Feminist criticism and gender studies, queer theory and gender studies

Topic:- “ FEMINIST CRITICISM AND GENDER STUDIES, QUEER THEORY AND GENDER STUDIES ”

Name:- Chauhan Sejal Arunbhai

Subject:- Literary Theory and Criticism

Paper:- 7

Roll No:- 28

M.A. Part- I Sem - II

Year:- 2013-15

Submitted to:-Dr.Dilip Barad

M.K.Bhavanagar University .

                                             

FEMINIST CRITICISM AND GENDER STUDIES , QUEER THEORY AND GENDER STUDIES :-

What is Gender Studies?

Gender Studies is a field of interdisciplinary study and academic field devoted to Gender identity and gendered representation as central categories of analysis. This field includes women‘s studies and men’s studies and men’s studies, LGBT Studies. Sometimes, gender studies is offered together with study of sexuality. These disciplines study gender and sexuality in the fields of literature, language, history, political, science, sociology, anthropology, cinema, media, studies, human development, law, and medicine. It also analyses race, location, nationality and disabilities.

Gender study has many different forms. One view espoused by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said:

                              “One is not born a woman, one becomes one”

This view proposes that in gender studies, the term “gender” should be used to refer to the social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities, not to the state of being male or female in its entirely. However, this view is not held by all gender theorists. Other areas of gender study closely examine the role that the biological states of being male or female have on social constructs of gender. Specifically, in what way gender roles are defined by biology and how they are defined by cultural trends. The field emerged from a number of different areas: the sociology of the 1950s and later the theories of the Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the work of feminists such as Judith Butler.

               We know that Gender is an important area of study in many disciplines, such as literary theory, drama studies, film theory, performance theory, contemporary art history, anthropology, sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis. These disciplines sometimes differ in their approaches to how and why they study gender. For instance in anthropology, sociology and psychology, gender is often studied as a practice, whereas in cultural studies representations of gender are more often examined. In politics, gender can be viewed as a foundational discourse that political actors, employ in order to position themselves on a variety of issues. Gender Studies is also a discipline in itself an interdisplinary area of study that incorporates methods and approaches from a wide range of disciplines.

FEMINIST CRITICISM AND GENDER STUDIES :-

What is Feminism?

 We know that Feminism is a multidisciplinary approach to sex and gender equality understood through social theories and political activism. Historically, feminism has evolved from the critical examination of in equality between the sexes to a more nuanced focus on the social and performative constructions of gender and sexuality.

As a distinctive and concerted approach to literature, feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s cultured roles achievements, and for women’s social and political rights marked by such books as Mary  Wollstonecraft’s “ A Vindication of the Rights Of Women (1792), John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Much of feminist literary criticism continues in our time to be interrelated with the movement by political feminists for social, legal, and cultural freedom and equality.

An important precursor in feminist criticism was Virginia Wooly, who in addition to her fiction, wrote A Room of One’s Own and numerous other essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic, and educational disabilities whiten what she called a

                       “Patriarchal society, dominated by man, that have hindered or prevented women from realizing there productive and creative possibilities. A much more radical critical mode, sometimes called “second-wave feminism”, was launched in France by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a wide- ranging critique of the cultural identification of women as merely the negative object, or “other” to man as the dominating “subject” who is assumed to represent humanity in general; the book dealt also with “the great collective mythes” of women in the works of many male writers.

In America, modern feminist criticism was inaugurated by Many Ellmann’s deft and witty discussion, in Thinking about Women, about the derogatory stereotypes of women in literature written by men, and also about alternative and subversive representations that occur in some writings by women. Even mere influential was Kate Millatt’s hard-hitting Sexual Politics, published the following years. By “politics” Millett signifies the mechanisms that express and enforce the relationships of power in society; she analyzes many Western social arrangements and institutions as covert ways of manipulating power so as to establish and perpetuate the dominance of men and the subordination of women. In her book she attacks the male bias in Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory and also analyzes selected passages by D.H.Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet as revealing the ways in which the author, in their fictional fantasies, aggrandize their aggressive phallic selves and degrade women as submissive sexual objects.

In the years after 1969 there was an explosion of feminist writings without parallel is preview critical innovations, is a movement that is its earlier stage, as Elaine Showalter remarked, displayed the urgency and excitement of a religious awakening current feminist criticism is America, England, France, and other countries is not a unitary theory or procedure. It manifests, among those who practice it, a great variety of critical vantage points and procedures, including adaptations of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and diverse postructuralist theories, and its vitality is signalized of the vigor of the debates within the ranks of professed feminists themselves. The various feminisms, however , share certain assumptions and concepts that underlie the diverse ways that individual critics explore the factor of sexual differences and privilege in the production, the form and contest, the reception, and the critical analysis and evaluation of works of literature:

(1)                The basic view is that western civilization is pervasively patriarchal that is, it is male- centered and controlled, and is organized and conducted is such a way as to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal, and artistic from the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophic writings to the present, the female tends to be defined by negative reference to the male as the human norm, hence as an other, or  non-man, by her lack of the identifying male organ, of male capabilities, and of the male character traits that are presumed, in the patriarchal view to have achieved the most important scientific and technical invention and culture. Women themselves are taught , is the process of being socialized, to internalize the reigning patriarchal ideology and so are conditional to derogate their own sex and to cooperate in their own subordination.

(2)                It is widely held that while one’s sex as a man or woman is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender of the traits that are conceived to constitute what is masculine and what is feminine in temperament and behavior are largely, if not entirely, social constructs that were generated by the pervasive patriarchal biases of our civilization. As Seminude Behavior put it,

                 “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman…. It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature….Which is described as feminine.”

By this cultural process, the masculine is our culture has come to be widely identified as active, dominating, adventurous, rational, creative; the feminine, by systematic apposition to such traits, has come to be  identified as passive, acquiescent, timid, emotional and conventional.

(3)                 The farther claim is that this patriarchal ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature, and which until recently have been written mainly by men for men. Typically, the most highly regarded literary works focus on male protagonists Oedipus, Ulysses, Hamlet, Tom Jones, Faust, the Three Musketeers, Captain Ahab, Huck Finn, Leopold Bloom who embody masculine traits and ways of feeling and pursue masculine interests in masculine fields of action. To these males, the female characters, when they play a role, are marginal and subordinate, an are represented either as complementary and subservient to, or in opposition to, masculine desires and enterprises, Such works, locking autonomous female role models, and implicitly addressed to male readers, either leave the woman reader an alien outsider or else solicit her to “identify against herself” by taking up the position of the male subject and so assuming male values and ways of perceiving feeling and acting.

                It is often held, in addition, that the traditional categories and criteria for analyzing and appraising literary works, although represented in standard critical theory as objective, disinterested, and universal, are in fact infused with masculine assumptions, interests, and ways of reasoning, so that the standard selection and rankings, the prevailing canon, and the critical treatments of literary works have in fact been tacitly but thoroughly gender-biased.

                                 

Queer Theory and Gender Studies:-

Queer Theory is a field of Post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and women’s studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the influenced by the work of Gloria Anzaldua, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jose Esteban Munoz and Lauren Berlant, queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gayllesbian studies close sexual acts and identities. Whereas gay/lesbian studies focused its inquiries into natural and unnatural behavior, queer theory expands its focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that falls into normative and deviant categories. Italian feminist and film theorist Teresa de Lauretis coined the term “queer theory” for a conference she organized at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990 and a special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies she edited based on that conference.

             Queer focuses on “mismatches” between sex, gender and desire. Queer has been associated most prominently with bisexual, lesbian and gay subjects, but analytic framework also includes such topics as cross dressing, intersexuality, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery. Queer theory’s attempted debunking of stable sexes, genders and sexualities develops out of the specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions. Queer theory examines the constitutive discourses of homosexuality developed in the last century in order to place “queer” in its historical context, and surveys contemporary arguments both for and against this latest terminology.

Both lesbian studies and gay studies began as “liberation movements” in parallel with the movements for African-American feminist liberation during the anti-Vietnam War, anti-establishment, and countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s. Since that time these studies have maintained a close relation to the activists who strive to achieve, for gays and lesbians, political, legal, and economic rights equal to those of the heterosexual majority. Through the 1970s, the two movements were primarily separatist: gays often thought of themselves as quintessentially male, while many lesbians, aligning themselves with the feminist movement, characterized the gay movement as sharing the anti-female attitudes of the reigning patriarchal culture. There has, however, been a gowning recognition of the degree to which the two groups share a history as a suppressed minority and possess common political and social aims.

In the 1970s, researches for the most part assumed that there was a fixed, unitary identity as a gay man or as a lesbian that has remained stable through human history. A major endeavor was to identify and reclaim the works of non-heterosexual writers from Plato to wait Whitman, Oscar Wilde, moral Proust, Andre Gide, W.H.Auden, and James Baldwin, and from the Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos to Virginia wooly, Adrienne rich, and Audre Lorde. The list included writers. William Shakespeare and Christina Rossetti are the examples who represented in their literary works homoerotic subject matter, but whose own sexuality the available biographical evideuee leaves uncertain, In the 1980s, and 1990s, however in large part because of the assimilation of the view points and analytic methods of Derrida, Foucauet, and other poststructuralists the earlier aroumptions about a unitary and stable gay or lesbian identity were frequently put to question, and historical and Gitical analyses of sexual differences became increasingly subtle and complex.

A number of queer theorists, for example, adopted the deconstructive mode of dismantling the key binary oppositions of Western Culture, such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, and natural/unnatural, by which a spectrum of diverse things is forced into only two categories, and in which the first category is assigned privilege, power and centrality, while the second is derogated, subordinated, and marginalized. In an important essay of 1980,”Compulsive Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, Adrience Rich posited what she called the “lesbian continuum” as a way of stressing how far-ranging and diverse is the spectrum of love and bonding among women, including female friendship, the family relationship between mother and daughter and women’s partnerships and social groups, as well as overtly physical same-sex relations. Later theorists such as Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler undertook to invert the standard hierarchical opposition by which homosexuality is marginalized and made unnatural, by stressing the extent to which the ostensible normativity of heterosexuality is based on the suppression and denial of same-sex desires and relationships. Queer reading has become the term for interpretive activities that undertake to subvert and confound the established verbal and cultural oppositions and boundaries between male/female, homosexual/heterosexual, and normal/abnormal.

Another prominent theoretical procedure has been to undo the “essentialist” assumption that heterosexual and homosexual are universal and transhistorical types of human subjects, or identities, by historicizing these categories that is, by proposing that they are Cultural constructs that emerged under special ideological conditions in a particular culture at a particular time. A central text is the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality published in1976, which claims that, while there had ling been a social category of sodomy as a transgressive human act, the “homosexual”, as a special type of human subject or identity, was a construction by the medical and legal discourse that developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In a further expansion of cultural constructionist theory, Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity published in 1990, described the categories of Gender and of sexuality as performative, in the sense that the features which a cultural discourse institutes as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual, the discourse also makes happen, by establishing an identity that the socialized individual assimilates and the patterns of behavior that he or she proceed to enact.

Homosexuality, by this view ,is not a particular identity that effects a pattern of action that produces the effect of originating in a particular identity. A fundamental constructionist text, frequently cited in the arguments against essentialism is “one is Not Born a Women” by Monique Witting, in The Straight Mind and other Essays published in 1992.

        Thus, Queer theory said that there is an interval between what a subject “does” and what a subject “is”. So despite its title the theory goal is to destabilise identity categories, which are designed to identity the “sexed subject” and place individuals within a single restrictive sexual orientation.