Feminist’s Writings : from Themes of Representation and Female Oppression to Sites of

Challenge and Otherness

History has often underestimated the immense contributions of women to domestic, social and
economic life and has neglected the complex life worlds of women. The development and
progress of men from the early stages of civilization which history claims to record is not
necessarily the progress of women but may be read or analyzed as different stages of
patriarchal oppression which is marked by women’s absence . In the major discourses of the
society, women have been absent or silent, and various social or cultural representations of
women are also highly misogynistic or gender biased. Textual representations often highlight
more or less the same andocentric attitudes.

However , some women act to change the way ideas about how gender shapes social
practices” . A close perusal of history reveals that at all times, in various degrees and nuances
women resisted their subordination through oral or textual representation. Steps have been
taken to correct the vision of women by various kinds of re-readings of history that
acknowledge the otherwise devalued ‘feminine’ .

Feminist writings came hand in hand with the feminist movement especially in the western
societies which escalated in three waves :

First Wave Feminism - late 1700s-early 1900's : highlight the inequalities between the
sexes and focuses on the oppression of women in a male dominant society .

Second Wave Feminism - early 1960s-late 1970s: building on more equal working
conditions and challenging the inequality between males and females by becoming more
powerful and focusing on their rights rather than their struggles . Writers like Simone de
Beauvoir (Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949) and Elaine Showalter established the groundwork for
this wave .

Third Wave Feminism - early 1990s-present : third wave feminism borrows from post-
structural and contemporary gender and race theories to expand on marginalized populations'
experiences. Writers like Alice Walker work to "...reconcile it [feminism] with the concerns
of the black community...[and] the survival and wholeness of her people, men and women
both, and for the promotion of dialog and community as well as for the valorization of women
and of all the varieties of work women perform" (Tyson 107).

Elaine Showalter divides feminist criticism into two varieties :

Feminist Critique that studies the representation of women in male texts . It is the political
and polemical reading of male texts and male culture by feminist 6 criticism, and it is
concerned with woman as reader (170). It analyses images and stereotypes of women in
literature, how women are omitted and misconstrued in literary history, and probes into the
expulsion of women writers from the male constructed literary history
Gynocritics that deals with how women represent themselves through their texts. It . is
concerned with “woman as writer with woman as the producer of textual meaning . . .” .The
female creativity, problems of female language, the literary career of a single female writer or
a group of female writers, literary history, studies of particular writers and works come under
the purview of gynocritics ; Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976) is a pioneering work in this
tradition, which makes the first attempt to describe the history of women’s writing. She
classifies three different period of women’s writing--‘Feminine’ (1840-1880) is the period of
imitation of male works and accepted norms of femininity. Womanhood itself was a vocation
during the time and writing was consid ered selfish, unwomanly and unchristian. The second
phase ‘feminist’ (1880-1920) is the period of protest against male centred norms, and the last
is ‘female’ (1920-1960) is a phase of courageous self-exploration.

‘‘Difference which is redefined ; not as male versus female – not as biologically constituted
– but as multiplicity , joyousness , and heterogeneity which is that of textuality itself .
Writing , the production of meaning , becomes the site of both challenge and otherness ;
rather than simply yielsing themes and representation of female oppression . ’’ (Jacobus
2012:12)

Though necessarily working within ‘male’ discourse, women’s writing would work
ceaselessly to deconstruct it: to write what cannot be written . Hence, a language adapted to
women is one that should express what cannot be written by men . It is a language that
redefines difference and that destabilizes binaries between men and women .It is a language
that challenges opposites and show where otherness lies and helps to deconstruct patriarchal
culture and writing s . The themes that used to be about the oppression of women becomes
themes such as women’s quest to find their identities and challenge the circumstances .

Social and cultural discourses of various periods have represented women in such a way that
corroborated the general oppression of women, and women writers of all ages have to
confront this either through assimilating or subverting it. The concept of women writers itself
negates the accepted notion of Western European societies that femininity and creativity will
not go together . In The Second Sex (1949), Simone De Beauvoir remarks that the woman is
a social construct. So women are invariably exhorted to be women, remain women, and
become women. This reveals the social conception that not every female human being is
necessarily a woman. Only those women who obey the norms of femininity are real ‘women’

To conclude , considering the cultural condition where women have been misrepresented or
not represented at all, feminist theory tries to develop a language that fully represents women .
Seemingly taking into consideration the development of women in all fields give the
opportunity for feminist writings to shift from being centered around female’s oppression and
their weak representation in the society to be about Otherness and women’s growth .

Name : Zitouni Amira

 References

BORDO, S. (1996). THE FEMINIST AS OTHER. Metaphilosophy, 27(1/2), 10-27. Retrieved

May 5, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/24439161

Gardiner, J. (1981). On Female Identity and Writing by Women. Critical Inquiry, 8(2), 347-

361. Retrieved May 5, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/1343167

Jacobus , M . (2012) . Women Writing and Writing about Women . Retrieved May 5,2020,
from https://books.google.dz/books?
id=BHP0HhnicuoC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f
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Widowson , P . ( 2003) . Re-Reading English . Retrieved May 5,2020 from

https://books.google.dz/books?
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