Chapter 6: Feminism (what I have)

Notes and excerpts from Susan Gubar's introduction to 'Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century':

(i) Feminist studies have multiplied into various forms of inquiry in which every category linked to gender has itself undergone critical redefinition. (The book was published in 2000.) Just as proponents of identity politics enlarged the meaning of the term "women" by combining such categories as race and sex with gender analysis, post-structuralist thinkers used gender analysis to display the instability of such categories as race and sex.
(ii) That is, the terms race, sex, religion, and caste started out as fixed phrases w.r.t. gender, but considerations of gender quickly complicated their meanings.
(iii) Gubar held the "passionate belief that the pedagogic function of feminist studies depends on abrogating scholarly ghettoization and that its future vitality hinges on our ability to bring gender into play with different sorts of differences" and felt that as a woman and a human, she should be able to write with authority through the African-American and lesbian perspectives. This hints at an underlying essentialism.
(iv) W.r.t. the extreme hate and disregard she suffered as a feminist, she says that the first-generation of feminist critics have felt deluged by the hostility of their successors. This was at the time when the phrase "I'm no feminist or anything, but [...]" started being used. Feminism got a really bad rep because of what Gubar thinks were failures to understand the agenda and method of feminist criticism.

Notes from class lectures:

1.
Ecriture feminine:

• fluid
• non-linear
• NOT a binary opposite to structuralism
• facilitates free play of meaning
• has a transgressing, rule-transcending problem: assumes that the body is unaffeccted by social condition (however, one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman), and that there exists a pure essence of feminine (there does not)

Explanation:

there is an assumption that the body remains unchanging w.r.t. social conditions, but since gender is a social construct, this assumption is proved false

The argument that all women's experiences are homogeneous is also erroneous

The movement becomes counter-productive if they, too, (the ecriture feminists) write about women's experiences in a linear manner

2.

Julia Kristeva rejects the humanist position regarding literature, saying that the subject is NOT male, unified, and coherent, but is also female, multiple, and fragmented (not necessarily in that order), thereby rejecting such binaries as logical/illogical that are associated with the male/female binary.

Proposes two aspects of language: symbolic and semiotic, borrowing from Lacan's psychoanalysis.

Symbolic: 

• rational
• authority, order, control
• language of the father
• repression
• self seen as fixed and unified

Semiotic:

• emotive, private
• language of the mother
• under which you have:

1. chora: language before language

2. poetry: 

• world of possibility
• alternatives to the world

3. pre-mirror stage:

• displacement
• slippage
• body of a meaningful self before symbolic language

The symbolic then seems to be an orderly surface structure threatened by the semiotic.

While this approach opens up a whole new way to write, Kristeva still maintains the problematic binary that privileges male language: rational/emotive

3.

Here's a fun new term: jouissance. It means orgasm.

The term is used w.r.t. notions of bodily pleasure - pleasure that cannot be articulated - thus facilitating free play.

4.

ppt points and random references.

• syntax, diction chosen by female authors
• Frenchman's Creek
• Daphne du Morree
• rebelling against the system while within it
• Look Back in Anger (a play)
• Norah Helma

5. 
Feminism and psychoanalysis

Kate Millet criticizes Freud for furthering the patriarchy. Says that psychoanalysis is chief source of patriarchal attitude

Juliet Mitchell defends Freud, saying he criticizes patriarchy, and that he links psyche and cultural construction of identity. He shows us the processes of construction, and that a woman's identity is determined by the structures she inhabits. Her defence is as such:

• laws of society and life built into the unconscious
• shift from psyche to social order
• psychoanalysis necessary to uncover the unconscious

<^> <^> <^>

Back to feminist angst:

[  Freud: penis    = sexual power

   Lacan: phallus = key source of power in language and being, where Man is the Norm, and Woman is the Other

Women are seen as objects of social transactions:

• They suffer a lack (they lack the penis)
• Where males are threatened by castration, women believe they've already been castrated
• Women's identities are formed in a state of anxiety, absence
• Woman becomes the Other to the man.

Women internalize these notions:

• psyche (head)
• accepting (heart)
• social order (home)

The Oedipus complex is a patriarchal myth. 

Women also desire the father's place. 

_femininity is born out of repression

Penis envy - organ symbolizing power

Gender differences are constructed

Criticism - essentialism - absence of resistance to imposed identity

The unconscious is the site of resistance.

Jacqueline Rose:

Freudian unconsciousness

How imposed identities fail

Psychoanalysis reveals failure of social processes

Page 125-127

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• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar - The Madwoman in the Attic
• difficulty in western tradition - to 'join' notions of woman and writer together
• "Is the pen a metaphorical penis?" 
• female body: mortal birth; male body: immortal birth

pen = penis

so, what is the alternative - semiotic language? No. Instead of aping male style, must come up with female perspective

(gender gives you subject positions)

So with what organs can females generate texts?

-> find: alternate methods and materials

(women were discouraged from publishing and writing; there were only very few women writers in western canon; "forgotten" women writers)

-> result: rewrote, add countless texts by women, value them, re-evaluate texts by men

6. 

Feminism and post-structuralism

"Men and women are equal but different" - a problematic statement that didn't really help solve binary opposites. Whatevs.

Gender is a relationship between signifiers. A signifier-signified relationship is arbitrary. Gender is arbitrary.

Which means there are contradictions. Also, gender signification operates through binary opposites (man/woman). Gender can be deconstructed. 

For instance, subjects that evade structuring rules of the center, like jouissance. Female jouissance disturbs the symbolic (patriarchal language), which is a phallogocentric system.

1. Helene Cixous' The Laugh of the Medusa
2. Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which is Not One

(political dimension: there is either awareness or power imbalance)

Textbook notes:

Feminism timeline:

1960s - Women's movement: literary w.r.t. realizing significance of images of women promulgated in literature; saw it as vital to combat them and question their authority and coherence

1970s - exposing the mechanisms of patriarchy, i.e. the cultural mind set in men and women which perpetuated sexual inequality. Combative and polemical criticism; focussed on books by male writers in which influential or typical images of women were constructed. In late 1970s, shift from androtexts to gynotexts

1980s - change:

(i) more eclectic, began to draw upon findings and approaches of other kinds of criticism like Marxism, structuralism, linguistics etc

(ii) switched focus from attacking male versions of the world to exploring the nature of female world and outlook, and reconstructing lost or suppressed records of female experience

(iii) attention to the need to construct a new canon of women's writing by rewriting the history of the novel and if poetry in such a way that neglected women writers were given prominence

Showalter's timeline:

1840-1880: feminine phase

Women writers imitated the dominant male artistic norms and aesthetic standards

1880-1920: feminist phase

Radical and often separatist positions were maintained

1920 onwards: female phase

Female writings and female experience

Since 1970s: debates and discussions on:

1. Role of theory

2. Nature of language

3. Value/lack thereof of psychoanalysis

Purpose of phasing:

- the view that feminist criticism required a terminology if it was too attain theoretical respectability

-to establish a sense if progress (important in intellectual disciplines)