Literary Theory- Feminism. Help please.

[suwoo]

Right, you educated lot. I am in my first year of an english lit degree and this semester we are doing literary and cultural theory, namely Marxism, Post Colonial Theory, Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory and Feminism. We haven't had the lecture yet but I want to get ahead of the game. Plus, I have to do an informal presentation to my seminar group on this subject and I would like to be well informed with 'insider' knowledge as it were. Anyone point me in a useful direction?
Thanks.

Yes, I get that dittany. I was referring to the bit of your post where you talking about 'actual theorising' as opposed to 'academic writing'. The OP's teacher may not be very interesting in, or knowledgeable about, 'actual theorising'.

I found the little teaching I had about academic theories quite confusing and unhelpful, because often you're taught by one person who has a surface-level knowledge of several theories and doesn't really have any interest in applying those theories to their own academic writing, let alone in practicing them.

But I readily admit I am not good at hard theory, so it may well be the OP finds it less confusing that this bear of little brain!

Ah, sorry, crossed wires. I thought it was a reply to my post as mine was just before yours.

I do wish when I was an undergraduate someone had told me that theorising doesn't have to be very high-flown academic stuff. I think I thought it was men (!) in ivory towers writing heavy philosophical tomes and felt very intimidated. Now I end up using masses of ideas that come from all sorts of non-academic sources, and it works much better.

I agree that feminist politics have muddied the waters somewhat. I have always found feminist lit.crit. to be a blind alley. I don't know enough about queer theory to comment on that.

Critical Theory is by its nature political, imo.

To a large extent it grew out of the widespread student unrest in 1968, particularly in Paris. Many of those students became influential in the academic 'establishment' in the sense that they spent their academic careers working on a political and philosophical basis for the unrest. That trivilaises it a bit but it's a simple way of describing its development. Many focussed on re-assessing Marx and Engels' work for the 20th century.

These theorists found much in common with the work of the Russian Formalists who had been beavering away since the 1920's on a cohesive theory of language which would serve the divergent cultures of the Soviet Union.

The focus tended early on to be on the hidden meaning in language. An obvious example is feedom-fighter/ terrorist, suicide-bomber/martyr etc. It fined-down, as in Barthes' work, into an examination of the nature of metaphor and the gap between a word and its relation to what it refers to.

Eagleton was, I believe, the initial proponent of Structuralism in this country and the debate generated a lot of hostility in the press about Shakespeare being trivialised, analysis of the words on bus tickets being on the curriculum etc etc. Some university English faculties resisted it for a long time and so it sneaked in the back door, so to speak, via Modern Languages faculties and American Studies depts.

I quite enjoy feminist lit crit when it's in action, so to speak. Some of it is poor, but you can learn from it too, I reckon.

It's very useful in my area, where everyone tends to use 'he' as default when they've no evidence for male authorship/readership. I did a paper where I assumed female authorship/readership, and I think it opened up the text a lot. It was nice to see both as possibilities, instead of assuming an author is 'male until proven female'.

Badly worded on my part but I it referred to your comment about it having 'deadened and destroyed'.

Don't get me wrong. I don't dislike it or dismiss its value but I have taken issue with feminists who try to overload reading lists.

Yes, I did misread you. (Cooking). I apologise.

I said 'over-load'!

Actually, I agree with austen to an extent, if she's seen the same kinds of readings lists as me.

I think we should acknowledge that in periods of history, women have been silenced and it has been made harder for them to write and get published. I'm all for pointing out when women are known to have been active in literate culture (and it's oftener than the syllabuses suggest). But I don't like the idea of pretending that, just because Virginia Woolf was able to write her books, all other women living at the same time who didn't 'make something of their lives' were somehow lazy or stupid. And that can be a danger of some reading lists I've seen.

Actually, this reminds me of the point people often make on here, that women throughout history have worked, and it's not a 20th/21st century phenomenon. I try to teach my students that lots of women worked in the book trade, and as artists and writers, in the period I teach. But I don't want to end up giving my students the idea that women were free to speak out however they liked.

One of my students recently finished an essay by saying something along the lines of 'What this text shows is that, though it was not perfect, things were getting better for women in this period'.

That is poor literary criticism, and poor history. It also suggests that the world has been set on an inescapable upward curve towards the perfect state of equality we have now (and speaking to the student, it was clear that was what he felt). I would like my students to recongize that, however hard we try to think in feminist ways about texts and readers, we're still living in a society that has a long way to go, and still likely to form assumptions based on the gender-biases we have.

dittany Yes I do have an equal problem with that and I have always hated marginalisation of women.

I fully understand the need to correct the balance but in certain situations the male reaction to obvious attempts merely makes them more entrenched. Better to sneak under the barricades sometimes!

But we are doing the thing that makes me wince. We're talking about gender politics and not about literature. That's why I avoid labelling the genre.

dittany, you speak of male supremacy manifesting itself through literature. I think there's also a problem here with well-meaning reading lists influenced by someone's (sometimes rather superficial) idea of feminism. The overtly misogynistic texts are edged out: great, they won't offend anyone if they're not read, and we'll all be able to celebrate the literary achievements of women instead.

But I think to censor these texts is also to give the misleading impression that there's little need for feminism, and that impression is already pretty widespread, without it needing any help from whitewashed history.

I clicked on an interesting looking thread.
I thought perhaps I could contribute a partial answer to the OP.

I had not noticed it was in the feminist section.

One of my favourite writers is Ursula Le Guin. I'm fascinated by her exploration of Utopias and I'm intrigued by her use of metaphor but I couldn't care less if she's a man or a woman.

I'm obviously in the wrong place and will leave you to it.

I am feeling very unintelligent reading this thread, which is all going completely over my head!

austen, I like Le Guin too - did you know she wrote a story about a world where people were neither male nor female (as an attempt to explore gender), but later said she was disappointed that, because she used 'he' as default, she felt she'd made a mess of the attempt?

dittany - I'm still thinking of English Lit reading lists. My students come to my subject (medieval lit), and tend to think that there's Chaucer (whom they mainly know as the writer of the Wife of Bath, which they usually think is a proto-feminist text), and there are people who write romances. Neither Chaucer nor Romance is particularly feminist (!), but the feminist criticism on both is strong. It's easy for them to feel as if wonderful modern criticism has found spaces for strong women, and ways to redeem the sexism of the past.

However, to take an example: romances fictionalize the idea that women's chastity is a source of society's honour, and honour for men. Because the idea is fictionalized and negotiated through the text, often humorously, there's space for students to find feminist interpretations.

They don't get to read the didactic literature that is strongly and uncompromisingly misogynistic. They don't get to read medical literature, which consistently defines women as deformed, inferior and inherently unclean. They don't get to read sermons and preaching texts, which often display revulsion towards women.

Because of this (and I've tried to counteract this in my own teaching), they don't realize that these attitudes are so prevalent. And they don't get to trace how similar some of these attitudes are to ones still current in this society. They don't get to find out how ingrained, for example, the idea of women's bodies are dirty is. They don't realize that's a guiding cultural image that has roots in all sorts of literature.

This, I think, makes it possible for them to come to shallow conclusions about the difference between medieval society ('it was sexist, but it was the dark ages! we're different now!) and our own.

Obviously, I've never had the ubiquitous 'do you wax' discussion with my students, but I suspect the answer might be 'sure, it just feels nicer, there's no cultural implications!'. Which is an attitude people develop when they are left ignorant of said cultural implications.

Whew, I do go on!

Does that make sense? I do teach them about women too, obviously.

Well, as I say, I think it's often a superficial or well-meaning attempt at feminism that gets them off the lists, which isn't quite the same as feminism. It's a problem of doing a course that tries to cover lots of theoretical ground all mixed together, which a lot of Lit courses do.

I think sometimes, also, people get blown away by the triumphalist image ('look at all the women on the reading list! Wonderful!') and don't think about the balance of the course and what's been left out.

In English Lit. part of the problem is that we've inherited a view of what 'real literature' is that's shaped (surprise surprise) by the patriarchy. There's a sense that 'real' literature is the product of lonely genius, is non-collaborative and is non-interdisciplinary. English Lit still has a real problem with how to deal with texts that are the product of more than one author.

For the period I teach, lots of work is collaborative and enriched with visual art - often women have roles in the production of texts which are simply ignored because undergraduates just aren't expected to have the historical knowledge and critical vocabulary to tackle this stuff.