00195--What is Ecofeminism?

Ecofeminism has become an ever more significant field in both contemporary feminist and environmental studies.  According to Diamond and Orenstein ecofeminism is actually ‘a new term for an ancient wisdom’.  It is in the early 1980’s that this term became prominent, it’s substratum is founded by feminist philosophy, environmental activism, and the European and American peace movements of the late 1970s.  Francoise d’ Eauborne is the one who used this term first ever, in 1980, and then onwards it is adopted by both environmental activists and scholars.

00181—What does Elaine Showalter mean by the current impasses in Feminist criticism?

According to Elaine, the present impasses in feminist criticism are not a problem of finding definitions or theories.  The impasse comes from women’s own divided consciousness; the split in each of us.  We are both the daughter of the male tradition of our teachers, our professors, our dissertations, advicers and our publishers.  It is a tradition which asks women to be rational, marginal and grateful.  At the same time they are sisters in a new women’s movement which engenders another kind of awareness and commitments.

To the present comments from some critics that Feminism is in wilderness, Showalter has clear answer.  She says Feminist criticism is in good company because all criticism is in wilderness now.  She admits that Feminist criticism lacks a systematic and unified theoretical basis.

00166—Feminine, Feminist and Female stages

In her book “A Literature of Their Own” Elaine Showalter writes on English women writers.  She says that we can see patterns and phases in the evolution of a female tradition.  Showalter has divided the period of evolution into three stages.  They are:

1.      the Feminine,

2.      the Feminist, and,

3.      the Female stages.

1)      The first phase, the feminine phase dates from about 1840-1880.  During that period women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture.  The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym.  This trend was introduced in England in the 1840’s.  It became a national characteristic of English women writers. During this phase the feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique, because of the inferiority complex experienced by female writers. 

2)      The feminist phase lasted about 38 years; from 1882 to 1920.  The New Women movement gained strength—women won the right to vote.  Women writers began to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wrong womanhood.

3)      The latest phase or the third phase is called the female phase ongoing since 1920.  Here we find women rejecting both imitation and protest.  Showalter considers that both are signs of dependency. Women show more independent attitudes.  They realize the place of female experience in the process of art and literature.  She considers that there is what she calls autonomous art that can come from women because their experiences are typical and individualistic.  Women began to concentrate on the forms and techniques of art and literature.  The representatives of the female phase such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf even began to think of male and female sentences.  They wrote about masculine journalism and feminine fiction.  They redefined and sexualized external and internal experience.   

00158--FEMINISM AND QUEER THEORY

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. 

135--"If the pen is a metaphorical penis, from what organ can females generate texts"? Explain.

            This was a question raised by the 19^th century male theorists to silence those who argued for women's writing.  In the male centred western culture, the author is considered as a father.  For him, the pen is an instrument of generative power like the penis.  Out of this prejudiced concept, they argue that women lack the power and instrument for literary creation.  The argument goes like this:  The author is the father of a text.  No woman can be a father so a woman cannot be an author.

            Feminists respond to this conclusion by rejecting the fundamental analogy of the Author/Father.  On the other hand women generate texts from the brain, they would say.  It can also be the word processor, with its microchips, inputs and outputs.  And the whole thing seems like a metaphorical womb.  Instead of the image of literary paternity, images of literary maternity predominated the 18^th 19^th centuries.  They started to view the author more as a mother than as a father.  Showalter says that by analogy, the process of literary creation is more similar to gestation, labour and delivery than insemination.  Showalter rewrites the earlier question like this:

            "If to write is metaphorically to give birth, from what organ can males generate texts"?

00134--Describe the three national variants in Feminist Literary criticism as presented by Showalter.

            In the 1980's women's writing asserted itself as the central project of feminist literary study through hundreds of essays and research papers.  In the 1970s, French Feminist theories had certain differences of opinion with the American feminist movements and theories.  Differences were mainly regarding the method of study.  But now, they are solved.  The new French feminism have much in common with radical American feminist theories.  The concept of ecriture feminine, is a significant theoretical formulation in French feminist criticism today.  Showalter comments "ecriture feminine is a hope for the future". 

            The three major national variants in feminist criticism Showalter talks about are:

a)         English Feminist Criticism which is essentially Marxist.  In the analysis of women issues, it stresses oppression.

b)        French Feminist Criticism.  This is essentially Psychoanalytic.  In its methods of reading and theory, French Feminist Criticism stress Repression. 

c)         American Feminist criticism.  This school is essentially Textual.  In the analysis of women's issues American Feminist Criticism stresses Expression.

            With all there differences, the three variants have still become gynocrtic.  Theories of women's writing presently make use of four models of difference.  The are:  Biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural.  Each model represents a school of gynocentric feminist criticism.  Each has its own favourite texts, styles and methods.

00132--Explain the term Gynocrtics.

            There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism.  The first mode is concerned with women as reader and this is termed Feminist critique.  The second mode is concerned with women as writer and hence called Gynocrtics.

            The term is introduced by Elaine Showalter in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics" published in 1979 and later elaborated in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness", 1981.  Gynocritics focuses on images, themes, plots, and genres, on individual authors and patterns of influence among women, in an effort to identify what is specifically characteristic of women's writing and to construct "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature".  Associated primarily with Anglo American feminist criticism of the late 1970s, gynocrtics seeks to recover the unknown, and to re-read the known, writing by women in order to 'map the territory' of a female literary tradition.

            Showalter called Gynocritics the "second phase" of feminist criticism, because it succeeded and built upon an earlier phase of "feminist critique", which has focused on women as the writers of male texts.

00131--Explain Concept of Feminist Critique.

            There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism.  The first mode is concerned with women as a reader, and this is termed Feminist Critique.  The second mode is concerned with women as writer and hence called Gyno-critics.

            Feminist critique is a historically grounded enquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literature.  It is political and polemical and has affiliations to Marxism.  The subjects of study are mainly the image of women in literature, omissions and misconceptions of them.  According to Elaine Showalter, Feminist Critique is an interpretation of texts from a feminist perspective to expose diche's, stereotypes, and negative images of women.  Generally focusing on male literary and theoretical  texts, it also calls attention to the gaps in a literary history that has largely excluded writing by women.  This approach dominated feminist criticism when it first emerged in the 1970s and is strongly linked to the decades political agendas; Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), for example ties the mistreatment of women in fiction by Henry Miller and others to the oppression of women in a patriarchal society.  As early as 1975, Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson associated such readings with the "righteous, angry" first stages of feminist criticism.  Showalter would go on to suggest that by continuing to emphasize writing by men, the strategy of feminist criticism remained dependent "on existing models" of interpretation.  It did, however, lay the foundation for what she identified as the second, "gynocritical" phase of feminist criticism, focusing on women as writers with values, methods, and traditions of their own.  It has also led to more fully elaborated theories of women as readers, and continues to be an important tool in exposing the operation of sexism in culture and society.

00130--Why does Showalter say that feminist criticism is the Wilderness now?

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            The term wilderness literally means 'a large areas of land that has never been developed or used for growing crops because it is difficult to live there'.  In history, Wilderness is the woodland region, south of the Rapidan River.  It was the scene of a Civil War between the armies of Grant and Lee in 
May, 1864.  It was Carolyin Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson, who observed that Feminist Criticism is in the Wilderness now.  The reason is that it has branched out into diverse groups and attitudes, and they cannot reach a monolithic perspective.  Originally it was Mathew Arnold who predicted that literary critics might perish in the wilderness before they reach the promised land.  To the present comment from some critics that Feminist criticism is the wilderness is clearly answered by Showalter.  She says that feminist criticism is in good company because at present, all criticism is in the wilderness.

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            Feminist criticism too lacks a systematic and unified theoretical basis.  Different thinkers interpret and explain it differently.  Black critics protest the silence of feminist criticism about black and third world women writers.  They demand a Black feminist aesthetic.  Marxist feminists want to focus on class along with gender.  Literary historians want to uncover the lost tradition.  Post structuralists want to synthesise a new critical mode that is both textual and feminist.  Psycho analytic critics prefer to talk about women's relationship to language and signification.