Self-Analysis of Wilfred L Guerin — Feminism and Gender Studies

Women have been struggling with their identity in the world throughout history and the aesthetic world is no different. A language that is dominated by the patriarchal society, has failed to present the issues suffered by women and portrayed them like naïve, fragile seductresses, who depend on men to form their identity and live in the society.

Wilfred L Guerin in this section ‘Feminism and Gender Studies’, talks about the origin of the term and the fight of women to establish and prove their presence in the literary world.

Feminism is not only a literary approach but also a political movement. It compasses the racial, cultural, class struggle that females had to go through apart from being discriminated based on their sex. This chapter of “Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature” focuses on studying the diversity of feminist theory throughout the years as they engaged with linguistic, biological, Marxist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and cultural studies as well as ethnic and gender studies, including other theories that will discuss in this assignment.

I. FEMINISM AND FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM: DEFINITION

For a long time in history, women had no rights, no excess to education, and no financial dependence that prevented them from establishing their identity. Their identity was defined by the man in their life, first their father, and then their husbands.

However, with time, Feminism’s definition was no longer accepted under a single set of ‘ism’ of bourgeois, heterosexual, Anglo-American, white, or educated women. The “evolution of feminism into feminisms has fostered a more inclusive, global perspective” (Ross C Murfin). Feminist wanted the recovery of women despite their culture, race or class.

This was a liberating time for women. A time when the word ‘feminism’ was also used as a taunt. British writer Rebacca West remarked that “other people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or prostitute”.

Feminists often focus on what is absent rather than what is present, which reflects their marginalization and silencing of women in the patriarchal culture. Feminism is a political approach, whose waves came to the literary realm, as it was used as a stage to express their minds. Like politics, literature is also male-dominated. For a long time, women portrayal in literature was done but men. Even the feminist theory is constructed by men, norms of which were followed by some of the most influential female writers.

This women’s criticism movement started during the early 20th century, with contributions of writers like Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte amongst others. Simone de Beauvoir in her book ‘The Second Sex’, questions “what is women, and how is she constructed differently from men?” and how the “idea that ‘man’ defines the human not woman”. Kate Millet (Sexual Politics) talks about the twin poles of gender as biology and culture. She reads works of Jean Genet, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence as a record of male dominance.

Feminist critics focused on silencing and oppression of “women gave way to deeper interrogation of what a history of women oppression meant.

II. WOMAN: CREATED OR CONSTRUCTED

Elaine Showalter identified women’s literary development into three phases:

1. Feminine Phase (1840–1880) — A time when imitated and followed dominant male traditions.
2. Feminist Phase (1880–1920) — When women actually advocate for their freedom and rights.
3. Female Phase (1920-Present) — During this time focus was shifted on the female writing experience. “Dependency of opposition was replaced by the women texts and women.”

In present Female Phase, Showalter talked about four models of difference that has been taken up feminist critics across the globe (biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural).

The biological model is the most problematic: she questions “if the text in some way is a mirror of the body, then do women writers are being reduced to merely their bodies”. She praises the idea of frankness that is developed in women writing expressing intimate experience first-hand from female experience. Linguistic model of how women are speaking a man’s language as their foreign tongue. She is searching for women voice in the text within female characters as well as the female writer. Although women are using a man’s language they can still use their voice. The psychoanalytic model discusses ‘Gynocentric’ tendencies within the literature, where female writers talk about women-centric issues, typing the experience of a woman and her psyche. Cultural model is concerned constructive feminism in which it is considered that male and female traits within any individual are constructed by their culture, so the critics want readers to reconsider these factors as they are not biological.

A. Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Several essentialist feminist critics have criticized and attacked the psychological approach. They are concerned with female characters in the texts of female writers and study how they are portrayed.

Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert examine female images depicted in the works of Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Bronte, addressing topics like motherhood, aspect of self, doubling of characters, enclosed living, feminized landscapes and diseases experienced by women. They found that these writers identity themselves with literary characters that they detest like a monster or a madwoman. They don’t construct the story around feminine utopia. They seem to detest heroine or angel-like figure. The monster-like female characters were free and considered monsters as they didn’t fit in the patriarchal world, where females are supposed to behave like angels.

In the 1980s, French feminists started using psychoanalytic tools, espoused by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Helene Cixous etc. Feminists despise Freud’s work as they felt he completely misunderstood women, used them as a means to understand men. He was only interested in male psychology. He practiced his theories on his daughter other participants, whom he diagnosed as ‘hysterics’ because being females living at a time when they had no voice when questions they had an extreme sense of emotions. In Freud’s defense, several women were able to benefit from his sessions, as it offered them with an opportunity to talk and express, giving them a voice of subjectivity. His studies helped his patients open up and offered help for several other mental issues, despite ignoring the feminist concerns.

Jacques Lacan, one of Freudian revisionist gave the notion of ‘Imaginary’, how in pre-oedipal stage, the child has no idea about the patriarchal world and has not separated from his mother, and it is the responsibility of the father to educate him about the symbolic order. The child notion of the world is represented by the law of the father. Lacan uses the term ‘phallogocentric’ to define this order, a universe where the male is in control of “the word”. French feminists’ practice ‘L’eecriture feminine’ as freeing discourse from this notion, as they feel their expression also consist of binary laws of the father.

When we read a text, there are gaps within the text and the meaning, which the writers adds unconsciously which need to be studied. Helene Cixous discusses the existence of a utopian place free from sex roles and law of the father, where voice mother us heard, and feminine expression is normal. Luce Irigaray argues that women are capable of offering a different ethic than men because men abstract themselves from the material world when they come into the world from their mother’s womb. Female critics while studying psychoanalytic are concerned with the negative connotations. Men think of themselves in terms of their rights, while women are assumed to have a responsibility to others, and this construct of society has been structured by man.

Julia Kristeva opposes the male-centric ideas of how women think and behave. She uses motherhood as a model for studying female psychic health in ‘Desire of Language’.

Myth Criticism is another approach used by female psychoanalytic critics to study the representation of women in the patriarchal world, where even the myth demean women. In the myth of Adam and Eve, the female is responsible for the doom.

However, archetypal figures like Great Mother, and other early goddesses as Isis, Medusa, Cassandra etc., who were worshipped by both genders and were considered alternatives for Zeus and Apollo. They criticize Jung for privileging Greco-Roman mythological hegemony and downplaying the role of women in pre-Greek past.

Medusa despite being a negative figure retains a sense of attraction for modern women, as she is depicted as imperfect, not preceded as a perfect figure. Study of history however also reveals how goddesses were turned into witches and seductresses and killed in the later ages of post-Greek hegemony.

Patriarchal influences have a major role in how women are defined in society as they play a major role in constructing a child’s understanding of the world that remains dominant in their unconscious.

B. Multicultural Feminisms

This section deals with women-centric issues considering their identity in terms of their race, color, sexual preference and birthplace. Identity politics plays a significant role in differentiating female struggles of white women to a black lesbian or bisexual female. It raises culture-specific issues, struggles of slavery, racism, xenophobia, homophobia etc. However, feminists celebrate their ethnic differences, one cannot compare challenges faced by white and black women, as not only they marginalized for being a woman, but also exploited for being black by colonizers. This is similar to lesbian feminists, who were constantly bullied and were not offered social rights like marriage. This division between feminists sparks a hundred different discussions. Alice Walker preferred the term womanist over feminist, as she believed a woman seeks equality and doesn’t turn her back on the man.

Black feminists like Maya Angelou have used autobiographical voices to present captive and slave narratives, drawing a picture of what they had to go through. Feminist struggles vary depending on their country, culture, race, class, sexual identity, and political structure of their society.

C. Marxist Feminism

Marxism is a crucial source of constructive feminism, because of its focus on reading as well as other social constructs. Karl Marx claimed that the notion of all social and historical developments is determined by different types of economic production. Marxist feminists, however, do not differentiate between personal and class identity. Personal identity is not far from class identity, as it shapes a person. Feminist critics criticize Marx for not discussing the condition of women in society.

D. Feminist Film Studies

Film Study scholars like Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis promoted the idea that language is responsible for writing identities, and is not a mere reflection of them.

Patriarchal culture has created the notion that men are superior to women. “Masculine means not feminine as much as it means anything normal”. In our society, we have given roles to both genders, while men have rights women have responsibilities, and based on where and for what purpose the pen is being stroked the female image changes. Laura Mulvey’s discusses this humiliation that female viewers participate with the actress. The “male gaze” on the screen is an example of fetishism and voyeurism.

Movies like Kill Bill and Charlie’s Angels released at the start of the 21st century are examples of how female roles became more diverse. The three actresses were playing roles in Charlie’s Angels that were not only beautiful but were also intelligent, sensible and strong. They were agents and performed dangerous stunts. It has an empowering notion, that women can be beautiful, intelligent and can also have fashion preferences. Despite this, these characters feed the male phantasy fetish, and females are styled accordingly to satisfy the male gaze. These movies can be seen from a different perspective but they were designed to reach the male dominant market.

Maggie Humm reminds readers, how feminists were “seen as a case for special pleading,” in the past, however, today ‘masculinism’ is more blind to the implications of gender.

III. GENDER STUDIES

Gender studies is interested in gay and lesbian writing, and how their life was distorted in their respective cultural history. Showalter’s cultural modal is used by Rivkin and Ryan in ‘Contingencies of Gender’ to discuss the natural and fluid nature of gender. They track how during the 1960s lesbian and gay studies have undergone a similar ground of struggle and oppression.

Myra Jehlen also claims that old critics tried to reduce all the complexities of sexuality “to a false common denominator”. Literary criticism involves both action and reflection, as homosexual and heterosexual male and female escape the norms of masculine society, everyone benefits. David Richter notes “the rules have little to do with nature and everything to do with culture”. Many theorists have found that what is considered “sexually” normal in a society depends on “when and where one lives”, the idea of masculinity and femininity are constantly changing with time, and so are the attributions attached to it. For instance, nobles of Periclean Athens practiced pederasty, which simply means that they had a relationship with both men and women, and it was accepted in the society.

Gender is a social construct, and the roles are attributed to them when they are born. Teresa de Lauretis describes the “technologies of gender”, and how modern technology influence in the creation of sex roles in response to marketplace needs like cinema. She uses Michel Foucault’s “theory of sexuality” to reflect how sexuality in any culture is constructed as a political means to manipulate the dominant class of that society. During 1970–80’s New York’s stonewall riots brought media attention to the lesbian, gay and transvestite discrimination and police harassment.

Lesbian critics consider their marginalization to be extensive in comparison to feminist critics. “Lesbianism has been a stumbling block for other feminists, and lesbian critics have excluded heterosexual feminists”. For homosexual women, lesbianism is normal and heterosexuality is abnormal, they brought a new appreciation for the sexual trait in female writing. Lesbian critics exclude men out of their study, they suggest the study of genres like female utopia and female gothic seeking interpretation double meanings in the text.

Foucault’s translated version of ‘History of Sexuality’ argues that “homosexuality is a medical, social and ontological category that was invented during late 19th century”. These practices were discouraged before. AIDS epidemic in the 1980s caused Michael Warner and Sedgwick among other to write “Queer Theory” which became a common term that included gays and lesbians, which later became a slogan for the LGBT pride.

Queer Theory has been involved in constant cultural wars in academia. Queer writers’ and artists’ every move is considered scandalous, like Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1990’s illustration, which resulted in conflicts because of the gay male aesthetic expression, when women had been posing nude in magazines for a long time then.

Sedgwick argues that sexuality “is an array of acts, expectations, narrative, pleasures, identity-formation and knowledges…” in ‘Epistemology of the Closet’. Queer theorists used Sedgwick’s work to create ‘public’ for their community that includes self-identified LGBT members. Queer rejects western sexual conventions and have a commitment solely to pleasure. This notion is similar to “art for art’s sake”. Instead of art, they celebrate desire.

Critics like Alan Sinfield, have given startling new perspective for the works of Shakespeare, where sexual meanings and homosexuality is highlighted. Fortunately, in the last decade, society has become more accepting and supportive of the LGBTQ community, and they have become subjects of interest in several Hollywood television series and films. Even today gay marriage is also legalized in several countries. This gives us hope for a better tomorrow, where men, women despite their sexual preference will be considered as equals.