feminism(s) carmen santiago. key ideas to bear in mind while studying feminism women treated as 2...
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KEY IDEAS TO BEAR IN MIND WHILE STUDYING
FEMINISM
Women treated as 2nd rate citizens in Western culture. (Social conditions of women)
There was a negative stereotype of women.
Cultural identity construction. (women’s roles: house-angel)
Power was always related to the public sphere and women were only admitted in private
sphere. Feminism fights against this idea and states public & private spheres cannot be
separated.
Feminism tried to change the power relations between women & men, it was against
Patriarchy, term that refer to almost complete domination of men in Western society &
beyond.
AN EXAMPLE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHW_5cgYew0
Contemporary feminist literary criticism- 1960’s-70’s. (Antecedents: V.
Woolf: A Room of One’s Own & Bible: Inanna)
Early feminism: women’s experience under patriarchy. (The canon was
male)
Movement moved to ethnic and gender boundaries. (African American
Feminist scholars)
Lesbian feminism criticism reconstructed a hidden tradition of lesbian
wrtiting and explored the experience of radical alterity within a
heterosexist world.
Two stages appeared. (Misogynist stereotypes in male lit. & recovery of
lost tradition and historical reconstruction)
Mid-1980’s began to impact the French Feminism. (Kristeva, Irigaray,
Cixous)
Liberal & radical Feminism were in disagreement since 1970’s and two
perspectives began:
- Constructionist: gender is made by culture in history. It took inspiration from
the Marxist theory of the social construction of individual subjectivity (Althusser)
and from the Post-structuralist idea that language writes rather than reflects
identities.
- Essentialists: gender reflects a natural difference between men and women
that is much psychological, even linguistic, as it is biological. Women are innately
capable of offering a different ethics from men. Men must abstract themselves
from the material world as they separate from their mothers to enter in the
patriarchate, that implies get involve in violence. On the other hand, women are
not required to separate from their mother as they acquire a gender identity; they
simply identify with the closest person to them, their mother. No cut is required
and that makes women more ethical than men with the others.
GAYLE RUBIN (1949-)
“The Traffic in Women” (1975)
Feminism was trying to find their place among 3 schools:
- Freudian psychoanalysis
- Structural anthropology
- Marxism
Talks about the “Sex/Gender system” as a part of social life. Defined as the
set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into
products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs
are satisfied.
To demonstrate the need of her concept, she discusses the failure of
classical Marxism to conceptualize sex oppression. In Marx’s map, women
is not seen as very significant, however, the “wife” is among the necessities
of a worker. Rubin says that is through this “historical and moral element”
the entire domain of sex and sex oppression is subsumed.
Engels saw sex oppression as part of capitalism’s heritage, and integrates
sex and sexuality into his theory of society. For human beings, once they
have covered the natural world elements (economy) the production is able
to be achieved, but, the human being is not fulfilled for the needs of
fundamental human requirements, then relations of sexuality appear.
Furthermore, a human group has to reproduce itself from generation to
generation. Engel’s indicates then the importance of the domain of social,
that Rubin calls “sex/gender system.”
Kinship for an anthropologist is a system of categories and statuses which often
contradict actual genetic relationships. They vary wildly from one culture to the next.
Kinship is organization and organization gives power. But to whom? Women are treated
as gifts and men are who have the power. Therefore, the only beneficiate here are men.
(“Exchange of women” is a seductive and powerful concept that places the oppression of
women within social systems, rather than biology.)
The “exchange of women” is neither a definition of culture nor a system in and of itself.
A kinship system is an imposition of social ends upon a part of the natural world. The
result is different rights that various people have over other people.
The economic oppression of women is an “economics” of sex and gender, and what we
need is a political economy of sexual systems.
The sex/gender system must be reorganized through political action and feminism must
dream even more than the elimination of the oppression of women, but the elimination of
obligatory sexualities and sex roles.
Rubin recognizes the mutual interdependence of sexuality, economics, and politics
without underestimating the full significance of each in human society.
SANDRA GILBERT & SUSAN GUBAR
Tried to show how important were the limit
options female writers had in 19th. “The
Madwoman in the Attic”
“Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language,
Sexuality.” (1985)
Body language articulates language.
Tries to integrate power, language &
meaning by means of examine between
sexual difference & symbolic contract.
That examination is not only interesting for
the questions of female linguistic destiny, but
has also interested to masculinist doubts.
Both female & male participate in a tradition
of linguistic fantasy that affects them.
Female subject is not alienated from the
words she writes and speaks.
Women is not just a sign but a generator of signs, therefore, she needs to know the
nature and purpose of her own passive signification, her own active signifying.
“(Women) … the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you.”
Women need a feminist language, in E. Showalter’s words: “a revolutionary linguism, an
oral break from the dictatorship of patriarchal speech.”
As long as women remain silent or speak in a body language of freely fluent multiple
referentiality, they will be outside the historical process. But if they begin to speak and
write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated; it is a history that, logically
speaking, their speech should disrupt.
This dilemma needs a reshape of language so that it works for, rather than against,
women.
Differences appear between French & American feminism.
A virulent battle between men against women appear.
The Freudanian theories falls paradoxically into mother’ supremacy.
“In spite of feminist doubt and masculinist dread, we can affirm that woman has not been
sentenced to transcribe male penmanship, she commands sentences which inscribe her
own powerful character.”
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
“Three women’s texts & a critique of
imperialism.” (1986)
Read British 19th literature with imperialism in
mind.
The signifier as “Third World” or “wordling.”
Examines the operation of Third World by means
of Jane Eyre. She plots the novel with Wide
Sargasso Sea & Frankenstein as an analysis –
deconstruction- of a “worlding” such as Jane
Eyre. What she is trying to show is the blindness
of feminism.
Imperialism, the subject not only as individual
but as individualist. Represented by 2 registers:
1. Child bearing 2. Soul making
To wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing
focus of the “subject-constitution” of the female
individualist.
19th subject-constitution by child bearing & soul
making
20th subject-constitution by psychoanalysis, from
Narcissus (imaginary) to Oedipus (symbolic)
Spivak tried to extend, outside of the European novelistic tradition, the most
powerful suggestion in Wide Sargasso Sea: the Jane Eyre can be read as the
orchestration & staging of self-immolation of Bertha Mason as “good wife.”
And she hoped that an informed critique of imperialism, granted some
attention from readers in the First World, will at least expand the frontiers of
the politics of reading.
The readings will provoque angriness against the narrativization of history.
Spivak does that to put feminist individualism in its historical determination.
Spivak effort is to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the
“subject-constitution” of the female individualist.
Spivak included the complicity of female writers with imperialism. “It should
not be possible to read 19th century British fiction without remembering that
imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the
cultural representation of England to the English.”
Spivak represents the voice of difference.
GERALDINE HENG.
Examines the conflict between traditional
gender ideology & the movement for the
liberation of women in Third World context.
There are different kinds of Third World
feminist movements, that’s mainly why they
don’t have a global theory.
3 factors in common:
1. Haunted by historical origins (nationalism)
2. Presence & Intervention of State itself
3. Ambivalence of Third world nations to the
arrival of modernity
“A great way to fly”: Nationalism, the State, and the Varieties of Third-World Feminism. (1997)
There’s a manipulation of 3rd World feminism by nationalism
3rd World feminism focus on the requirement of an
unexceptionable genealogy, history or tradition.
3rd World states profit from the manipulation of women &
feminine identity as an economic resource.
All 3rd World feminists are at risk because the state can take
them down in any moment, that’s why there’s a need to write
about the feminist groups existence for a survival effect.
WHAT IS REMAINING FOR US?
http://cargocollective.com/citypulse#1225738/CITY-OF-WOME
N-/-La-Ciudad-de-las-Mujeres