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-WOMEN-/-La-Ciudad-

de-las-Mujeres