Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism.

An Introduction
Roxanne Gay. 2012. “Bad Feminist.” Virginia Quarterly Review 88 (4). Available:
https://www.vqronline.org/essay/bad-feminist.

Maggie Humm. 1998. “Feminist Literary Theory.” In Stevi Jackson & Jacki Jones eds. Contemporary Feminist
Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 194–212.
 Feminism:
“women who don’t
want to be treated
like shit”
 Or the question of essential

Why does Roxane Gay see

feminism

herself as Judith Butler’s analogy concerning

a bad feminist?
the essentialism of gender identity:
“Performing one’s gender wrong
initiates a set of punishments both
*** obvious and indirect, and

Why can any of us see performing it well provides the

reassurance that there is an
herself as a bad feminist? essentialism of gender identity after
all.” (1988)
 The right way to be a woman
The right way to be a feminist

Failing to adhere to the standards:

being a fallen woman, being a bad feminist
“Real feminists earn a
living, have money and
means of their own.”
(Atlantic 2012)

“Looking great is a matter

of feminism”. (Harper’s
Bazaar 2012)
 Problems with essential feminism:
it doesn’t allow for the complexities of human experience or
individuality, and indicates that the issues put forward by
white, heterosexual, middle-class, Western women are the
same for all women around the globe universally
I sometimes cringe when someone refers to me as a feminist, as if I should
be ashamed of my feminism or as if the word feminist is an insult. The label
is rarely offered in kindness. I am generally called a feminist when I have
the nerve to suggest that the misogyny deeply embedded in our culture is a
real problem, requiring relentless vigilance. […]
All feminists are angry instead of passionate.
[…] I’m not the only outspoken woman who shies
away from the feminist label, who fears the
consequences of accepting the label.
(Roxane Gay)
 Well, I don’t think of myself as a feminist at all. As
soon as we start labelling and categorizing ourselves
and others, that’s going to shut down the world. I
would never say that. Like, I just did that episode with
Louis C. K.
Melissa Leo
I really had to think about it. I am very clear that I am
not a feminist. It puts you into a category and I don’t
like that. An artist has no gender. All that matters is
whether they make good art or bad art. So I thought
about it, but then I said yes.
Marina Abramović
The stereotypical
representation understood by
mainstream society
“women has become a troublesome term, a site
of contest, a cause for anxiety” (Butler 1990, 3)

“the premature insistence on a stable subject of

feminism, understood as a seamless category of
women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to
accept the category” (Butler 1990, 4)
 The problematic ‘Other Feminist’

Feminism, after all, is itself a movement which derives its political

energy from a desire to struggle against discrimination and
oppression on the basis of a collective marker of identification:
gender. It is safe to say that with the rising to prominence of the
problematic of race and ethnicity, feminism has been thrown into
a crisis — a not unproductive crisis.
(Ang 2001, 177)
 Roxanne Gay:

“feminists don’t seem terribly

concerned with the issues
unique to women of color —
the ongoing effects of racism
and post-colonialism, the
status of women in the Third
World”

The 1940s Now

 “I wasn’t purposefully naive – just sheltered – in part due to
the storytelling in American history books. In grade school,
we had an entire month to celebrate the achievements of
black inventors, but our books dedicated only a paragraph to
the subject of black slavery. (And certainly not a word about
forced sterilizations, lynchings, eugenics, the Tuskegee
Syphilis Experiments, the stereotypical servile images in
American Advertising, Florida Slave-masters using
African-American infants as alligator bait…) . In third grade, I
knew George Washington Carver was wild about peanuts, but
not that he was born a slave. And that Rosa Parks stood up for
equality – but not that she was proceeded by Claudette Colvin
– who the NAACP [National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People] didn’t want to symbolize
their boycott because she was a young, pregnant teen and
viewed as “too feisty” and “emotional” for the cause.”
https://leighhecking.com/2017/05/16/the-h
andmaids-tale-exposes-the-limits-of-non-i
Leigh Hecking, blogger nclusive-feminism-and-racism-in-america/
 “The Handmaid’s Tale shows a dystopian future – for white
women – but not for the African American women whose
labor built our country. Not for the Native American women
we exterminated to make way for the New World. Not for the
40,000 or more Indian women who are surrogates for couples
that can’t have their own children each year. The Handmaid’s
Tale is fiction, but it isn’t some made-up version of the world;
it’s a world that has existed, that still exists in different forms
all around us.”

Leigh Hecking, blogger

https://leighhecking.com/2017/05/16/the-h
andmaids-tale-exposes-the-limits-of-non-i
nclusive-feminism-and-racism-in-america/
 Paradoxical universal:
all female persons ‘do not inhabit the same
sociohistorical spaces’ (Chow 1991, 93)
 An act of symbolic violence
disguising the structural divisions
created by colonialism,
imperialism and nationalism

White/Western
feminism in the
position of “master
discourse”
 “I am a feminist but…”

a resistant identification
along the lines of ethnicity, nationality
as well as cultural, social, geographical,
geopolitical factors
“Real feminists earn a living, have
money and means of their own.”
(Atlantic 2012)

“Looking great is a matter of

feminism”. (Harper’s Bazaar 2012)

What is at stake for Wurtzel’s

feminism is economic equality
with liberalism in the background
which prefers the rights of the
individual in comparison to collective
rights, accentuates individual
independence and private property
Individualist or libertarian feminism:

Broadening of “the political” had resulted in a world in which government was often
called on to do the fixing when the real responsibility lay with women themselves.
Instead of attacking the state, the representatives of individualist feminism charged
materialist feminists with enlarging the state and attacking individual autonomy.
Rene Denfeld wished for a movement that truly addressed women’s concerns “while
keeping its nose out of women’s private lives.”
Individualist feminism sees women’s movement as an isolated behavior of generous
women with capital.
To them, a feminist movement based on sororal charity seemed tame compared to
the fiery structural demands of the radicals only two decades before.
 “Working has little to do with having it all and
much more to do with having food on the table”.
Roxane Gay
“I keep reading these articles and getting angry and tired
because these articles tell me that there’s no way for women to
ever get it right. These articles make it seem like there is, in fact,
a right way to be a woman and a wrong way to be a woman. And
the standard appears to be ever changing and unachievable.”
Roxane Gay
Feminism functions as a nation which ‘other’ women are invited to join
but only without disrupting the ultimate integrity of the nation:
“Welcoming someone into one’s own home doesn’t represent and
attempt to undermine privilege; it expresses it” (Spelman 1988, 163).
 “non-white, non-Western women in ‘white/Western’ societies can only
begin to speak with a hesitating ‘I’m a feminist, but . . .’, in which the
meaning and substance of feminism itself become problematized. […]
Feminism […] must stop conceiving itself as a nation, a ‘natural’ political
destination for all women, no matter how multicultural. Rather than
adopting a politics of inclusion, which is always ultimately based on a
notion of commonality and community, it would do better to develop a
self-conscious politics of partiality, and imagine itself as a limited
political home […].”
(Ang 2001, 178)
 While a politics of inclusion is driven by the ambition for universal
representation (of all women’s interests), a politics of partiality does
away with that ambition and accepts the principle that feminism can
never ever be an encompassing political home for all women, not just
because different groups of women have different and sometimes
conflicting interests, but, more radically, because for many groups of
‘other’ women other interests, other identifications are sometimes more
important and more politically pressing than, or even incompatible with,
those related to their being women.
(Ang 2001, 192)
The differences that define us mostly cannot be reconciled
— but our goal should not be reconciling, eliminating these
differences, because it would mean adhering to standards
that are not fitting to some of us/most of us.
It’s like the shoes of Cinderella: we should stop wanting to fit
into her glass shoes.
We have our own ones and we should be proud to wear them.
From 2nd wave feminism to the present
differences of diverse feminism

Why feminist literary criticism matters

 Maggie Humm:
Literary theory matters because all representations
— literary or otherwise —
make constructions of knowledge and subjectivity possible.
Through representations we shape our identities and our worlds.
The insights of feminist literary theory will
help us, even require us, to think about
cultural identities in new ways.
 1. gender is a social construction
which oppresses women more
than men
The three major
perceptions of 2. patriarchy shapes this
construction
feminism
3. women’s experiential knowledge
is a basis for a future non-sexist
society
1. The task of critique These assumptions
2. The task of construction, i.e. inform feminism’s
feminist praxis double agenda
Feminism is thus interested in the cultural constructions of gender,
particularly the cultural constructions of gender in literature.

Literature produces representations of gender difference which

contribute to the social perception that man and women are
of unequal value.
Literature often provides
symbolic
misrepresentations of
women: feminist literary
criticism matters because
it reveals these
misrepresentations and
the power relations
present in literary texts
 The stages of feminist literary
criticism from the 1970s, the 2nd
wave of feminism to the present
 “There is no private domain of a
person’s life that is not political and
The 1970s’ there is no political issue that is not
2nd wave criticism ultimately personal. The old barriers
have fallen.”
Charlotte Bunch, 1968
 Events leading up to 2nd wave criticism:

It started in the 1950s, after the women were forced out

of the workplace after end of World War Two.

“Is this all?" That was the question that echoed around
a generation of US housewives in the early 1960s.
Theirs was the problem with no name, wrote Betty
Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963).

The symptoms: creeping fatigue, tranquiliser and

alcohol abuse, bleeding blisters that appeared suddenly
on their arms doctors attributed not to the cleaning
Sylvia Plath killed herself in London in 1963,
fluids they used constantly, and a deeper malaise.
not long after publishing Bell Jar
1967 passing of the Abortion Act
Before that, as Rowbotham writest in the early 1960s:
"not only were we all ignorant about contraception,
but we had no idea who we could ask for advice …
Abortion, an inconceivable horror of gin and
screams, was still illegal."
1970 passing of the Equal Pay Act
Women were yoked to men economically: women's
earnings as a proportion of men's earnings were
54.8%; they often needed a signature from their
father or husband to gain credit or buy bigger items.
1975 passing of the Sex Discrimination Act
1970s brought the first national women's liberation
march, the magazine Spare Rib, the publishing house
Virago, the first women's refuge, Rape Crisis centres
across the country, and campaigning groups including
Southall Black Sisters
A body of feminist literature followed The Feminine
Mystique, including Kate Millett's Sexual Politics,
Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, bell hooks's
Ain't I a Woman, novels by Angela Carter, Marilyn
French, Alice Walker, memoirs and poems by Maya
Angelou, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.
 The 1970s’
gynocriticism
A new phase of feminist literary
criticism: the study of women
writers and women-identified
themes.
The main representative of this
critical strand was Ellen Moers and
Elaine Showalter.
Defining women’s literature as a
sub-culture.
 Creating a feminist aesthetic within
literary tradition
Écriture feminine in Fance
The 1980s
Black feminism
Lesbian feminism and the emergence
of queer theory
 Gender studies: focusing on gender
and sexual difference in culture and
in texts both by men and women
The 1990s Postcolonial feminist literary theory
Feminist gynographic criticism
 Political criticism
Towards the 2000s Pedagogic or performance criticism
Positionality
Outside the box
Research shows that in children’s science books women are
significantly underrepresented
Susan Wilbraham & Elizabeth Caldwell. 2018. “Hairdressing in space. Depiction of
gender in science books for children.” Journal of Science & Popular Culture 1 (2):
101–118.
Wilbraham & Caldwell studied children’s science books and their study revealed a
biased representation, which means that women are not absent, but highly
underrepresented, particularly in physical sciences: the illustrations fail to
communicate women’s technical skills or women’s technical knowledge.
 Findings:
the examined books picture males three times more often
than females

1 2 3

reinforcing the under-representation women were depicted

stereotype that of women worsened as passive, lower
science is a male as the target age of status, unskilled, or
they were simply
pursuit the books increased
absent
 Examples

1. No mention of the 11 women who

have performed spacewalks
2. No mention of the qualifications
and experience required to go to
space, for a woman only the
appearance matters: “In zero G,
every day is a bad hair day.”
 Children’s science books advertise
career choices and women need to
be present to demonstrate that
these fields are also open and
achievable and rewarding for
girls/women too.

Why this matters?