Feminist criticism is part of the broader feminist political movement that
seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities. While there is no single
feminist literary criticism, there are a half dozen interrelated projects: exposing
masculinist stereotypes, distortions; and omissions in male-dominated
literature; studying female creativity, genres, styles, themes, careers, and
literary traditions; discovering and evaluating lost and neglected literary
works by women; developing feminist theoretical concepts and methods;
examining the forces that shape women's lives, literature, and criticism, ranging
across psychology and politics, biology and Cultural history; and creating
new ideas of and roles for women, including new institutional arrangements.
Feminist theory and criticism have brought revolutionary change to literary
and cultural studies by expanding the Canon, by critiquing sexist representations
and values, by stressing the importance of gender and sexuality, and
by 'proposing institutional and sodal reforms.
Theorists of a "feminist aesthetic" argue that women have a literature of
their own, possessing its own images, themes, characters, forms, styles, and
canons. In Elaine Showalter's pioneering account' of British novelists from
the early nineteenth 'century to the 19705, for example, women writers form
a subculture sharing distinctive economic, political, and professional realities,
all of which help determine specific problems and artistic preoccupations
that mark women's literature. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
propose that nineteenth-century women writers had to negotiate alienation
and psychological disease in order to attain literary authority, which they
achieved by reclaiming the heritage of female creativity, remembering their
lost foremothers, and refusing the debilitating cultural roles of angel and
monster assigned to them by patriarchal society. Countering Harold Bloom's
masculinist "anxiety of influence" (explained above), Gilbert and Gubar's
"anxiety of authorship" depicts the precursor poet as a sister or mother whose
example enables the creativity of the latecomer writer to develop collaboratively
against the confining and sickening backdrop of forbidding male literary
authority. Diseases common among ,women in male-dominated,
misogynistic societies include agoraphobia, anorexia, bulimia, claustrophobia,
hysteria, and madness in general, and they recur in the images, themes,
and characters of women's literature.
As Judith Fetterley insists in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach
to American Fiction (1978), women read differently than men. She examines
classic American fiction from Irving and Hawthorne to Hemingway and
Mailer and points out that this is not "universal" but masculine literature,
which forces women readers to identify against themselves. Such literature
neither expresses nor legitimates women's experiences, and in reading it
women have to think as men, identify with male viewpoints, accept male
values and interests, and tolerate sexist hostility and oppression. Under such
conditions women must become "resisting readers" rather than assenting
ones, using feminist criticism as one way both to challenge male domination
of the institutions of literature and to change society.
As concepts such as the anxiety of authorship, ecriture feminine, and the
potential of the Imaginary order suggest, psychoanalysis is fundamental to .a
great deal of feminist theory and criticism. However, feminist psychoanalysIs
is typically revisionist: it has had to work through and criticize the "phallocentric"
presuppositions and prejudices of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan,
and other pioneering psychoanalysts. For example, the feminine anxiety of
authorship-in its opposition to the masculine anxiety of influence-reconfigures
the "oedipal" relationship between Writers as cooperative and
nurturing rather than competitive and rivalrous. Similarly, ecriturefeminine
transforms Lacan's idea of the Imaginary, casting it not simply as an infantile
sphere of primary drives superseded on the way to the patriarchal Symbolic
order but as a liberating domain of bodily rhythms and pulsations associated
with the mother that permeates literature, especially modern experimental
poetry. Moreover, the pre-Symbolic Imaginary order, a realm of bisexual/
androgynous/polymorphous sexuality, opens the possibility of sexual liberation
from the suffocating confines of the "compulsory heterosexuality" that
dominates patriarchal culture.
Within feminist circles, there are political differences and conflicts of
interest among women of color and white women, women from different
classes, women of different sexualities, women belonging to different nations
and groups, and women who are liberals, conservatives, radicals, and revolutionaries.
Black women have complained that white middle-class women,
in academia as well as in the mass media, often end up speaking for feminism
or for all women, even though they tend to represent only their own interests.
Third world women, abroad and at home (Latinas, aboriginals, Asian
women), feel similarly silenced and unrepresented in mainstream social
agendas, which rarely consider their needs or issues. Lesbian women have
likewise organized themselves to ensure that their voices are heard. The
"politics of difference" opens onto a world of differences and multiple identities
among and within women themselves.
One of the main flash points among feminist critics has been identity
politics, by which is meant a politics of difference based on. some fixed or
definable identity (as a middle-class white woman, a working-class black
woman a third world brown woman, and so on). Critics of identity politics
have several major complaints. To begin with, defining feminist identity by
giving priority to race or class or geography tends to essentialize these features,
reducing people to social indicators whose "real essence" .is determined
by race or class or country of origin. Moreover an emphasis on the
multiplicity of female identities undermines the solidarity and united front
of feminists. Advocates of the politics of difference respond, m turn, that
the act of herding all women into -one homogeneous category (Woman) is
a reductive totalization and very unlikely to disturb the dominant order.
They argue that alliances and coalitions, in strategic cooperation with other
new social movements, will best and most democratically address Issues of
equality and recognition. In the spheres of theory and criticism, the politics
of difference opposes universal notions of traditional humanism and promotes
two key ideas: there are many women's literatures across the globe and there are
many modes of resistence and of resisting reading.
many modes of resistence and of resisting reading.