FEMINISM(S)

Carmen Santiago

KEY IDEAS TO BEAR IN MIND WHILE STUDYING

FEMINISM

Women treated as 2nd rate citizens in Western culture. (Social conditions of women)

There was a negative stereotype of women.

Cultural identity construction. (women’s roles: house-angel)

Power was always related to the public sphere and women were only admitted in private

sphere. Feminism fights against this idea and states public & private spheres cannot be

separated.

Feminism tried to change the power relations between women & men, it was against

Patriarchy, term that refer to almost complete domination of men in Western society &

beyond.

AN EXAMPLE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHW_5cgYew0

Contemporary feminist literary criticism- 1960’s-70’s. (Antecedents: V.

Woolf: A Room of One’s Own & Bible: Inanna)

Early feminism: women’s experience under patriarchy. (The canon was

male)

Movement moved to ethnic and gender boundaries. (African American

Feminist scholars)

Lesbian feminism criticism reconstructed a hidden tradition of lesbian

wrtiting and explored the experience of radical alterity within a

heterosexist world.

Two stages appeared. (Misogynist stereotypes in male lit. & recovery of

lost tradition and historical reconstruction)

Mid-1980’s began to impact the French Feminism. (Kristeva, Irigaray,

Cixous)

Liberal & radical Feminism were in disagreement since 1970’s and two

perspectives began:

- Constructionist: gender is made by culture in history. It took inspiration from

the Marxist theory of the social construction of individual subjectivity (Althusser)

and from the Post-structuralist idea that language writes rather than reflects

identities.

- Essentialists: gender reflects a natural difference between men and women

that is much psychological, even linguistic, as it is biological. Women are innately

capable of offering a different ethics from men. Men must abstract themselves

from the material world as they separate from their mothers to enter in the

patriarchate, that implies get involve in violence. On the other hand, women are

not required to separate from their mother as they acquire a gender identity; they

simply identify with the closest person to them, their mother. No cut is required

and that makes women more ethical than men with the others.

GAYLE RUBIN (1949-)

“The Traffic in Women” (1975)

Feminism was trying to find their place among 3 schools:

- Freudian psychoanalysis

- Structural anthropology

- Marxism

Talks about the “Sex/Gender system” as a part of social life. Defined as the

set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into

products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs

are satisfied.

To demonstrate the need of her concept, she discusses the failure of

classical Marxism to conceptualize sex oppression. In Marx’s map, women

is not seen as very significant, however, the “wife” is among the necessities

of a worker. Rubin says that is through this “historical and moral element”

the entire domain of sex and sex oppression is subsumed.

Engels saw sex oppression as part of capitalism’s heritage, and integrates

sex and sexuality into his theory of society. For human beings, once they

have covered the natural world elements (economy) the production is able

to be achieved, but, the human being is not fulfilled for the needs of

fundamental human requirements, then relations of sexuality appear.

Furthermore, a human group has to reproduce itself from generation to

generation. Engel’s indicates then the importance of the domain of social,

that Rubin calls “sex/gender system.”

Kinship for an anthropologist is a system of categories and statuses which often

contradict actual genetic relationships. They vary wildly from one culture to the next.

Kinship is organization and organization gives power. But to whom? Women are treated

as gifts and men are who have the power. Therefore, the only beneficiate here are men.

(“Exchange of women” is a seductive and powerful concept that places the oppression of

women within social systems, rather than biology.)

The “exchange of women” is neither a definition of culture nor a system in and of itself.

A kinship system is an imposition of social ends upon a part of the natural world. The

result is different rights that various people have over other people.

The economic oppression of women is an “economics” of sex and gender, and what we

need is a political economy of sexual systems.

The sex/gender system must be reorganized through political action and feminism must

dream even more than the elimination of the oppression of women, but the elimination of

obligatory sexualities and sex roles.

Rubin recognizes the mutual interdependence of sexuality, economics, and politics

without underestimating the full significance of each in human society.

SANDRA GILBERT & SUSAN GUBAR

Tried to show how important were the limit

options female writers had in 19th. “The

Madwoman in the Attic”

“Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language,

Sexuality.” (1985)

Body language articulates language.

Tries to integrate power, language &

meaning by means of examine between

sexual difference & symbolic contract.

That examination is not only interesting for

the questions of female linguistic destiny, but

has also interested to masculinist doubts.

Both female & male participate in a tradition

of linguistic fantasy that affects them.

Female subject is not alienated from the

words she writes and speaks.

Women is not just a sign but a generator of signs, therefore, she needs to know the

nature and purpose of her own passive signification, her own active signifying.

“(Women) … the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you.”

Women need a feminist language, in E. Showalter’s words: “a revolutionary linguism, an

oral break from the dictatorship of patriarchal speech.”

As long as women remain silent or speak in a body language of freely fluent multiple

referentiality, they will be outside the historical process. But if they begin to speak and

write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated; it is a history that, logically

speaking, their speech should disrupt.

This dilemma needs a reshape of language so that it works for, rather than against,

women.

Differences appear between French & American feminism.

A virulent battle between men against women appear.

The Freudanian theories falls paradoxically into mother’ supremacy.

“In spite of feminist doubt and masculinist dread, we can affirm that woman has not been

sentenced to transcribe male penmanship, she commands sentences which inscribe her

own powerful character.”

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

“Three women’s texts & a critique of

imperialism.” (1986)

Read British 19th literature with imperialism in

mind.

The signifier as “Third World” or “wordling.”

Examines the operation of Third World by means

of Jane Eyre. She plots the novel with Wide

Sargasso Sea & Frankenstein as an analysis –

deconstruction- of a “worlding” such as Jane

Eyre. What she is trying to show is the blindness

of feminism.

Imperialism, the subject not only as individual

but as individualist. Represented by 2 registers:

1. Child bearing 2. Soul making

To wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing

focus of the “subject-constitution” of the female

individualist.

19th subject-constitution by child bearing & soul

making

20th subject-constitution by psychoanalysis, from

Narcissus (imaginary) to Oedipus (symbolic)

Spivak tried to extend, outside of the European novelistic tradition, the most

powerful suggestion in Wide Sargasso Sea: the Jane Eyre can be read as the

orchestration & staging of self-immolation of Bertha Mason as “good wife.”

And she hoped that an informed critique of imperialism, granted some

attention from readers in the First World, will at least expand the frontiers of

the politics of reading.

The readings will provoque angriness against the narrativization of history.

Spivak does that to put feminist individualism in its historical determination.

Spivak effort is to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the

“subject-constitution” of the female individualist.

Spivak included the complicity of female writers with imperialism. “It should

not be possible to read 19th century British fiction without remembering that

imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the

cultural representation of England to the English.”

Spivak represents the voice of difference.

GERALDINE HENG.

Examines the conflict between traditional

gender ideology & the movement for the

liberation of women in Third World context.

There are different kinds of Third World

feminist movements, that’s mainly why they

don’t have a global theory.

3 factors in common:

1. Haunted by historical origins (nationalism)

2. Presence & Intervention of State itself

3. Ambivalence of Third world nations to the

arrival of modernity

“A great way to fly”: Nationalism, the State, and the Varieties of Third-World Feminism. (1997)

There’s a manipulation of 3rd World feminism by nationalism

3rd World feminism focus on the requirement of an

unexceptionable genealogy, history or tradition.

3rd World states profit from the manipulation of women &

feminine identity as an economic resource.

All 3rd World feminists are at risk because the state can take

them down in any moment, that’s why there’s a need to write

about the feminist groups existence for a survival effect.

WHAT IS REMAINING FOR US?

http://cargocollective.com/citypulse#1225738/CITY-OF-WOME

N-/-La-Ciudad-de-las-Mujeres