Feminist Criticism

FEMINIST CRITICISM

Many feminists think that women should be able to study at home and raise children. Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature and other cultural production reinforce or undermines the economic, political, social and psychological oppression of women. Feminist critics hold many different opinions on all of the issues their discipline examines. Some feminists call their field feminism in order to underscore the multiplicity of points of view of its supporters and offer ways of thinking that oppose the traditional tendency to believe there is a single best point of view.

One of the most maligned feminist claims is that we should not use the masculine pronoun “he” to represent both men and women. This claim suggests what they see as the trivial, even infantile, nature of feminist demands. For many feminists the use of the pronoun “he” to refer to members of both sexes reflects and perpetuates a “habit of seeing” that uses male experience as the standard by which the experiences of both sexes is evaluated. The “inclusive he” claim to represent both men and women and it is part of a deeply rooted cultural attitude that ignores women’s experiences and blinds us to women’s points of view. The damaging effects of this attitude can be seen in a number of areas.

Before the centuries-old struggle for women’s equality finally emerged in literary studies in the late 1960s. The literary works of male authors describing experience from a male point of view was considered the standard of universality and universality was considered a major criterion of greatness. Because the works of female authors do not describe experience from a male point of view so they were not considered universal and hence did not become part of literary canon. When women authors began to appear more frequently in the literary canon in the mid 1970s, they were not represented on an equal basis with male authors. The most chilling example of the damaging effects of this “habit of seeing” is found in the world of modern medicine, where drugs prescribed for both sexes often have been tasted on male subject only. In laboratory tests to determine the safety of prescription drugs before marketing them, men’s responses frequently have been used to gather statistical data on the medication’s effectiveness and possible side effects. As a result women may experience unexpected side effects while male users are unaffected.

Traditional gender role

Patriarchal woman has internalized the norms and values of patriarchy as any culture that privileges men by promoting patriarchal gender role. Traditional gender role cast men as rational, strong, protective and decisive. It casts women as emotional, weak, nurturing and submissive. These gender roles have been used successfully to justify inequalities such as excluding women from equal access to leadership and decision making positions, paying men higher wages than women for doing the same job, and convincing women that they are not fit for careers in such areas as mathematics and engineering. Many people today believe such inequalities are the thing of the past. For example, an employer can pay a woman less for performing the same work as a man simply by giving her a different job title.

Patriarchy is sexist that means it promotes the belief that women are innately inferior to men. This belief in the inborn inferiority of women is a form of what is called biological essentialism because it is based on biological differences between the sexes that are considered part of our unchanging essence as men and women. Feminists don’t deny the biological differences between men and women. But they don’t agree that such differences as physical size, shape and body chemistry make men naturally superior to women. Feminism distinguishes between the word sex which refers to our biological constitution as female and male, and the word gender, which refers to our cultural programming as feminine or masculine. Women are not born feminine and men are not born masculine. These gender categories are constructed by society. This view of gender is an example of what has come to be called social constructionism.

The belief that men are superior to women has been used to justify and maintain the male monopoly of positions of economic, political and social power. This belief keeps women powerless by denying them the educational and occupational means of acquiring economic, political and social power. The inferior position long occupied by women in particular society has be culturally produced. An example of patriarchal programming is that little girl has been told early in their educational careers that they can’t do math. They are told so by the body languages, tone of voice and facial expressions of adults. Girls are always “rewarded” for failing at math. If girls manage to do well in math despite these obstacles they are considered exceptions to the rule. Girls are programmed to fail. Patriarchy creates the failure that it then uses to justify its assumptions about women.

Patriarchal gender roles are destructive for men as well as women. Patriarchal gender roles dictate that men are supposed to be the strong; they are not supposed to cry because crying is considered as sign of weakness. Expressing sympathy for other men is especially taboo because patriarchy assumes that only the most mute and stoic forms of male bonding are free of homosexual overtones. Men are not permitted to fail at anything they try because failure in any domain implies failure in one’s manhood. Failure to provide adequate economic support for one’s family is considered the most humiliating failure a man can experience because it means that he has failed at what is considered his biological role as provider. The imperative for men to succeed economically has become an extremely pressurized situation in contemporary America because the degree of success men are expected to achieve keeps increasing; to be a “real” man in this day and age one must have a more expensive house and car than one’s father, siblings, and friends, and one must send one’s children to a expensive school. If men can’t achieve the unrealistic economic goals set for them in contemporary America, then they must increase the signs of their manhood in some other area: they must be the most sexually active of be able to hold the most liquor or display the most anger. The anger is very effective means of blocking our fear and pain and it usually produces the kind of aggressive behavior associated with patriarchal manhood.

Patriarchal ideology suggests that there are only two identities a woman can have. If she accepts her traditional gender role and obeys the patriarchal rules, she’s a “good girl”; if she doesn’t, she’s a “bad girl”. These two roles view women only in terms of how they relate to the patriarchal order. It is patriarchy that will do the defining of “bad girl” and a “good girl” because both roles are projections of patriarchal male desire. Patriarchy objectifies both “both girls” and “good girls”. Patriarchy treats women like objects. From a patriarchal standpoint, women’s perspectives, feelings, and opinions don’t count unless they confront to those of patriarchy.

In middle class American culture today the women on the pedestal is the woman who successfully juggles a career and a family, which means she looks great at the office and over the breakfast table , and she’s never too tired after work to fix dinner, clean house, attend all her children’s needs, and please her husband in bed. Patriarchal gender roles have not been eliminated by modern women’s entrance into the male-dominated workplace, even if some of those women now hold what used to be traditionally male jobs. The persistence of repressive attitudes towards women’s sexuality is still visible in our language today. For example, when we use the negative word “slut” to describe a woman who sleeps with a number of men while we use the word “stud” to describe a man who sleeps with a number of women.

Summary of feminist premises

Patriarchal ideology works to keep women and men in traditional gender roles and thereby maintain male dominance. That patriarchal ideology functions in this way is a belief shared by all feminists even if they disagree about other issues. Feminists share several important assumptions which might be summarized as follows:

Ø Women are suppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary means by which they kept so.

Ø In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is “other”. She is objectified and marginalized, defined by only by her difference from male norms and values, defined by what she lacks and that men have.

Ø All of western (Anglo-European) civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology. The development of the western canon of great literature, including traditional fairy tales, was a product of patriarchal ideology.

Ø While biology determines our sex, culture determines our gender. For most English-speaking feminist, the word ‘gender’ refers not to our anatomy but to our behavior as socially programmed men or women.

Ø All feminist activities including feminist theory and literary criticism have as its ultimate goal to change the world by promoting women’s equality. All feminist activities can be seen as a form of “activism”, although the word is usually applied to feminist activity that directly promotes social change through political activity such as public demonstration, boycotts, voter education and registration, the provision of hotlines for rape victims and shelter for abused women and the like.

Ø Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience, including the production and experience of literature, whether we are consciously aware of these issues or not.

Getting beyond patriarchy

Feminists have long puzzled over the problem of getting beyond patriarchal programming and have offered many different solutions. Every ideology has points of self-contradiction that permit us to understand its operations and decrease its influence. The difficulty in theorizing our way out of patriarchal ideology arises when we think of our immersion in it as an all -or-nothing solution: if we’re not completely beyond patriarchy, then we must be completely programmed by it. We must constantly struggle to understand and resist the various ways in which patriarchy dictates our lives, although we can’t always see all the ways in which it does so.

The difficulties involved in resisting patriarchal programming, many feminist theorists and literary critics believe we should be especially cautious about using frameworks that is themselves patriarchal. Such frameworks are considered patriarchal because they embody various elements of patriarchal ideology. Many feminists draw on elements of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory as well other critical theories because they find them useful in examining issues relevant to women’s experience. For example, psychoanalysis can be used to help us understand the psychological effects of patriarchal ideology as well as how and why women and men internalize it. Marxism can be used to help us understand how economic forces have been manipulated by patriarchal law and custom to keep women economically, politically, and socially oppressed as an underclass. Structuralism principles can be used to study underlying similarities among the experiences and productions of women from various cultures as well as underlying similarities in the ways they are oppressed. Deconstruction can be used find the ways in which a literary work covertly reinforces the patriarchal ideology it criticizes. Deconstruction is useful to feminists in helping us see the ways in which patriarchal ideology is often based on false oppositions. From feminist perspective, when we interpret texts or anything else, the way to deal with our subjectivity is not to try to avoid it but to be as aware of it as possible, to include it in our interpretation as fully as possible, so that others will be able to take it into account when evaluation our viewpoint.

French feminism

French feminism is diverse like American feminism because it consists of many different points of view. French feminism believes in the importance of social and political activism in order to ensure equal opportunity and equal access to justice for women. French feminists have tended to focus more strongly in the philosophical dimension of women’s issues. The focus of French feminism has taken two different forms: “materialist feminism” and “psychoanalytic feminism”. The first form is intended in the social and economical oppression of women while the second form concentrates on women’s psychological experience. These two approaches to analyzing women’s experience in patriarchal culture often contrast significantly. French feminists are also concerned with the ways in which women’s social/economic and psychological experiences are connected.

French materialist feminism examines the patriarchal traditions and institutions that control the material (physical) and economic conditions by which society oppresses women. Although Simone de Beauvoir didn’t refer to her as a materialist feminist, her groundbreaking “The Second Sex (1949) creates a theoretical basis for materialist feminists for decades to come. In a patriarchal society, Beauvoir observes that men are considered contingent beings. Men can act upon the time, change it, give it meaning, while women have meaning only in relation to men. Thus, women are defined not just in terms of their inadequacy in comparison to men. The word “woman” has the same implication as the word “other”. A woman is not a person of her own right. She is man’s “other.

Christine Delphy, one of many thinkers influenced by Beauvoir, offers a feminist critique of patriarchy based on Marxist principles. She focuses her analysis on the family as economic unit. For Delphy, marriage is a labor contract that ties women to unpaid domestic labor. She contends that women’s domestic work in their own homes are unpaid not because their work is unimportant or involves less time or labor than the paid work performed by man outside the home, but because patriarchy defines women in their domestic roles as nonworkers. And nonworkers should not expect to be paid. In a patriarchy, women do the domestic labor at home that men don’t want to do, and their work day is twenty four hours long. In order to understand anything about sexuality or gender we must first understand all relationships between men and women based on power.

French materialist feminist Colette Guillaumin observes that men are defined primarily and referred to primarily in terms of what they do, according to their value in society as participants in the workforce, as decision makers, and so forth. Women are defined primarily and referred to primarily in terms of their sex. The primary form of women’s oppression is appropriation. Women are oppressed by “direct physical appropriation”. Guillaumin calls this appropriation “sexage”. Sexage occurs in four main forms: 1) the appropriation of women’s time, 2)the appropriation of the products of women’s bodies, 3) women’s sexual obligation, and 4) women’s obligation to care for whichever members of the family can’t care for themselves as well as for healthy male family members.

In contrast to materialist feminism, French feminist psychoanalytic theory is interested in patriarchy’s influence on women’s psychological experience and creativity. Its focus is in individual psyche, not on group experience. For many French psychoanalytic feminists, the possibilities for women’s psychological liberation must be investigated at the site at which most of their psychological subjugation occurs because it is within language that detrimental patriarchal notions of sexual difference have been defined and continue to exert their repressive influence.

Helen Cixous argues that language reveals the “patriarchal binary thought”, which might be defined as seeing the world in terms of polar opposition. According to patriarchal thinking the women occupies the inferior side of the binary opposition while male occupies superior side. Patriarchy thinking believes that women are born to be passive while men are born to be active. Cixous thinks that women will not learn to resist patriarchal thinking by becoming part of the patriarchal power structure. For women’s acquisition of power within the existing socio-political system would not adequately change the system. There is a need of a new feminine language that undermines or eliminates the patriarchal binary thinking that oppresses and silences women. This kind of language best expresses itself in writing, is called “ecriture feminine” (feminine writing). It is fluidly organized and freely associative. The example of such writing, Cixous names the work of French writers’ marguerite Duras, Colette, Jean Genet.

Luce Irigaray suggests that in a patriarchal culture much of women’s subjugation occurs in the form of psychological repression enacted through the medium of language. Women live in a world in where all meanings have been defined by patriarchal language. Therefore women don’t speak as active originators of their own thought. Irigaray observes that for western philosophers the woman is just a mirror of their own masculinity. Men have defined femininity in terms of their own needs, fears, and desires. Caught within patriarchy, Irigaray posits, women have two choices: 1) to keep quiet, or 2) to imitate patriarchy’s representation of her as it wants to see her.

Patriarchal power is also evident in what many thinkers refer to as the “male gaze”: the man looks; the woman is looked at. It is the one who looks who is in control, who holds the power. The one looked at is the woman is merely an object to be seen. They, in patriarchy women are merely tokens, markers, commodities in a male economy. A patriarchal man who feels he must have a beautiful woman on his arm in order to impress other people isn’t interested in impressing other people. He’s interested in impressing other men. Patriarchy is a man’s world where men invented the rules of the game, they play it only with one another, and women are merely to be founded among the prizes.

Julia Kristeva, another French psychoanalytic feminist doesn’t believe in “ecriture feminine” because she believes that any theory that “essentializes” women misrepresents their infinite diversity and leaves them vulnerable to the patriarchal essentialization of women as naturally submissive, overly emotional and so forth. The biological differences that make women female and men male are seem by Kristeva as social differences rather than biological differences because of their concrete effects on women in the real world. If one is born with the biology of a female, one’s place in society is accorded fewer rights than if one is born with the biology of a male. Kristeva argues that men and women can get beyond patriarchal language and patriarchal thinking by seeking access to what she calls the ‘semiotic’ dimension of language. For Kristeva, language consists of two dimensions: the symbolic and the semiotic. The symbolic dimension is the domain in which words operate and meanings are attributed to them. The semiotic words operate and meanings that part of language that consists of such elements as intonation; rhythm; and the body language that occurs as we speak. The semiotic consists of the way we speak, for instance the emotions that come across in our voice and body language as we talk.

The semiotic is the first “speech” infants have available to them before they acquire language. They learn this “speech” through their contact with the gestures, rhythm, and other non-verbal forms of communication associated with the mother’s body. Kristeva observes that both our earliest connections to our mothers are repressed by our entrance into language. The semiotic remains beyond patriarchal programming and whatever patriarchy can’t control outright, it represses. Kristeva is not suggesting that we can or should return to the semiotic state of infant bit that we can and should access that part of our unconscious where the semiotic resides.

Multicultural feminism

Awareness of owns own subjectivity is a feminist goal. It has become especially important as white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists, who have always held the most visible positions of leadership in women’s movements in America, are finally recognizing the ways in which their policies and practices have reflected their own experiences while ignoring the experiences of women of color, lesbians, poor, undereducated women both in America and throughout the world. While all women are subject to patriarchal oppression, each woman’s specific class, desires, and problems are greatly shaped by her race, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, educational experience, religion and nationality. Patriarchy operates differently in different culture. Cultural differences affect women’s experience of patriarchy. The promotion of ‘sisterhood’ must include respect for and attention to individual differences among women as well as equitable distribution of power among various cultural groups within feminist leadership.

African American feminists have been especially helpful in revealing the political and theoretical limitations inherent in white mainstream feminists’ neglect of cultural experience different from their own. Black feminists have analyzed the ways in which gender oppression cannot be understood apart from racial oppression. A black woman is oppressed by patriarchy but black feminists observe, not just because she is a woman but because she’s a black woman. The Victorian ideal of the “true woman” as submissive, fragile, and sexually pure, which still influences patriarchal thinking today; excluded by definition black women and poor women of all races, whose survival demanded hard physical labor and who are vulnerable to rape and to sexual exploitation in the workplace. The logic was that a woman whose racial economic situation forced her into hard labor and made her the victim of sexual predators was defined as unwomanly and therefore unworthy of protection from those who exploited her. This view was widely held by both white and black men and by white women as well. Therefore, black women were in a double blind. They could expect neither gender solidarity from white women nor racial solidarity from black men. This dilemma persists today. White mainstream feminism nevertheless encourages them to prioritize gender issues over racial issues, arguing that black women are oppressed more by sexism than by racism. At the same time, the black male community nevertheless encourages them to prioritize racial issues over gender issues, arguing that black women are oppressed more by racism than by sexism.

Gender studies and feminism

Feminist analysis focuses good deal on the enormous role played by gender in our daily lives. Our gender plays a key role in forming our individual identity. And our gender strongly influences how we are treated by others and by society as a whole. An understanding of some of the major issues addressed by gender studies is a useful and indispensable part of our understanding of the ways in which feminist concerns are continuing to evolve and expand. The issues that figure prominently in gender studies are as follows: 1) Patriarchal assumptions about gender and gender roles that continue to oppress women, 2) Alternatives to the current way conceptualize gender as feminine or masculine, 3) the relationship between sex and gender, and 4) the relationship between sexuality and gender.

Gender is socially constructed rather a matter of biology: women and men usually behave in ways associated with their assigned gender because they are socially programmed to do so, not because it is natural for them to do so. If there is one dimension of gender studies that is perhaps even more capable of making us rethink our conventional way of viewing gender, it is cross-cultural studies in gender. The American gender system is referred to as a binary system because it consists of two genders, masculine and feminine, that are based on two sexes, male and female, and because two genders are considered polar oppositions. There is no in-between: you’re either masculine or feminine because you’re either male or female, and if you’re not one or the other of these two genders, then there must be something wrong with you. In numerous other cultures there are gender systems that are not binary. Southern Asian cultures, men and women are considered more alike than different. They are not considered different genders in our sense of the terms. At Native American cultures there are more than two genders. There are many societies in southern Asia that emphasize the similarities between men and women rather than their differences.

The similarities between women and men in Vanatinai, a small island near New Guinea, where ideologies of male superiority or right of authority over women are notably absent, and ideologies of gender equivalence are clearly articulated. Men and women in this culture have equal rights over their labor, equal access to the accumulation of material wealth, and equal access to the acquisition of prestige in the community. In other cultures, gender system is neither binary, like the gender system in the United States today, nor what might be called unitary. In contrast, some cultures see gender as a system of multiple possibilities. The hundreds or more North American Indian societies that had multiple gender systems, that is, system consisting of more than two genders, Native North American societies tended to define gender in ways specific to their own cultures, differing in what aspects of social life were considered primary in their conceptions of gender. Native North American cultures included three or four of the following gender: 1) women, 2) female variants, 3) men and 4) male variants.

In determining a person’s gender, neither biological sex nor sexual orientation was generally the primary factor in Native North American societies. Rather, occupational interests and pursuits were of central importance. Clothing sometimes played a role depending on the culture to which they belonged. In some North American Indian cultures, gender variants played valued roles in the community, such as healers or performers of sacred ritual functions because gender variance was associated with sacred power. Gender theorists are also interested in the relationship between sex and gender: between the ways in which our bodies are biologically constructed and the genders to which we are assigned. There are only two genders in based on the idea that there are only two sexes. Biological sex doesn’t fit neatly into two separate, opposite categories. It would be more accurate to say that, following the European model, American society has imposed the two-sex system despite the fact that this system does not fit a significant portion of the population. Biological sex categories have not imposed the two-gender system on Americans; rather Americans have imposed two-gender system on biological sex categories. The transgender activists have suggested that there are really five sexes that occur naturally: 1) female, 2) female intersexed, 3) true intersexed, 4) male intersexed, and 5) male.

Many gender theorists are interested in the relationship between sexuality and gender which means between our sexual orientation and the ways in which we are viewed in terms of gender. Much of the cruel and unfair treatment many nonstraight people endure is due largely to the fact that they often doesn’t conform to traditional gender behavior or appearance. “Gendering” a child, that means raising a child to conform to his or her traditional gender role both socially and psychologically, is always heterosexual gendering. Thus the sex/gender system establishes not only the sex of bodies but also the kinds of desire they can have.

It is important that in talking about sex and gender, we’re talking about people and how they live their daily lives. Our society persists in thinking that the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean basically the same thing and that the only people worth thinking about are the straight people who fit the traditional masculine-male/feminine-female categories. This state of affairs ignores the theoretical progress that has given us, for example, such concepts as gender identity, androgyny, and the category of sex/gender identification called ‘questioning’. Consider the enormous contribution that these three examples alone offer us in terms of our ability to understand the complexity of the concept of gender. The term ‘gender identity’ implies that one’s gender may not match one’s biological sex. ‘Androgyny’ tell us that, regardless of one’s sex, one’s gender identity may consist of some combination of feminine and masculine behaviors. Finally ‘questioning’ opens the door both for people who feel unsure of their sexual orientation.

Feminism and gender studies are intimately related. They share some of the same subject matter as well as a desire for justice and a belief in the power of education to change our society for the better. For centuries feminism has worked for gender equality: for a dissolution of the patriarchal gender roles that continue to short-circuit efforts to achieve complete equality between women and men. And gender studies are working to broaden our understanding of how complex the concept of gender really is. There is great deal of disagreement among feminist theorists and literary critics concerning how and how much women are programmed by patriarchal ideology; whether or not there is a distinctive way of writing that might be called feminine; whether or not the work the work of women writers should be interpreted along different lines than writing by men; the ways in which various cultural factors intersect with sex and gender in creating women’s experience.

Feminism and literature

Some literary works will lend themselves more readily than others to feminist analysis or at least to certain kinds of feminist analyses. It is useful to examine the ways in which literary texts reinforce patriarchy because the ability to see when and how patriarchal ideology operates is crucial to our ability to resist it in our own lives. Thus approach, applied to literary works in the male canon, was the dominant mode of feminist literary analysis in America during 1970s, and it usually requires reading ‘against the grains’ of text’s apparent intention, for patriarchal literature is usually unconscious of the sexist ideology it promotes, or perhaps more precisely, patriarchal literature sees nothing wrong with its own sexism.

It is also important to be able to recognize when a literary work depicts patriarchal ideology in order to criticize it or invite us to criticize it. Many literary works have a conflicted response to patriarchal ideology. Feminists issues range is so widely across cultural, social, political, and psychological categories. Whatever kind of analysis is taken, the ultimate goal of feminist criticism is to increase our understanding of women’s experience, both in the past and present, and promote our appreciation of women’s value in the world.