Feminism - Gender Studies class notes

By King Meera -
Waves suggest that there were academic movements that began and ended, which is only an epistemological approach to feminism
We look at these theorists: Virginia Woolf (the abject, bisexual writing and deconstructing sexual difference), Simone de Bouvoir, Judith Butler (androgynous writing, the present continuum) and Marcel Proust (the narrator's gender is unknown)
(also Freud, with the homopsychologicus and homophilosophicus)

Interpellation, identity, subjectivity are concepts tied with theoretical movements trying to bring back focus to individuals

Virginia Woolf brought focus back to women themselves- the feminine continuum, feminine tradition, alternate forms & rhythms, a journey backwards rather than forward (going back to the mothers, back to Lesbos), breaking the chronological way of understanding progress/modernity (which she saw as the patriarchal method of understanding history as linear). She studied at Oxford.
  • a continuous present wrt time/space/writing
  • the essential androgyny of writing - writing is bisexual (note that she described writing as bisexual before it came to mean "attracted to two genders" and only meant "both male and female" or even perhaps none)
  • in The Three Guineas she says "as a woman I have no country; I want no country" - she argued that the nation-state excludes women
  • Especially with regard to to war (post WWI & WWII nationhood and nationalism), she describes a: unified British subjecthood - resignifying subject of nation constituted through violence unto enemy and epistemic violence unto women, children, elderly and infirm. Violence and death become meaning-making processes
The very very important concept of the abject, abjecthood
(to be continued)

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