GÉNERO Y LITERATURA EN LOS PAÍSES DE HABLA INGLESA

BLOQUE 1: LA LITERATURA DESDE LA PERSPECTIVA DE GÉNERO: TEMAS Y MOTIVOS EN LA

LITERATURA ESCRITA POR MUJERES

Autoevaluación teoría. Introducción.

1.- Explique por qué Riley y Pearce afirman: “’Gender awareness’ seems to be enough.
Needless to say, this book starts from the assumption that it is not enough”
Despite of the fact that ‘gender’ is discussed about at school, debating about
‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities’ is not enough. There is still a necessity of including in
syllabuses courses on women’s writings and feminist movements, for students and readers
could contextualise and historicise the thematic of a work of fiction and not only being
‘gender aware’.

2.- ¿Cuál es la opinión de Elaine Showalter sobre las diferencias entre la escritura
femenina y masculina?
Elaine Showalter asserts that women’s writing is different from men’s because women
have access to life experiences that men could not share. This assumption opened the
debate of how to avoid essentialism (i.e. all women share the same qualities/experiences
that are necessarily different from men’s).

3.- ¿Qué valor dan las autoras al proyecto ginocrítico?

Riley and Pearce give the gynocritic project a great sum of importance for this project
allowed to recuperate the lives and writings of women who otherwise would have
remained obscured. This project brought to light a great number of books from eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries which male publishers denied giving importance. Thus, the
flourishing of this works countered the idea that women were intellectually inferior than
men, and it gave a compelling argument to feminist movement to prove that women’s
work has been diminished and purposefully undermined throughout the centuries.

4- ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre “individuo” y “sujeto”?

Post-structuralist thinking asserts that a subject is not static but dynamic. This idea destabilises
the humanist concept of the individual with fixed identities or identifications. The ‘subject in
process’ (i.e. men and women) could in theory assume and perform identities traditionally
associated with women if they wish for. Accordingly, identity is not fixed, it may change or
evolve.

5- ¿Qué quiere decir Judith Butler con la idea de que todas las identidades se construyen
artificialmente?

According to Butler, gendered identities are produced and maintained through repetition and
training, and they could be ‘performed’ otherwise depending on the occasion. For Butler,
gendered identity is a matter of imitation. A boy or a girl repeats the behaviour of his/her
parents for (s)he thinks it is socially accepted. Accordingly, gender identity is also a matter of
choice. Therefore, identity is, in every case, ‘artificially’ constructed.

6.- ¿Cuál es la importancia de las editoriales para los movimientos feministas y de género?
Since publishers contribute to the creation of the canon due to their power to decide what is
to be published, they are crucial to gender and feminists’ movements. Literature is a powerful
media for the transmission of ideas and ideology, therefore, gender and feminists’ movements
have always been accompanied by the creation of publishing houses ruled by women, in order
to help women to publish their work, while avoiding male censure. During the first wave,
feminist presses helped spread the ideas that advanced the suffrage movement; in the second
wave, feminist publishers used literature as a tool for gaining empowerment by the means of
‘authentic realism’, fiction that showed ‘real women’ that were far from the mainstream
culture. However, during the third wave, the conglomeration of the market, that caused a
reduction in the number of feminist publishing houses; and the rise of the ‘star author’ (i.e. a
figure whose physical aspect is as important as his/her writings), changed the paradigm of
producing books: writing have become a matter of selling.

7.- Explique la relación entre “writers’ looks” y “writers’ books” según Riley y Pearce.

According to Riley and Pearce, individualism and consumerism have changed the way books
are produced. Nowadays, is equally important for an author to be physically attractive as to
make a good writing. This change, therefore, is contrary to feminists’ movements, who have
always striven to desexualise feminine body.

8.- Comente de qué modo las nuevas tecnologías y los medios sociales intervienen en el
discurso feminista.

Today, technology and social media have become a place for feminist expression during the
fourth wave. The reduction of the numbers of feminist publishers of the third wave, had led
women with no means for transmitting their ideas, and with hardly an option for their work to
be published. Thus, social media allows women to exchange ideas, and many of them use
blogs for self-publishing. Movements against sexism and sexual abuse have started in these
social sites and have been spread throughout the world. However, the internet is also a place
for hate, and numerous people use it to harass women and men that support feminism and
have egalitarian ideals.

Reflexión crítica sobre “The Lady of Shalott”, Lord Tennyson.

1.- ¿Cómo se representan las diferencias de género en el poema?

There is a clear distinction between the representations of the Lady of Shalott and Sir Lancelot
in this poem. The narrator highlights different features of both characters that agree with a
stereotyped representation of gender differences. The lady is represented in seclusion, she is
weaving, a lady-like activity, and she is accomplished. She sings like an angel and has a pretty
face, as Lancelot comments at the end of the poem. While the lady stayed secluded, she will
be safe and alive; but the very moment she rebelled and reacted against her situation, she will
die. On the other hand, the narrator points out the warlike aspect of Lancelot. He is a knight
and his armour gleams with the sunbeams; he is outside, free, riding his warhorse is likened to
a meteor crossing the sky. This representation fits to the Victorian manly and womanly values.

2.- ¿Qué estrategias desarrolla la dama para suprimir su melancolía y frustración?

The lady weaves all the time the images she sees reflected in the mirror. By doing so, she
avoids regretting her own situation. She channels her frustration by weaving nice and gay
scenes in her loom, she “delights” with her creation and feels somehow relieved with any
authorial sign she can find in her task. As we can observe, the task she realises is alienating,
however, she cannot stop doing it, and she even finds pleasure. Victorian society constructed a
model of womanhood based on keep women occupied in minor labours in which they may feel
valuable, but always within home.

3.- ¿Qué le sugiere que la dama no tenga nombre? ¿Y que no pueda verse bien en el espejo?

That the lady does not have a name, and that she does not see herself well at the mirror
suggests me a lack of identity. She is a construct; her name and face are no important for her.
This leads me to think that, as women in Victorian era, she has been raised to an ideal, and
idealised models are usually denied of self-identity, as if women were mere tools at the service
of society: they were valued only by the accomplishment of the role they were supposed to
play.

4.- Identifique el momento en que la mujer toma conciencia de su falta de poder y control
sobre su vida.

She “awakes” of her slumber the moment she sees a young couple passing by in their way to
Camelot, and she becomes aware of her own solitude and isolation. The lady expresses
sickness for the way she has to live and yearns for experimenting love. Therefore, when she
sees Lancelot reflected in the mirror, she feels overwhelmed and runs after him. Again, is a
sentiment what makes her rise and take control over her life; however, this sentiment is
prompt by an image, an idealised model as well: Lancelot is a brave warrior. This points to the
role of women in Victorian age, where women were pushed to sentiment, as guardians of the
family values.

5.- ¿Qué significados podemos asignar al espejo roto del poema? ¿Qué se quiebra
simbólicamente en el acto desafiante de la dama?

The broken mirror may represent the rupture of the establishment. The lady defies her
assumed position in society, she wants to be free and to experiment things, what triggers the
curse on her and, consequently, she dies. This can be interpreted as the deserved destiny for
the woman who tried to challenge this establishment and to change seclusion and submission
for freedom and control over her life.

6.- Repase el modo en que Tennyson utiliza el entorno natural para acompañar la partida de
la dama. ¿Es un entorno amable u hostil? ¿Por qué cree que Tennyson vincula lo natural a lo
social?

Natural environment chosen by Tennyson is hostile. The sunbeams that accompanied Lancelot
the previous scene have disappeared and instead it is stormy and windy, and rains heavily. It
seems that nature is angry with her for breaking the established values, and so, it is hostile on
her. Nature was linked to God for many in the Victorian era, therefore, this hostility can be
seen as a punishment from Him for her challenge. By doing so, the author implies that society
and its codes are sanctioned by God Himself, so, her fault is even worse.

7.- ¿Cómo interpreta que la dama escriba “Lady of Shalott” en la barca?

She has renounced to have a name, that is to say that she has sacrificed her own identity.
However, I think that writing her name in the boat is a way of not being invisible anymore.
Invisibility was a consequence of the way life of many Victorian women.

8.- ¿Qué imágenes de “locura” (desorden, desequilibrio, alienación, frenesí…) encontramos

en el poema asociadas a la dama?
In first place, the narrator tells us that the lady heard a whisper that reveals her about her
curse, but she is alone and isolated in the tower, so, the whisper may come from the lady’s
imagination. Following the line, the images she sees in the mirror are “magic sights”, what
leads us to think that they may also come from her imagination, and these points to a special
state of mind. On the other hand, the behaviour of the lady when she sees Lancelot reflected
in the mirror are a sign of madness. She suddenly stops weaving and walks with anxiety over
the room and runs after a man she does not even know. This could point to the sudden
madness that women supposedly suffered when they were sick of their lives and reacted to
the established models. Furthermore, Tennyson points to an irrational behaviour, for the lady
abandons everything she was pleased with, putting her life on a risk, just for an infatuation.

9.- Tennyson apenas describe a la dama, pero sabemos que va vestida de blanco en su viaje a
Camelot, un color a menudo vinculado a lo virginal y a las novias. ¿Qué significados podemos
extraer de esta indumentaria, a la luz del deseo que la dama ha expresado anteriormente
por Lancelot?

White colour is associated with purity. The lady is innocent, she is not tainted for the vices of
society, for she has been “protected” from the real world by the walls of the tower.

Autoevaluación teoría. Capítulo 1: “Gendering the canon”

1.- ¿Qué relación sostiene el canon literario con el género?

Canon defines the traits of ‘great literature’. However, canon was instituted by the time when
women were hardly present in literature or culture, during the nineteenth century. Thus,
books published were written by men, published by men, and reviewed by men, but read by
almost any. The perspectives that showed were mainly masculine, and the constructed roles of
femininity and masculinity they conveyed were socially accepted. This male bias excluded
women’s writing, and, derided works that had even been best-seller in their time. Therefore,
even nowadays, canonical works are mainly by men’s, therefore, canon is still gendered.

2.- Explique por qué Riley y Pearce afirman que “what we read is, of course, in part dictated
by the production processes that lie behind the creation of any literary artifact”

Riley and Pearce assert that because the production processes, i.e. publishing, are important in
considering how a text becomes canonical, since they design the specific paradigms that add
‘value’ to a literary work. Therefore, publishers in part decide what we are to read.

3.- ¿Qué es “The Great Tradition” de la literatura en lengua inglesa?

“The Great Tradition”, from F.R. Leavis, is a study of works of fiction under the light of the poet
Matthew Arnold (who first defined what the canon is in the nineteenth century, and defined
literature as a civilising tool) that excluded women’s writings, with one or two exceptions such
as George Elliot or Jane Austen. This text helped define university and school syllabuses, that,
obviously, lacked works written by women.

4.- ¿De qué forma han contribuido las reseñas literarias a la formación del canon tradicional?

Reviewers traditionally have the power of influencing people’s minds. They have striven to
keep women out of the intellectual and public life, discouraging them from writing by
comparing it to prostitution. Male critics derided a bestselling work of nineteenth century
(Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe) by saying it was sentimental, excluding it, thus,
from serious discussion as a canonical text. Thus, reviewers have a great power in the shaping
and definition of the canon.

5.- ¿Qué prácticas (editoriales, educativas, etc.) han posibilitado la revisión del canon y la
canonización de obras escritas por mujeres?

Since the second wave, a great number of publishing houses ruled by women have arisen.
They start the task of recovering the work of women obscured because of the male
domination of the canon in every stage of history. Other aspect that allowed the revision was
the review of male and female works by female critics that demonstrate that women not only
were prolific at literature, but also that they could entreat the title of canonical. Furthermore,
these publishers and reviewers set up a prize on female literature, that gave women’s writings
a name and reputation that should increase sales, which nowadays also defines the canon. On
the other hand, the inclusion of women’s writings in university and school syllabuses is
increasing little by little, but nevertheless, it is still necessary a major implication from
educational programmes.

Reflexión crítica sobre “The Yellow Paper”, Gilman.

1.- ¿De qué modos contesta la protagonista la figura del “ángel de la casa”? ¿En qué se acaba
convirtiendo (piense en el desmayo de John al final de la historia)?

The heroine does not react at all against this figure. Instead, she is diligent and makes
everything she thinks she might to please her husband, even to perform her mood to one
more proper or control her frustration and anguish before him. She accepts without questions
the decisions her of her husband regarding her mental state, even when she disagrees with
him. Unfortunately, this submission leads the heroine to believe that she is really affected by
nervousness she is being treated for, and she eventually ends up mad. People thought that a
woman might be mad if she did not feel delighted with motherhood.

2.- En el relato de Gilman, la “habitación propia” simboliza tanto la represión como la

creatividad. ¿Qué interpretación podemos dar al hecho de que la protagonista, al final de la
historia, se encierre en ella?

According to Virginia Woolf, before the act of writing, a woman must break away with the
submissive figure of “the angel in the house”. In order to do so, a woman needs to find a
private space, both, mentally and physically, for avoiding masculine perspective from her
thoughts in order to reach independence of mind, that allows her write about her own
experiences and feelings. This is what the heroine achieves in this room, therefore, I think that
the she encloses herself in the room because it is the place where she is out of the reach of
paternalism.

3.- El marido de la protagonista es, al tiempo, esposo y médico (es decir, su poder para
controlar el cuerpo y la mente de la mujer es doble). Si relacionamos al personaje masculino
con lo empírico y racional, ¿con qué asociamos a la mujer? ¿Se trata de una simplificación
represora, o este relato proporciona otra lectura del mundo emocional?

The woman is linked to irrationality, superstition and sentimentalism. It is not a mere act of
repression, in my opinion, what the husband felt for her is paternalism. He really thinks that
she needs this retirement. He loves her and want to take care of her, he thinks he is obliged to
do so. In Victorian age, there was the thought that women were less intelligent and capable
than men, thus, women could not take care of themselves nor make any decision, they needed
always men in their back to provide for.

4.- Piense en el modo en que este relato y el poema de Tennyson establecen diálogos con el
mito de la caverna de Platón: las protagonistas no pueden participar de las figuras de la
pared, solo las observan.

If we read these poems under the light of the allegory of the cave from Plato, we can trace
parallelisms. In Tennyson’s, the lady cannot take part of the images she sees in the mirror, but
she takes them as if they were the real world, just like the prisoners. Her fatality, however, is
like that of the prisoner who manages to get out of the cave, to the actual real world and looks
directly to the sunlight. He is condemned to die, as well as the lady, who dies because of a
curse when first looking at Camelot, the reality or the world of ideas, in her context. On the
other hand, in Gilman’s, the heroine choses to stay at the room looking at the walls. She does
not even want to look out of the windows, for she fears what may live out there. In this case,
the heroine reminds me of the prisoners that reject to get out of the cave for they mistrust the
outside world. As Moers maintained, fiction provided female writers a way into the world
ideas, and, according to Spender, women in Victorian age were denied access to the world of
ideas, however, some women react against, as the lady of Shalott, and some other does not
react at all, and stay in the room, as in Gilman’s.

5.- La historia se sustenta sobre elementos binarios (hombre/mujer, razón/locura,

libertad/encarcelamiento, ángel/monstruo, creación/destrucción, etc.). Una de esas
oposiciones es la de lectura/escritura: ¿qué formas de lectura se pueden ver en el relato?
¿Qué diferencias existen entre John como lector y la protagonista como lectora? ¿Qué es lo
que John no puede “leer”?

John and his wife have different form of understanding the reality or of “reading” it. They both
have different perspectives about her disease, and about the house, when they arrive the
heroine feels that the house has something strange and John laughs at her. Furthermore, John
cannot read the wallpaper as his wife does. She can read the pattern and describe it, talk about
the feelings it arises and so. But John laughs at every comment of his wife about it, and he will
never admit being watching it, he is not able to see on it the same his wife does. If we look
again at the allegory of the cave, the wallpaper may stand for the world of emotion and
imagination, as opposite to the world of ideas and intelligibility which is outside. Thus
understood, John resists against acceding this world of emotion, reserved for women, he is
more pragmatic and only sees what is before him. Also, John cannot ‘read’ his wife, he does
not understand what happens to Jane, she is unhappy and is not supposed to be so, because
she has everything a woman should need and still, she is not happy. Therefore, he thinks she is
ill.

6.- Explore el uso de los pronombres en el relato, y cómo crean tensión con el binomio
I/They.

This story is told from the first-person perspective. The narrator uses almost all the time the
pronoun ‘I’. It makes its reading very intense for the reader. It is striking that the narrator does
not use the pronoun ‘we’, save for once, considering that they are married, one could expect
that they use to make decisions in common and so the narrator would use this pronoun. For
me this is a sample of how they both are not united and a sign of their totally opposed
perspectives, and of the way the heroine is disconnected from reality. However, this closeness
with the reader created by the first-person perspective, widens the remoteness to those ones
referred by the pronoun ‘they’. These give the impression of being of another age, something
like an ‘entity’, obscured and shrouded in mystery.

7.- El estilo del relato es evocador de la mente que intenta expresarse y no siempre lo
consigue. ¿Qué aspectos narrativos y estilísticos producen esta sensación? Fíjese en las
interrupciones, las exclamaciones, o el modo fragmentario en que se exponen las ideas.

The author uses fragmented prose to achieve the effect of a disrupted mind. There are short
paragraphs, composed of one sentence in most of the cases; unconnected thoughts,
interruptions, exclamations, hesitations. Everything helps to create this effect of blurring.

8.- Tanto en el poema de Tennyson como en el relato de Gilman, la inestabilidad es un precio

que las protagonistas deben pagar. ¿Qué obtienen a cambio?

The lady gets control over her life, she makes her decisions and take the consequences, for
looking at Camelot, at the real world, reserved for men. On the other hand, Jane gets in
exchange the possibility to create, she writes about her own feeling and experiences in this
room. Both break away with some aspect of the Victorian’s “angel in the house”.

9.- ¿Qué temas comunes encuentra entre el poema de Tennyson y el relato de Gilman?

These two works share some of their main themes, which are among others: madness,
seclusion, female illness, male authority over women, the world of ideas denied to them:
explains the idea present in Victorian age that women were intellectually inferior…

Glosario:

- Angel in the house: figure used to define what a woman was supposed to be in Victorian
society. This figure depicts a woman engaged to domesticity, pleasant and submissive wife,
loving mother, that suppresses her own subjectivity in order to attain an ideal construct, as
Virginia Woolf says “pure”.

- Canon: a set of principles, first established in nineteenth century Britain, that define what is
to be considered ‘great’ literature, namely, a text that communicates truth and that
illuminates moral certainties, leading to a more civilised society.

- Essentialism: the believe that all women share the same qualities/experiences that are
necessarily different from men.

- First / second / third / fourth feminist waves: the stages in what is somehow divided
feminism movement. They correspond to moments on history in which women reacted against
their assumed roles in society.

- Gender in the agenda: aspires to make us aware of how gender stereotypes operate in
writing and reading.

- Gynocriticism: feminist term coined by Elaine Showalter that involved a movement to

celebrate or recuperate writing specifically by women, and a theory that maintained that
women write different from men, pointing to ‘cultural’ differences, such as that women can
share experiences that men cannot. Though this theory could not be refuted.

- Madwoman: feminine figure present in literature pieces that explore the conflict existing
between domesticity and creativity. Given that madness greatly depends on the social and
cultural conditions that define it, these madwomen represent the mismatch consequence of
the resistance against these assumed roles.

- Performance: the skill to ‘perform’ a gendered identity depending on the requirements of the
moment.

- Phallogocentrism: term coined by Lacan meaning the privileging of the masculine ‘word of
truth’ in the construction of meaning.

- Post-feminism: for many, the third wave was the era of post-feminism and backlash.
Although some thought that it was a continuity of the movements existing until that moment,
for others, this post-feminism was interpreted as an admission that feminism was a matter of
the past and that it was over.

- Resisting reader: The Resisting Reader is a study of the American canon Judith Fetterley, who
defends that American literature is based on female readers conscience, however, this
assumption disregards the fact that literature is not universal, yet it is biased by male
perspective. Therefore, this resisting reader may expel “the male mind that has been
implanted on us”.

- Re-vision: a term used by Adrienne Rich for ‘revisiting’ texts that have been forgotten “seeing
with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than
a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in
which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves”.

- Subjectivity: the change in the humanist concept of the individual, with a fixed identity,
proposed the new ‘subject’ whose identity was a social construction, made up of combined
linguistic, cultural and psychoanalytic forces. Subjectivity is embodied in will or desire, and
women were forced to repress this subjectivity on behalf of the “angel in the house”, through
self-sacrifice and devotion for their families. As Woolf stated: “She was intensely sympathetic.
She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of
family life. She sacrificed herself daily […], in short she was so constituted that she never had a
mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of
others. Above all –I need not say—she was pure”.

BLOQUE 2: DE FEMINISMO A FEMINISMOS

Autoevaluación teoría. Capítulo 2: “Gender”

1.- Describa cómo se llega al término “género” desde la primera ola del feminismo.

The suffragist movement that characterised the first wave brought along the figure of the New
Woman, an alternative version of womanhood more independent and freer, which opened the
debate about cultural constructions of, especially, female identity. This ‘New Woman’ rejected
the traditional dressing for women (‘gendered clothing’) and embraced the invention of the
bicycle, which gave women freedom of movement. Thus, the traditional figure of women
(motherliness/domesticity/docility) was challenged and a feminist exploration and theorisation
of women’s status in culture started then. Several writers of the time depicted this ‘New
Woman’ in their work, giving the first literary examples of feminism’s exploration of gender
constructs. Following this first signal of challenging gendered roles, authors such as Virginia
Woolf or Simone de Beauvoir explored the construction of gender years before the term was
defined. De Beauvoir describes the processes by which women are made ‘feminine’, she
asserted in The Second Sex that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. In the
second wave, these ideas contributed to shape the articulation of gender. Ann Oakley’s Sex
and Gender makes a distinction between sex as the anatomical differences between woman
and men, and gender as a set of cultural assumptions and psychological attributes. This
separation of sex and gender allowed women to examine the ways in which specific roles and
behaviours had come to be ascribed to them (mother/housewife/sex object).

2.- Explique lo que quiere decir “Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes” (43).

The reason why gender divides the sexes refers to the constructed roles that have been
imposed to men and women by the society. These roles are defined in a binary structure (i.e.
passive/aggressive), so that, every trait of behaviour that is not manly is therefore womanly.
These roles have been constructed and sanctioned by society; thus, they have been imposed
on every one of us and maintained by imitation and repetition. Therefore, if men and women
were instructed the same since infancy, they will not show any difference in adulthood
regarding gender.

3.- Según las autoras, ¿qué papel desempeña la maternidad en la exploración del concepto
de género emprendida por la segunda ola del feminismo?

According Riley and Pearce, motherhood was “a central tenet of second wave politics” for it
was a tool that served to maintain the differences between the sexes. Women were obliged by
physiology to bear children and obliged by society to raise them, and second wave feminism
intended to challenge the assumption that women ought to raise the children just because
they bore them. Furthermore, since motherhood was interlinked with women’s role of
housewife, it was doubly constraining to them.

4.- ¿Qué “triada “de roles sociales apuntan las autoras como objetos de debate de la
segunda ola del feminismo, en cuanto a la construcción de una feminidad aceptable?

The roles ascribed to women that were shown as both desirable and normative, were mainly
three: ‘mother’, women ought to bear children and then ought to be mainly responsible for
raising them, they were expected to be loving and self-sacrifice; ‘housewife’, the image
showed by the contemporary media represented an idealisation of the housewife, i.e. loving
and submissive, happy of her way of life; and ‘sex object’, but never subject. Regarding sex
attitudes, women were constrained to one of two sexual categories- the active, desiring
‘whore’ or the passive, inhibited ‘virgin’.

5.- Una de las consecuencias de la revisión feminista del género es que se revisan también
las formas en que se relacionan los sujetos generizados, hombres y mujeres. En el estudio
del caso 2.1 sobre Herland ¿cómo afecta a los hombres encontrarse con modelos de mujer
desconocidos para ellos?

These three men that unwittingly wander in this woman-only utopian world do not recognise
the inhabitants of Herland as women because they do not resemble the model of women
traditionally accepted. Herland’s inhabitants are desexualised, they wear unshaped dresses
more practical than fashionable, their hair is cropped for the same reason, and the intruders,
who have problems to accommodate this version of femaleness, try to sexualise them in order
to become them a model they could recognise and exert their power over it. This constitutes a
tough critique to the ‘sexual object’ role and shows how this imposed model of sexuality
constrains women’s life.

6.- ¿Por qué cree que Margaret Atwood afirma que leyó a Friedan y de Beauvoir “behind
locked doors” (49)?

In my opinion, Atwood made this assertion because those two writers interrogated the models
of femininity current at the time. Reading their work should be challenging, for the
contemporary society rejected the discussion on the topic. Nevertheless, both imagined
alternatives to the establishment and strongly influenced her exploration of the imposition of
gendered stereotypes.

7.- Explique qué quieren decir Riley y Pearce con lo siguiente: “culture, medicine and
psychology allow only for one choice” (51)?

Since those three entities come from humanist thinking they are only prepared to recognise
one of only two options of gendered identities, male=man/female=woman alongside with their
imposed roles of dressing, behaviour, etc. Western culture categorises its reality in opposite
pairs, which leads to a situation that really constrains and limits the life of many people that
cannot fit in either of both extremes. Furthermore, this assertion relates to heteronormativity,
the set of norms that define masculinity and femininity or what is considered ‘normal’ by
society, which indeed are exclusive and inflexible, so that, every trait of behaviour that is not
manly is therefore womanly, and if the subject is a man, his behaviour turns weird for the rest
of the society.

Reflexión crítica sobre “Three Dreams in a Desert”, Shreiner.

1.- La voz narrativa (“I”) en el relato es neutra, es decir, no sabemos si está narrado por un
hombre o una mujer. Esta neutralidad reforzaría la visión de conjunto (“hand in hand”) con
que finaliza el tercer sueño. En su opinión, si asignamos un género masculino o femenino a
esa voz, ¿leeríamos la historia de forma diferente?

If we assign gender to the narrator it would alter our perception of the story, for we as readers
would expect that it should be narrated by a woman, because of the themes the story
emphasises. However, if we read it under the perspective of a male narrator it should strike us
a man with these fantasies of freedom for women.

2.- ¿Que evoca la imagen de “the brown earth”?

This “brown earth” is dominated by the patriarchal values (the sun), who oppresses this brown
earth with its fierce heat. Because of this oppression, the earth has become so arid that would
not allow growth. Therefore, this dryness claims for a change.

3.- ¿Qué significado le sugiere “the broad band of Inevitable Necessity” con que se sujeta la
subordinación de la mujer?

In my opinion, this image stands for the economic dependence of women, that needed of a
man to provide for them. This financial dependency would end up with the knife of Mechanical
Invention, which may stand for the progress linked to the Industrial Revolution, which
separated the production process from the family house when the economic model shifted
from one based in agriculture to one based in mechanization. Industrialization brought forth
many changes within the model of society, and, by the end of the nineteenth century, it has
become more modern. Among other changes, this progress provided woman of new spaces in
which develop their creative necessities, such as tearooms that allowed women to go alone to
a public place. They made possible the arising of the figure of the New Woman. Therefore, in
this utopian dream, the author explores the idea of industrialization as a means for women’s
liberation and financial independence, by the means of proper work.

4.- La prenda de lencería que viste la mujer (“white garment”) que viste la mujer antes de
cruzar el río, ¿qué le sugiere?

In my opinion, this white garment is a symbol of purity and innocence. Moreover, the garment
has written on it the word ‘Truth’, and “the sun (patriarchy) had not often shone on it”.
However, in order to attain this ‘illumination’, the woman must take off “the mantle of
Ancient-received-opinions” which may mean that she must leave behind the social impositions
on her as a woman to be free and to keep herself untainted or pure.

5.- ¿Por qué cree que la Razón está representada como un hombre? ¿Y el sol?

If we read the story under the light of the allegory of the cave by Plato, in the first dream, both
men and women are looking at the ‘wall’ represented as the desert and are somehow chained
to its sands. Neither of them has reached, here, the world of ideas or ‘reason’, because they
still looking at the sand without questioning their situation. But in the second dream men have
already reached the world of ideas, therefore, it is represented with the figure of a man, old
and wise. He invites the woman to embrace reason as well and move forward to the world of
Freedom with the help of Reason.

On the other hand, the representation of the sun as a man may point to patriarchy. At the
beginning of the story, we know that the “heat beat fiercely”, and at that moment, the
subjects of the dreams are controlled by patriarchal ideas. However, as the dreams become of
more freedom for women and they escape its influence, the sun goes cooling down. But the
narrator let us know that we may not think that the struggle is over, for the sun (he) will arise
again.

6.- Esta historia fue escrita en el punto álgido del darwinismo, que abraza la idea de que se
puede avanzar el futuro a través del pasado y el presente. ¿Qué cambios se observan en la
representación del desierto al final de la narración?

In the first dream, the desert is a great one, and the sand blows about everywhere. There is
any sign of vegetation of any kind. But, when the narrator describes the setting of the second
dream, that corresponds to the present, we early see there has been a change. There’s a
woman that comes out of a desert and finds a river, which stands for a symbol of life, though
this river is not a soft current, it has steep and high banks, very difficult to cross. The desert has
changed to a place less hostile. However, the change turns evident in the third dream, the
future of mankind, where there is no desert anymore but a land where men and women walk
side-by-side, as equals. If we bear in mind Darwinist thinking, every entity tends to evolve to an
improved state, as women’s situation has done; though the ‘great change’ is to come in the
future, which means that we must continue the struggle to make our future the place where
men and women live in harmony and equality.

Reflexión crítica sobre “Girl”, Jamaica Kincaid

1.- ¿Quién cree que recita esta lista de consejos y advertencias a la muchacha? ¿Qué papel
cree que juega esta figura de referencia como espejo y modelo?
It seems to me that the narrator corresponds to a female voice that has authority over the girl,
maybe the person who takes care of her: her mother. The advises and counsels the speaker
gives the girl, remind me of those my mother gave me when I was a little girl. If we assume
that the speaker is the girl’s mother, it is probably that the girl does not question at all the
words of this person because of the authority she projects over her. Therefore, this figure
plays a crucial role in the whole life of the girl, her privileged position gives her authority to
define, represent and interpret, so that the girl will surely trust every word she utters.
Furthermore, given that children always intend to please, the little girl will, if necessary, force
herself to fit well in the model described so to please her mother. Thus, this text points to the
words of de Beauvoir: “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, for the girl is being
instructed/constructed likewise.

2.- ¿Cómo interpreta “don’t feel too bad about giving up”? Explore la idea de sacrificio
implícita en la frase, y compárela con otras renuncias analizadas hasta ahora en las obras
literarias anteriores.

This sentence is uttered while talking about how to love a man and implies a renounce to
romantic love for the sake of the institution of marriage. It also implies a loss of subjectivity,
for this renounce conforms a sacrifice for her, because she may supress her feelings, losing in
the process a part of her own identity. Women’s loss of subjectivity by the means of sacrifice is
frequent in literature. In “The Lady of Shalott” the lady may renounce to have a name and to
see her face in the mirror, this altogether, points to a lack of identity. On the other hand, the
heroine of “The Yellow Paper” renounces to her mental equilibrium in order to develop her
creativity. In “Three Dreams in a Desert”, the female figure of the first dream renounces her
own subjectivity in order to protect the man who stands by her. However, the woman of the
second dream is asked to leave behind a child who was sucking in her breast, which is a sign of
sacrifice, to achieve the Land of Freedom.

3.- A pesar de las admoniciones para convertirse en la mujer adecuada. “Girl” no cae en la
ideología del matrimonio y la maternidad como premios u objetivos de satisfacción. ¿Qué le
sugiere “throw away a child? ¿Le parece que la historia de Kincaid deja espacio para que
actúe el potencial transgresor que encierra la performatividad?

In my opinion, this narrator is not showing the bounties of being housewife and mother, she is
rather explaining a mere procedure to her daughter. It seems that the speaker is familiar with
the way of life she instructs her daughter, but she does not seem very happy with it. The idea
of giving up love if it does not “work” and “throw away a child”, that is, kill your own unborn
child, are a reminder of the situations slave women had to face, they were forced not to love
anything. There is another sentence that points to performativity, at the end, the narrative
voice tells the girl how to spit up in the air, and how to avoid it falls on her. This seems to me
very transgressive to the model of decorum that prevailed the Victorian era. In this way, the
woman explains how to perform to be categorised as a Woman, but she subtlety says the girl
to be herself in the intimacy, when nobody could see her real own. In this sense, the author
points to performativity, every activity the girl is instructed for agree with traditional gendered
roles.

4.- Fíjese en los elementos del texto que sugieren la mirada a la que la chica debe adaptarse
y que va a juzgarla. ¿Existen diferencias entre el espacio público y el privado?

Since the girl is being prepared to ‘discover’ the outside world, her behaviour and manners are
going to be tested by the whole society, but especially she will be judged under the sight of
men and valued by the relations she establishes with them. The way the girl behaves in the
presence of men will define the way the society perceives her, i.e. a lady or a slut. The
narrative voice explains the girl to behave in a particular way, i.e. like a lady, when she is in
public “On Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming”,
but in the intimacy this woman tells the girl how to spit up in the air without anyone noticing,
which was not very decorous. Thus, the author draws differences between the public and the
intimate spheres to illustrate the extent of pressure that society (and men) put into women.

5.- ¿Cómo interpreta “the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread”?

In my opinion, the mother is taking for granted that the girl will become a ‘slut’ after all with
this assumption, for she implies that the girl will be excluded, and that would be a reason for
the baker to keep her afar from the bread. This points to the classification in stereotypes to
which women were ascribed by patriarchy: desire=whore; versus submission=angel. A woman
who showed her desires in public, no matter what kind they were, was considered a slut for
the society. Women were no supposed to have self-conscience, they were not expected to
want anything for themselves, thus, showing desire deemed deviated for the others.

6.- Como ya se ha indicado, la identidad es performativa y por ello no tiene un origen ya que
toda identidad es repetición de otra(s) ad infinitum. En su opinión, ¿refleja “Girl” esta
repetición?

The speaker gives instructions to the girl for ‘becoming’ a woman. These instructions cover
almost any aspect of what means to be a woman, and it is obvious that the narrative voice,
who is a female voice, has previously received the same instructions told by a female
authoritative figure during her childhood. Therefore, the text reflects that identity is
performative and does not have an origin, it is a repetition of something learned from an
authoritative figure that is trained the whole life.

7.- La muchacha debe aprender cuestiones referentes a las labores de campo, asumidas por
las mujeres de raza negra en el contexto colonial que produce “Girl”. Reflexione sobre el
modo en que las expectativas de género se entrelazan con las de raza y clase.

The first feminist movement was started by white middle-class women, in order to claim for
the rights of white middle-class women. Thus, feminism disregarded women who were
different regarding their social class or race, and whose life was even tougher due to their
belonging to a minority. Afro-American women first claimed for being included in the feminist
struggle, and being recognised as women as well, thus, they highlighted the need of giving up
this tendency to assimilation and of changing the category ‘Woman’ to one more flexible and
inclusive. As a conclusion, women from minorities face multi-layered discrimination: for being
a woman, for belonging to a minority considered inferior by many, for being poor…

Autoevaluación teoría. Capítulo 3: “Body/Image”

1.- ¿A qué se refiere Naomi Wolf cuando compara el cuerpo femenino con una prisión (60)?

Since Victorian era, the ideal of feminine body has changed. When women where in the
privacy of their homes, they could enjoy the fullness of their bodies, and a curvaceous body
was desirable. However, when women came into the outside world, this socially constructed
ideal was imposed on women, and turned towards thinness, control and tailoring, save for the
bust, which was expected to be huge. Furthermore, at the end of the twentieth century, when
Wolf published this assertion, women’s ideal weight was revised even downwards, thus,
making this ‘ideal’ unattainable and turning female body into a prison. A woman that aimed to
be accepted in this male dominated world, might try to adjust her body in order to fit in this
ideal to be recognised as a woman, losing her subjectivity just because the society does not
recognise the plurality of the female body. As a conclusion, the loss of subjectivity is compared
to be imprisoned.

2.- Explique qué quieren decir las autoras con “the white bias of the construction of the ideal
body type” (61)

The image of the ideal body type is reinforced by popular culture, i.e. media, advertising, etc.
This popular culture is traditionally linked to Western culture, and the image of women it
promotes is a uniform image of the female body, disregarding women which were different
because of race, age, gender identities or disability. This idealisation of the female body is
Caucasian, and therefore White, because it has been formulated by they who have the power
and influence enough to do so, namely, White men.

3.- Comente de qué formas la eliminación del vello corporal femenino es un acomodo al
género normativo.

The removal of hair from the female body is a relatively new addition to the ‘ideal’ of female
beauty, when in 1915 Gillete launched into the market a new razor for women. This decision
came from an office, probably from a man, and impacted on million women’s life, because
shaving armpit, leg and pubis hair rapidly became the norm. Years after, German Greer
analysed this tendency, and concluded that this new rule of the female ideal had to do with
the relation between ‘masculinity’ and sexuality and the latter’s association with animalistic
imagery, therefore, women must get rid of the hair of their bodies because it represented the
‘masculine’ sexuality they were not allowed to. It is also a way of returning to an appearance
of pubescence or pre-pubescence, because the adult body turns into one infantilised,
emphasising weakness, which leads to inequality in their relation to men and causes a
disempowerment of women while reinforcing the concept of passivity in woman/man
relations.

4.- Según las autoras, ¿cómo se conjuga la discriminación por sexo con la de la edad (sexismo
y edadismo) cuando hablamos de un cuerpo femenino ideal?

The image of the ‘ideal’ female body is highly exclusive, it does not represent women of any
minority group, including old women. It is difficult to find an image of a desirable beauty of
more than forty-five years in advertising or the media. This exclusion is a way of silencing the
voices of these women, which actually represent the majority of the female population. Even
nowadays, older women are represented as undesirable, problematic or tragic; they are still
undergoing discrimination.

5.- ¿Cuáles son las consecuencias de que las mujeres se vean “perpetually represented as
sexes bodies”?

The representation of the ideal body type is linked to women’s sexual objectification.
However, it was not until the era of the so called ‘free love’ that women unwrapped their
bodies particularly in the images of a new consumerism (i.e. the media, advertising and
popular culture) that has dominated cultural discourse. This mainstream representation
showed the female body reduced to its sexual parts. This sexed ideal of the female body has an
enormous influence on how women perceive and represent themselves. Since they see
themselves represented as sexed bodies, they cannot avoid represent themselves in these
terms and shape their bodies accordingly. The consequence of this situation is that women feel
that their worth lays only in their sexual assets, leading to many young women to construct
their identities under this sexualised imagery, covered by a (false) sense of empowerment and
sexual emancipation. Because of their new-born sexuality, women expose themselves to
brutality and abuse, because the society is not prepared yet to women’s real liberation.

6.- ¿Qué peligros encierra la expresión sexual de la mujer?

As long as the female body is represented as a sexual ideal, women’s assertive sexuality will be
not displayed in terms of equality. Thus, this quest for empowerment through sexual
emancipation is still defined by the values and ideologies profoundly misogynist of a sexist
consumer culture that even plays a role in directing women’s ‘freedoms’. Although this seems
a liberation for women, they are still less powerful than men, so that, women must play their
‘games’, whereas neglecting in claiming real equality.

Reflexión crítica sobre “The New Dress”, Woolf.

1.- Mabel se siente “like a dressmaker’s dummie”. Los maniquíes de costura, además de
objetos estáticos, no suelen tener cabeza. ¿Qué evoca la imagen?

The image of the beheaded dummy evokes a lack of identity. In my opinion, Mabel feels she
has lost her own identity because she does not recognise herself anymore in this dress. She
feels an alien in her own body, which causes a dislocation between selfhood and embodiment,
that is, what she sees in the mirror does not correspond with the way the others see her,
causing insecurity and anxiety in Mabel, who changes the way she looks at herself.

2.- ¿Por qué piensa que Mabel empieza a incomodarse cuando la recibe Mrs. Barnet, la
doncella de Mrs. Dalloway?

The gesture of Mrs. Barnet makes Mabel uneasy because the woman seems to send her a
subtle message when the former holds the mirror while pointing to the varied stuff of the
dressing table. Mrs. Barnet seems to say that Mabel’s appearance is not proper to the party
and the idea of feeling out of place is perhaps what triggers her anxiety. This anxiety may be
caused because she becomes aware that the messages she will send with her appearance will
be perceived awkward by the others. Therefore, she runs to the far end of the room trying to
avoid any sight on her.

3.- Además de las moscas en el plato, vemos que el relato utiliza varias imágenes del mundo
animal. ¿Qué le sugiere el uso de estos vínculos conceptuales?

Mabel likens herself to a fly, however, she cannot see the others likewise, and she compares
them to beautiful insects. This highlight the inferiority that Mabel feels regarding other people,
that represent the society. Also, it is a hint of the alienation she feels. There are other images,
such as the one that compares the social behaviour she observes in the party, to a “row of
cormorants” flapping their wings to get sympathy or acceptation from the others, pretending
to be rather than being. It is paradoxically that they pretend that love and like others, but
everything is cast in order to get the pretended love of the others. This points to Judith Butler’s
performativity; they all perform a desired role which fits into one accepted by society. Mabel
also compare some of the members of the party with magpies (urracas) when she thinks that
they are laughing at her at the fireplace.
4.- Analice la búsqueda de aprobación que encierra la oración “If he had only said, ‘Mabel,
you are charming to-night! It would have changed her life”. ¿Qué relaciones de poder en
cuanto al género se perciben? ¿Qué dinámicas articula?

Upon the whole, Mabel wants the acceptance of a male member of the party. Since the body
is also a social construct, it is created through discourse. The one who controls discourse has
the authority to comment, judge and represent it. Therefore, Mabel seeks the approbation of
Charles, because the ones who controls discourse about what a woman should look like are
men. We can infer that women shape themselves just to please men, in order to be, thus,
socially accepted. By doing so, Mabel is highlighting her powerless position regarding male
gender. This statement let us see that what the others think about her is more important to
her than her own opinion, thus activating dynamics of self-sacrifice, Mabel renounce her true
self for Charles’s recognition; losing thus her subjectivity and self-esteem, for she disregards
her own opinion of herself, she liked when she looked at Miss Milan’s mirror but this opinion
changed to insecurity and dislike when she looked at the “social” mirror.

5.- De nuevo encontramos la idea del castigo: “an orgy of self-love, which deserved to be
chastised”. Repase todas las expresiones del relato que hacen referencia al dolor, como
“tortures” o “spears”, y que encierran una suerte de violencia simbólica hacia Mabel.

She felt like a dressmaker’s dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into/We are
all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the
phrase as if she were crossing herself,/Pain/agony/and here she was in a corner of Mrs.
Dalloway’s drawing-room, suffering tortures, woken wide awake to reality/she issued out into
the room, as if spears were thrown at her yellow dress from all sides. But instead of looking
fierce or tragic/as if she were a beaten mongrel,/ and not be whipped all round in a second by
coming into a room full of people?”

The loss of self-confidence leads Mabel to think that she is absolutely out of place. The anxiety
she feels when she realises that her outfit is ‘wrong’ turns to agony and physical pain when she
is exposed to the judgement and comments of the other members of the community.

6.- Cuando Mabel ve las imágenes en el espejo, las mujeres son “dots” o “buttons”. ¿Qué le
sugieren estos “reflejos”?

These reflections suggest the inferiority and homogenisation to which women are tide to by
social impositions. The mirror represents the social context; thus, they are mere dots or
buttons when they are reflected in the social mirror.

7.- Según Susan Bordo, “[t]rough these disciplines [diet, makeup and dress] we continue to
memorize on our bodies the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good
enough”. ¿Hasta qué punto le parece que el texto de Woolf se puede leer bajo este prisma?

Glosario.

-Binarios: binary pairs are composed of two opposite elements. Humanist thinking
conceptualises the world in terms of binary pairings that are always structured in terms of
superior/inferior elements i.e. life/death. However, modern criticism deemed binary pairs as
not exclusive but complementary terms, therefore, one cannot exist without the other. Also,
modern criticism focusses its efforts on deconstructing binary pairs, revealing the extent to
which Western culture privileged always the masculine (phallogocentrism).

-Feminismo de la igualdad/diferencia: equality feminism struggles for achieving equality to

what already exists, namely, to men, in every aspect of life. On the other hand, “women-
centred” feminism highlights the singularity of women and struggles for recognition of this
singularity and the addition of them to power structures in the same terms than men. There
are two branches within the women-centred feminism, the modernist, which defends women
as an individual within social and power structures, and assumes that identity is permanent;
and the postmodernist, which puts into question the ontology “Woman”, disregarding
ascribed labels, considering gender identity as mutable and instable, not permanent.

-Feminismo REI (Race/Ethnicity/Imperialism): feminist movement was traditionally a

movement designed for heterosexual white middle-class women. This REI feminism
highlighted this tendency to assimilation and insisted on the need of considering ‘otherness’
(black, Asian, lesbian women...), while unfolding and neutralising gender inequalities within
the society.

-Heteronormatividad: this concept adds heterosexuality to the set of principles that define a
socially accepted behaviour. Thus, men and women are not only told how to dress or talk to
others, but also how and who they might love.

-New woman: the suffragist movement that characterised the first wave brought along the
figure of the New Woman, an alternative version of womanhood more independent and freer,
which opened the debate about cultural constructions of, especially, female identity. This ‘New
Woman’ rejected the traditional dressing for women (‘gendered clothing’) and embraced the
invention of the bicycle, which gave women freedom of movement. Thus, the traditional figure
of women (motherliness/domesticity/docility) was challenged and a feminist exploration and
theorisation of women’s status in culture started then. Several writers of the time depicted
this ‘New Woman’ in their work, giving the first literary examples of feminism’s exploration of
gender constructs.

-Otredad: the concept of ‘otherness’ comes up during the second wave of feminism when
women from minorities (black, Asian or lesbian) started to interrogate feminist movement
because they felt excluded even though they were women as well. Thus ‘otherness’ refers to
the suppressed because of their race or class, the ‘other’ is anyone that is different from the ‘I’.
Queer studies maintain that the subject is mutable and instable and this ‘otherness’ exists
within the subject, constrained in the subconscious.

-Performatividad: according to Butler, performativity is the capacity that everybody has for
‘perform’ an identity in a given moment. Thus, identity is a matter of choice.

-Postmodernismo:

-Queer theory: feminist movement emerged by the end of twentieth century that challenges
the ontologies gender, sex and sexuality. This movement maintains that, along with gender,
sex and sexuality are constructs as well, and so, they are mutable and instable. This movement
also supports the flexibility and fluency of categories related to gendered identities.

-Selfhood/embodiment: the relation between selfhood and embodiment lays in what we see
of ourselves and how we enact what we think we are. Social pressure over women can lead to
a disruption between these two elements, because of the need of acceptance of human
nature.

-Sexo/Género: according to Stoller, sex and gender are not inevitably bound, rather gender is
culturally determined and linked thus to sex. In this sense, sex is the anatomical differences
between men and woman and gender is the set of cultural assumptions and psychological
attributes imposed by society.

BLOQUE 3: FEMINISMO Y POSMODERNISMO

Autoevaluación teoría. Capítulo 4: ”Not straight sex”

1.- Si hablamos de un sujeto (o del lenguaje) mutable, cambiante, incierto, fragmentado,

múltiple y ambiguo ¿desde qué perspectiva feminista nos estamos aproximando a la
cuestión de sujeto?

The feminist approach is the ‘women-centred’ feminism of postmodernism, which widens the
Butlerian approach, for Judith Butler maintains that identity is performative, therefore, the
subject is mutable and unstable. However, Butler based her studies upon previous work from
French feminists such as Cixous or Kristeva, who believed in the ‘subject in process’ from post-
structuralist thinking. Thus, French feminism sustained its theories in the work of Lacan and
Freud within Psychoanalysis.

2.- ¿Le parece posible desde el enfoque teórico del feminismo de la diferencia y el
psicoanálisis hacer la siguiente afirmación: la identidad del sujeto es una identidad sexuada?

It is not possible this assertion within this approach because women-centred and
psychoanalysis feminism defends that the ‘subject’ is not fixed nor stable, but always in
process, in construction. This approach conceptualises gender and sexual identity as ‘fluid’,
and it has demonstrated how we can assume different positions/sexualities at different times.
Therefore, identity cannot be sexed, it is like the subject: mutable, unstable, ambiguous, etc.

3.- ¿Qué hay de esencialismo biológico en el feminismo centrado en la mujer?

Women-centred feminism do not believe in essentialism, it explores alternatives to the pre-

imposed biological identity, namely, a woman in a male body and vice versa. It was Freud who
theorised about biological essentialism by linking the phallic or masculine directly to the penis.

4.- El psicoanálisis rehúye una taxonomía jerárquica de la diferencia, ¿es esta propuesta
potencialmente válida para paliar la fuerte jerarquización que encontramos en el plano
social con respecto al género, al sexo y a la sexualidad?

In my opinion, this might be the starting point on the process of subversion of the hierarchised
and reductively gendered binaries upon which culture was built. Since hetero patriarchy works
to stereotype the sexes and how we think about them, privileging the masculine and negating
the feminine, deconstructing these binaries is the way by which the existing hierarchies could
be challenged or overthrown. By doing so, psychoanalysis exposes and undermines the
structuring principles of phallogocentrism itself.

5.- Desde el psicoanálisis el cuerpo pasa a ser un cuerpo sexuado ¿Qué implicaciones
conlleva este cambio?
During the process of attaining ‘subjectivity’ (Oedipus complex), the subject must repress the
attraction he feels for the mother, in order to avoid castration. However, what has been
repressed is not totally suppressed, for it always remains a trace in the ‘conscious’ which
conforms a part within the identity of the subject, yet, ‘invisible’.

6.- ¿Por qué se habla, dentro del feminismo posmoderno, de lo femenino y no de la mujer?

In postmodernism there is a shift from humanist thinking, that supported the equality
feminism and the ontological category ‘Woman’, with a fixed and stable identity, to the
concept of gender difference. Postmodernist feminism interrogates both, femininity and
masculinity, and focuses on the singularity of women, and the diversity which involves being a
woman. Furthermore, we speak of femininity because the relation between biological sex and
identity is not a one-to-one relation and being biologically a woman does not imply to be
‘feminine’.

Autoevaluación teoría. Capítulo 5: ”Ethnicity”

1.- ¿Cuáles son los intereses principales del discurso feminista poscolonial?

Postcolonial feminism main concern was to admit ‘otherness’ in feminist discourse. It explores
the oppression which the prevailing discourse, that sets whiteness and patriarchy as
normative, exerts in men and women belonging the so-called minorities, considering not only
race, but also ethnicity and imperialism, and analysing its impact in the subject. In order to do
so, this movement struggles for erasing marginality of both men and women from the
normative Western discourse while unfolding and neutralising exiting gender inequalities
within their own culture. It also claims the distinctiveness of every women (and men),
regardless their ethnicity, race, etc., deconstructing universal referents such as the ontological
category ‘Woman’.

2.- ¿Es importante tener en cuenta los condicionantes particulares de las experiencias vitales
de las mujeres a la hora de reivindicar los derechos de la mujer? ¿Podría ilustrar su
argumento con ejemplos de las lecturas que se proponen?

It is extremely important to consider the singularity of women’s lives because BME women
must face distinctive ways of oppression and discrimination from those of white women.
Therefore, postcolonial feminism started to give voice to those women for they to relate their
specific experiences, recovering obscured texts form BME writers.

3.- ¿Podría indicar qué diferencias encontraríamos en alguno de los textos leídos hasta ahora
si los analizamos bajo el prisma de la raza, o de algún otro inherente a las diferencias dentro
del feminismo que se tratan en esta unidad?

4.- ¿Cuáles son las consecuencias de cuestionar la categoría ‘Mujer’ cómo término universal
para todas las mujeres?

The universal category ‘Women’ disregards experiences of women different from white middle
or upper-class women. Thus, by putting into question this referent, are recognised and
admitted other possibilities of womanhood. According to Spivak and bell hooks, women are
diverse, they are not alike and do not need to be so.

Reflexión crítica sobre “To live in the borderlands means you”, Gloria Anzaldúa.
1.- ¿Cuál es el efecto psicológico, según Anzaldúa, de vivir entre varias culturas?

According to Anzaldúa, the effect of belonging to different cultures is that the subject does not
feel attached to any of them. The speaker of the poem feels rejection either from the Anglo
culture and the Mexican. She sees herself as a stranger at home, a contradiction who has no
voice. Consequently, her identity is fragmented but in the process of creating something new.

2.- ¿Qué metáforas emplea la autora para esta situación?

The author confronts binary pairs in order to show the contradictions to which she is
submitted because of her interbreeding. She uses images such as “to put chile in the borscht”
or “speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent”, which emphasises contradiction. The speaker
compares herself with a “battleground where enemies are kin to each other”, and “white
bread, but dead” which suggest that she feels white, but having suppressed part of her identity
she feels somehow dead. Also, the metaphor of the mill that wants to break her apart could
stand for the feelings she has of being fractured, her identity is fragmented by the fact of
belonging to several cultures, but not feeling attachment for none of them. The mill stands for
the homogenising forces of society that cannot not understand her as a conglomerate of
identities and wants them separated.

3.- ¿Cuáles son los beneficios de la ambigüedad cultural?

The benefits of cultural ambiguity are that the subject may have access to more plural
experiences and stories, multiplicity of perspectives, the access to more than one language,
etc. This mix of cultures leads to new situations, that result in a new culture and identity.

4.- ¿Podemos comparar a Anzaldúa con bell hooks o Judith Butler? ¿En qué sentido?

These three authors believe that identity was not fixed and stable but mutable, unstable and
ambiguous. The three of them advocate that identity is composed by multiplicity of
experiences and stories, therefore, identity must be fluid and contradictory. Accordingly, the
only way to achieve progress is to admit this diversity, to thus avoid the limitations and
constraints that white heteronormativity exerts both, into men and women.

Reflexión crítica sobre “A drunk cadet had hit them”, Susan Hampton.

1.- ¿Qué evento acaecido narra el poema? Explique lo que ha pasado en sus propias palabras
brevemente.

The speaker explains what she sees in a noticeboard. There is an announcement of a car-crash
caused by a drunk man that killed two people, and a message to the dead girl from her best-
friends. The speaker eventually ends up chatting with one of the friends of Beck, the dead girl,
who feels confident enough to tell her own story. When Kristin was a girl, she was cheated and
raped frequently by her uncle, he threatened her in order to be silent at it, saying that
otherwise, her little sister will have the same fate. Nevertheless, her mother does not believe
her either, for the uncle, who is her brother, helps them to pay the house where they live.

2.- ¿Quiénes son los hombres que lloran? ¿Qué razón tienen para llorar?

Since crying is something that boys are not supposed to do, I think the author tries to subvert
this imposed norm by giving them the power to grief. Their reaction opposes to that of the
girls, who are ‘numb’, exploring the idea that gendered reactions does not actually depend on
gender, but on the singularity of each person.
3.- ¿Qué motivo encuentra en la narración de tan terrible violación?

In my opinion, what impulses Kristin to tell her story is to break away the silence she has been
keeping during the years, for she now is aware that her silence did not protect her sister from
her uncle either, because he did the same to Odette. Furthermore, she feels comfort and
confident with the speaker; between them, a bond of sympathy and solidarity has grown,
which make it easier for Kristin to tell the whole.

4.- Dentro de las distintas etapas que se han estudiado de la historia del pensamiento
feminista lesbiano ¿dónde ubicaría usted este poema?

I would say that this poem fits within the ideas of Adrienne Rich’s lesbian continuum, for it is
precisely because of a female bond of solidarity and sympathy that Kristin feels strong enough
to tell the terrible things her uncle did to her and her sister when they were children. Their hug
transcends reality to the world of fantasy and bring the Furies forth to fight against alike
samples of male depravity towards women, which can be interpreted as “union made women
stronger and capable of everything”.

Reflexión crítica sobre Beloved, Toni Morrison.

1.- Explique el epígrafe “Sixty millions and more” con que comienza la novela.

Toni Morrison dedicates her novel to all the American slaves that contributed with their lives
to the construction of the American nation. In 1661 King Charles II legalized slave trading, and
it was not until the end of the Civil War that slavery came to be a matter of concern in
America. During these years, there were more than sixty millions of people who were treated
as commodities, beasts, sexual objects, subhuman, etc.

2.- Comente la estructura narrativa de Beloved ¿cómo contribuye la estructura narrativa de

la novela a la narración de la historia de Sethe?

Sethe’s prime objective is to leave behind her past. However, she is somehow a prisoner of it,
she cannot move forward and be happy and most of all, free. The plot of the novel is
structured with constant time shifts. The plot does not follow a chronological order of the
events. We know about Sethe and Sweet Home through the constant flashbacks, memories
and nightmares she and others have throughout the story. There is also information hidden by
the means of foreshadowing devices that unfold and give hints of what is going to happen.

3.- Nos encontramos ante una narrativa de fantasmas en la que el fantasma es el personaje
principal. ¿Cómo funciona esta peculiaridad?

The most central character to the novel is the ghost of a murdered baby, unintended victim of
slavery but totally unaware of it. The author gives her the voice she was taken away, breaking
thus her silence.

4.- Comente los roles genéricos tal y como aparecen en la narrativa.

Gendered roles in this story differ from what is imposed by white heteropatriarchy.
Masculinity and femininity are in constantly construction and deconstruction. Female
characters are not soft and delicate, or weak and submissive; they are clever, brave,
determined, strong, have desires and disregard decorum, as in the scene when Beloved
appears and Sethe needs to pee, which she does “like a horse”. On the other hand, masculinity
is deconstructed, that is, male characters are sentimental and weak, as Paul D says, “a man
ain’t a goddamn ax”. They are not aggressive nor brute, they are irrational and are sometimes
prey of their emotions.

BLOQUE 4: LOS GÉNEROS LITERARIOS DESDE UNA PERSPECTIVA FEMINISTA Y DE GÉNERO

Autoevaluación teoría. Capítulo 7: “Crime”.

1.- ¿Qué géneros de narrativa son antecedentes de la literatura de misterio?

We can trace the origins of crime fiction writing tradition back to the gothic and sensation
novels of the Victorian era. These novels featured highly dramatic stories centred on criminal
conspiracies, secret arrangements and hidden illegitimacies.

2.- Explique lo que quieren decir las autoras con “the female medium is equivalent to the
female detective, and both are counterpoints to the patriarchal structuration of law and
order as male”. (130)

The authors assert that because both, the medium and the detective from both genres are
shown to have control, even mastery, over their environment and over others. Thus, both
characters challenge the patriarchal structuration, for they give power to those who are not
supposed to have it.

3.- ¿Qué quiere decir el término anglosajón “whodunit”?

This term means literally ‘who has done it’, that is, who has committed the crime in a crime
writing. Discovering the murderer, solving thus the crime and restoring the establishment was
the focus during the golden age for crime’s writing. The relevance to gender studies were the
lapse until the crime is resolved, where the alteration of order allows the possibility of offering
models distinctive from that of mainstream culture. Later, the focus shifted towards
“whydunit”, exploring human condition through psychology and psychoanalysis to unfold the
motives of a crime.

4.- Según las autoras, ¿qué cambia en la novela de misterio a partir de la Segunda Guerra
Mundial?

After the Second World War the number of publications decreased until the beginning of the
second wave of feminism. Then, women writers appropriate of the conventions of crime genre
to empower women, putting them into roles unexpected for them such us detectives, private
investigators, etc., instead of being the victims themselves. Also, there was a shift in plotting,
before WWII crime stories dealt with “whodunit”, the object is to solve the crime finding who
committed it; to “whydunit”, where the purpose is to find the motives that lead to commit it.

5.- En el Bloque III hablamos de una literatura posmoderna que toma la diferencia (de clase,
racial, étnica o sexual) como punto de inflexión narratológico. Según el capítulo de Riley y
Pearce ¿cuál es la situación en este punto del género de misterio?

Unfortunately, crime genre heroines have been assimilated to a white, professional, middle-
class woman, often with higher education. It is remarkable the absence of black women
writers, and so, of non-white heroines. However, this situation changed around 1990-2000
with the emergence of the X Press, that promoted the difference and published stories of non-
white men, but also, women writers.
Autoevaluación teoría. Capítulo 8: “Science Fiction”.

1.- ¿Podría mencionar las convenciones más comunes del género de ciencia ficción y
comentar, brevemente, para qué utilizan las mujeres escritoras, desde la segunda ola
feminista, dichas convenciones según Riley y Pierce?

Science fiction conventions appropriated by women were extra-terrestrial life, space and time
travel, cyborg and robotics. These conventions were utilised by women writers, particularly
since the second wave of feminism, to offer new explorations of gender and sexual identity.
Writers such as Ursula Le Guin or Pat Cardigan created an estrangement of everyday life in
order to highlight social and political injustices, and to suggest alternatives to the binary
constriction socially imposed in both, women and men.

2.- ¿En qué sentido se habla de un subgénero de literatura de ciencia ficción feminista?

Since the second wave of feminism, women had appropriated the science fiction genre to
explain and expose the differences and limitations they had to face in everyday life. Women
writers utilised this genre to express feminist concerns and their stories were read by great
numbers of people in both, the UK and the US, to an extent that they constituted a subgenre.

3.- Comente el modo en que aparece la literatura de ciencia ficción en Estados Unidos y
mencione algunas de sus autoras más importantes con algunas obras.

As the development of science, mathematics, and astronomy took place, there was an
emergence of stories exploring the limits of science with writers such as H.G. Wells and Verne
during the Victorian era. However, the first science fiction novel ever written was Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), yet it was not recognised as such until the second wave of
feminism. It is then when the genre emerges in the US, with writers such as Ursula Le Guin
(The Left Hand of Darkness), Pat Cardigan, Joana Russ (The Female Man) and Mage Piercy
(Woman on the Edge of Time).

4.- Comente la literatura de Ursula K. Le Guin con relación a su cuestionamiento de la

división genérica que sustenta el patriarcado.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin explores the nature of gender and its constructedness.
Her story is told from the perspective of a male character from a planet analogue to the Earth,
who is dispatched to another planet whose inhabitants are ambisexual, with no fixed gender
identity. They are androgynous and there is no demarcation of role, status or behaviour
according to sex characteristics. The author shows, through Ai’s incomprehension of their
culture how arbitrary and often absurd our rules of gender and identity are.

5.- Según las autoras, ¿qué aporta Margaret Atwood al género y en qué tradición se entronca
su obra?

According to Riley and Pearce, Margaret Atwood changed the paradigm of science fiction
writings from what is purely fiction and is highly unlikely, to ‘speculative fiction’, or the
depiction of the ‘already-possible’. She explores alternative futures in which everything that
happen is viable or even may have already happened. Atwood portrays dystopian worlds
created out of corporate greed and mis-governance, genetic modification of the natural world,
and ingrained misogyny and hetero-normativity.

6.- ¿Qué ocurre con la ciencia ficción escrita por mujeres a partir de las teorías de Judith
Butler?
Since the beginning of the third wave, the new formulations of gender and sexuality brought
along by Butler, more fluid and complex, led to a decline of the popularity of sci fi. Women
writers moved away from deconstructing gender identities towards the creation of a new kind
of ‘hero/ine’.