de Beauvoir

 De Beauvoir was a dynamic feminist activist

 She founded a feminist newspaper in France, Nouvelle féminisme, and a
feminist journal, Nouvelles questions féministes.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

 One Is not born a woman; rather one becomes a woman. Simone de

Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
De Beauvoir’s concern here, to distinguish the difference between
biological sex and gender as a social expression, can be seen as the
cornerstone of modern feminism. While biological difference exists, these
differences are harnessed by patriarchy in the service of inequality that
those differences themselves do not justify.
 Friedan was one of 120 international signatories to the second humanist
manifesto published in The Humanist magazine in 1973, which included the
line ‘No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.’
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique

 It is in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) that the consciousness- raising efforts of
second-wave feminism come to the fore. Friedan, who had established the National
Organization for Women in the United States in 1966, echoes many of de Beauvoir's
sentiments, particularly in terms of illustrating how patriarchy has used biological
differences to limit women's opportunities and rights. Her text was revelatory when it was
published, however, because it directed its attention to the core of ordinary, married,
middle-class white American women, to examine how their seemingly comfortable lives
were dominated by stifling patriarchal values that limited their expression and creativity.
This kind of female identity was enshrined recently in the TV drama Mad Men, where the
central female character Betty Draper's first name might be seen as a nod to Friedan's
theory. Friedan in this respect highlights how economic success only empowers patriarchy,
and provides little advantage for women. Her discussion of the ways in which
technological advancements in the home had not made life better for women but
instead had developed 'the problem with no name' - the discontent felt by many
housewives in the 1950s and 1960s - was highly influential on the focus of the second-
wave movement on the psychology of oppression.
 ‘Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds,
shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter
sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay
beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the
silent question – “Is this all?”
 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
The rise of feminist literary theory

 Feminist literary theory emerged during the second wave of feminism.

Following from the aims of the second movement to raise women’s
consciousness and challenge stereotypes, feminist critics consider how
literary texts might reinforce patriarchal norms in society, and also how
they might question these. They see literature as an agent for change: not
merely reflecting the roles of women but also serving as a powerful tool for
socializing women into particular identities, and as a potentially radical
spa where new identities are encouraged. Feminist literary theory also
draws attention to the gender bias in the creation of literature itself – the
ways in which female voices are less prominent in the literary world, or
stereotypically associated with certain kinds of writing such as romance of
children’s fiction.
 Belief in the ability of literature to serve as a feminist manifesto is
rooted early examples that have become central to the work of
feminist literary critics. In the late 1960s and 1970s, theorists such as
Elaine Showalter ) and Kate Millett (1934-) would take up these
influences and use them argue for an overlooked female canon.
Showalter defined the study of the texts as ‘gynocriticism’,
meaning simply the study of literature authored women,
Gynocriticism

 Gynocriticism is the study of female-authored literature.

Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics

 Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) is a scathing critique of the representation of

sexual relations in many canonical works of literature by famous male
writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer. Instead, Millett
applauds the complex gender politics of queer writers such as Jean Genet.
In this respect, Millett’s work was of significance in the growing movement
towards concerns with gender- rather than more exclusively women – that
began to emerge in this period, paving the way for later queer theory. The
study of this literature is seen to counter the patriarchal construction of
womanhood that feminist critics like Millett argue is present in many male-
authored works.
 The best-known text in this regard is Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The
Mad Woman in the Attic (1979). For Gilbert and Gubar, the male writing
tradition positions women in only a limited number of roles designed to
further the interests of patriarchy. And it is within this system that the female
writer struggles to find her voice.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

 The title of Gilbert and Gubar’s text has become the subject of
affectionate humour, in that it refers to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1847);
but the first Mrs Rochester lives not in the attic but in the upper floor of the
house, which in fact has no mentioned attic at all.
 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

 ‘What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of

literary authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and covertly patriarchal? If the
vexed and vexing polarities of angel and monster, sweet dumb Snow White and fierce
mad Queen, are major images literary tradition offers women, how does such imagery
influence the ways in which women attempt the pen? If the Queen’s looking glass
speaks with the King’s voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the
Queen’s own voice?
Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King,
imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his points of view? Or does she “talk back”
to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint?’
(Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)
 Gubar and Gilbert’s approach is echoed in a number of other works from the
1980s, such as Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985). Feminisms concern for
the representation of women has also influenced studies in the visual and
popular arts, most notably film theory. For example, in her landmark essay
‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), Laura Mulvey employs Freudian
and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that Hollywood cinema imagines a
masculine viewer, placing the female character in a position of being
watched and objectified. This process she calls the ‘male gaze’. By positioning
the viewer as male (regardless of gender), film reproduces patriarchy. It
reaffirms men as voyeurs and consumers of pleasure, and women as creators
of that pleasure in the service of male needs. As a challenge to this, Mulvey
argues for a feminist, avant- garde film-making practice that would disrupt
Hollywood conventions.sm’s
Male Gaze

 The male gaze refers to the construction of visual media through an

imagined male viewer and his desires.
The BLUE VELVET - Case Study

 One self-conscious engagement with the idea of the male gaze is David
Lynch’s 15% film Blue Velvet. The film tells the story of a young man, Jeffrey
(played by Kyle MacLachlan), who, while out walking one day, finds a
severed ear and becomes drawn into the mysterious life of a woman
named Dorothy (played by Isabella Rossellini). Dorothy is being
blackmailed by a violent sociopath called Frank (played by Denis Hopper).
Frank has abducted Dorothy’s husband and son, and is forcing her to
perform sexual favours in payment for their return.
The BLUE VELVET – Case Study

 In one defining scene from the film, Frank visits Dorothy, who hides Jeffrey
in a closet. During this scene the camera switches from a close-up of Frank
and Dorothy’s interactions to Jeffrey’s position in the closet. As Frank forces
Dorothy to engage in sexual acts and is brutally violent towards her, we
see the action from Jeffrey’s perspective. By including the viewer with the
male gaze within the film itself, Lynch draws the audience’s attention to
their own voyeurism – they are no different from the man watching in the
closet. Any erotic pleasure derived from the highly sexualized but also
violent scene presented to us is therefore immediately associated with a
kind of distasteful, secret observation.
THE BLUE VELVET – Case Study

 This is reinforced by the fact that Jeffrey finds the experience repugnant,
and when Frank leaves and Dorothy attempts to sexually engage Jeffrey,
asking him to hit her, he refuses (although he later returns to the apartment
and does have sex with her). By making us feel like Jeffrey in the closet,
Lynch exposes how our erotic experiences are rooted in the codes
perpetuated by the male gaze.
THE BLUE VELVET – Case Study

 In a later essay entitiled ‘Cult Etherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus

and Blue Velvet’ (1996), Laura Mulvey has argued that the relationships
presented by Lynch in the film are symbolic of the domestic abuse within
families. Yet in his film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – Lacanian
Psychoanalysis and Film (2006), the controversial philosopher Slavoj Žižek
has suggested that Frank also represents Dorothy’s fantasy, and in
particular her desire to be shaken out of her passivity. If this is the case,
then we can read this as a damning example of how the male gaze is
internalized, as Dorothy’s own fantasy is to become the subject of Frank’s
whims.
French Feminist Theory

 Alongside these works stand a number of French theoretical texts that also
examine female stereotypes. Although often not directly about literature,
they are still concerned with questions of representation. The three major
writers in these terms are Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva,
whose critical work encompasses feminist, poststructuralist and
psychoanalytic influences.
L’ÉCRITURE FEMININE

 One influential term coined by the feminist critic Hélène Cixous is écriture
feminine (female writing), which has become a central way of considering
women’s creativity. The term first emerges in Cixous’s essay ‘The Laugh of
the Medusa’ (1976). Écriture feminine is not new, however: it builds in
particular on Woolf’s comments in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ that novel
writing is dominated by a ‘masculine’ prose that she cannot naturally
produce. Cixous, however, integrates Woolf’s ideas with her own
poststructuralist thinking, so that, while there is a female writing, this writing
is beyond definition – continually changing and exceeding boundaries so
that it cannot be turned into a kind of absolute. This writing emerges
through its difference from patriarchal writing, serving as a challenge to it
and also to the forms it upholds(prose and realism in particular)
ÉCRITURE FEMININE

 Écriture feminine refers to female writing, as distinct from and as a

challenge to male writing.
ÉCRITURE FEMININE

 Both Irigaray and Kristeva take up Cixous’s idea: for Kristeva it is embodi in two different
parts of language-one that is ordered and structured, and driven by male control (the
symbolic), and one which is fluid, disruptive and essentially female (the semiotic). Irigaray
translates the idea into a broader notion of women’s speech – what she calls in This Sex
Which is Not One (1985) parler femme, which is represented as a challenge to male
authority For Irigaray, women’s pleasure is impossible within male systems of language-
desire, and its successful achievement (what Lacan called jouissance), is unavailable to
women unless they are allowed to speak as women. This pertains for Irigaray to a wider
celebration of the female body, in particular to those figures that have sometimes been
silenced in feminist politics, such as the mother. Rather than rejecting this role as some
feminists have done, as one into which women are socialized, Irigaray in her book
Speculum of the Other Woman (1985) attempts to rehabilitate the figure of the mother by
suggesting that it is possible to be both mother and woman, stating in her essay ‘The
Bodily Encounter with the Mother” (1991) that “we do not have to renounce being
women in order to be mothers’. To do so, one must separate out the materiality of
woman from the ideal that she is often taken to represent.
ÉCRITURE FEMININE

 'Better than a mother, then, is the working out of the idea of a mother, of
the maternal ideal. Better to transform the real "natural" mother into an
ideal of the maternal function which no one can ever take away from
you.“
 Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’ (1991)
ÉCRITURE FEMININE

 The risk in écriture feminine is that, despite Cixous’s open, heterogeneous

conceptualizing, it becomes distilled in such a way that it upholds binary
distinctions between male and female authors, and thus between male and
female identities more generally: Equally, it can be seen to contribute to other
stereotypes, such as the idea that certain subject matter is more naturally
‘female’ (for example, it has long been a stereotype of female poets that their
work is focused on the personal and approaches the political largely through
this).
There is a tension in the celebration of women’s writing at the same time that
the idea of what it is to be a woman is being challenged. This can be seen to
have split the feminist movement, between those arguing for an essential
mode of female expression that had been denied and those arguing that
women should be seen differently from men.
Case study: the Suzanne Moore
controversy


Many radical feminists support transgender rights. A small number however,
have argued that transgender issues are separate from feminism. They suggest
that sex is biological, and it is therefore impossible for someone who has not
grown up as a woman to experience the same oppression as someone who
has. In addition, because they refuse to recognize male-to-female transgender
individuals as women, these feminists argue that the transgender movement is
a continuance of men speaking for women. This, plus the suggestion that the
stereotypical views upheld by many transgender women are damaging to
feminism, means that radical feminists have been criticized for excluding
transgender women. Liberal feminists supporting the transgender position have
defined these radical feminists through the acronym TERF which stands for trans
exclusionary radical feminist.
Case study: the Suzanne Moore
controversy

 The divisions between liberal and radical feminists on this issue have been
fuelled by social media, where transgender feminists have a strong presence.
This was strongly illustrated in January 2013, when the feminist journalist Suzanne
Moore unwittingly found herself at the centre of the debates. On 8 January,
Moore published a piece in the New Statesman magazine examining the
relationship between gender and the economic downturn in Britain, arguing
that it was women who were facing the harde fallout from events. One line in
the article, that women were angry with ourselves fu not being happier, not
being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape-the of a Brazilian
transsexual’ led to a massive response on Twitter accusing Moore of
transphobia. Moore’s comments in response were seen by many to be flippant
and insensitive, and the media storm that grew led to equally distasteful threats
against Moore that led her to close her Twitter account.
Case study: the Suzanne Moore
controversy

 These debates draw attention to the complexities of defining feminism in

the twenty- first century. For literary critics, it means we must be certain
about precisely what feminism we think works might usefully engage with
or represent.
Third-wave feminism and beyond


The move to feminisms is associated with where feminism is today – in a
third wave that began in the 1990s and continues to the present. This latest
feminist movement has opened itself to the need to acknowledge the
varying ways in which gender discrimination relates to other forms of social
oppression, and this has had an impact on the use of feminism in literary
criticism. As Mary Eagleton notes in the introduction to her excellent critical
reader Feminist Literary Criticism (1991), feminism constitutes a broad
range of diverse identifications, and debates with other theoretical
interests.
Third-wave feminism and beyond

 Black feminists and Marxist feminists have foregrounded the ways in which,
respectively, race and class complicate the operation of patriarchy. The
theory that examines such significances is called intersectionality. It argues
that we cannot think about identity politics by just examining one
particular aspect of how a person is identified; we need to consider how
each part of their identity is important. Influential works in these terms are
Michele Barrett’s Women’s Oppression Today (1988), Catherine Belsey’s
John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (1988), and bell hooks’s Ain’t I a
Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981). These works prompt us as
literary critics not to think exclusively about the gender politics of a text,
but also about how the representation of gender is affected by other
elements of identity such as class, sexuality, race and disability.
Intersectionality

 Intersectionality is the study of the rights of

 Third-wave feminism faces a challenge from what has become referred to
as post-feminism: a movement that suggests we no longer need to focus
on female inequality. Critics of post-feminism, however, draw attention to
its essentially Western focus, an ethnocentrism (centring on one particular
ethnic experience) which neglects the powerful inequalities still
experienced, not only by women in the developing world but also by
ethnic minorities within the developed world. At the same time, there are
calls for a fourth-wave feminism from some campaigners, distinct from the
third wave in its focus on social media and globalization. For literary critics,
these debates mean that gender continues to be a rich source of
discussion, as what we read is surely part of the changing sense of gender
relations across the world.