Feminist Literary Theory

Feminist literary theory is a complex, dynamic area of study that draws from a wide range of critical theories including psychoanalysis, Marxism, anthropology and structuralism. Feminist theorists celebrate the identity of women, defend their rights and promote women's writings andliterary works as a representation of their experiences. They criticize heterosexuality which, for them, organizes identities and culture in terms of the opposition between man and women.

Most feminist literary theories share several assumptions: They generally agree that male-female gender relations impact all aspects of human social existence by establishing series of binarisms, such as: active/passive, presence/absence, universal/ particular in which the feminilized term occupies the devalued place. Feminists agree that female stereotypes expose women as soft, passive, vulnerable, and domestic made for children care and husband care. And, sometimes, women with ambitions of male dimensions are considered less female. 

According to Cathrine.A.Mackinon, Feminist theory (1982) female gender stereotypes whether manifested in

fiction or in reality are revealed as sexual:

Vulnerability means the appearance/ reality of easy sexual access. Passivity means receptivity and disabled resistance, enforced by physical weakness. Mackinon asserts that socially

femaleness means attractiveness to men, which means sexual attractiveness, which, in turn, means sexual availability on male terms. Women, for her, are defined according to men's perception. For example, "Good girls" are attractive, "Bad girls" are provocative. Gender

socialization: the process through which women identify themselves as sexual beings, internalize a male image of their sexuality and their identity as women.

Women's situation has been also explained as a consequence of biology. Simone de Beauvoir, the second sex (1970) criticizes social meanings with biological determination or what she calls

"anatomical destiny". 

She states that "Her misfortune is to have been biologically destined for the repetition of life when even in her own view life doesn't carry within itself reasons for being, reasons that are more important than life."(p59). Another quotation by Shulamith Firestone, the Dialectic of Sex: the case of Feminist Revolution (1972), considers women's situation as presocial, she states that "unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality; men and women were created different and not equally privileged ...the biological family s an inherently unequal power distinction".

Sexuality then, is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed, embodies it. Women and men are divided by gender n by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes

male sexual dominance and female sexual submission.

Generally, feminist literary criticism exists to counter, resist, and eventually eliminate the traditions and conventions of patriarchy the ideology or belief system which sees as "natural" the dominance and superiority of men over women in both private and public contexts--as it exists in literary, historical, and critical contexts. As we have seen in our discussions of Marxism and ideology, the fact that the goals of feminist criticism are "literary" does not necessarily limit its effects to the arena of "culture" or the academy. If, as in Althusser's theory, the "superstructural" elements of a given society (such as its literature) are needed to "educate" a population to reproduce its present economic relations, feminist literary criticism may be seen to intervene in the process of culture's self-reproduction to make visible the injustices of present relations between men and women, and perhaps, keep them from being reproduced in the future. 

Feminist interventions in literary and literary-critical modes have taken any number of shapes over the past two centuries. While Western literature has (at least since the romantic period) taken

for granted that its reader, writer and critic is male, feminist criticism has shown that male and female readers bring different perspectives to texts and thus (after the notion introduced in readerresponse and strengthened in post-structuralism) "produce" very different interpretations and thus very different "texts"--even in the act of reading.

 Feminist critics have also called attention to unique female literary traditions and modes of reading informed, if not wholly determined by, women's historical oppression in patriarchal society. These traditions may be overt (as in, say, the

actual allusions of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich to a figure such as Emily Dickinson), or covert, legible, for example, only through post-Freudian psychological analyses. In all cases, feminist criticism makes space for and listens to women's voices previously muted or drowned

out by dominant patriarchal literary-critical practices. 

In practice, feminist literary criticism is not limited to texts written and read by women, for its interest is not only how 'women' have been treated in books per se, but how notions of gender

and sexuality, generally, have determined or enforced an inferior place for many different voices of women, of racial and ethnic minorities, and of gay and lesbian writer and readers of literature.

Its target may include stereotypes of any of these groups as seen as inferior from the point of view of an established patriarchal order, or the exclusion of such groups created by such a point

of view (or ideological bias) in literary history. 

There are no "rules"-no "recipe"-to doing feminist criticism. Rather, feminist literary critics may employ, for example, reader-response criticism to present a reading of a text in which female

characters are traditionally ignored, or to reveal how the text itself (in an Iserian view), seems to "imply" or elicit a feminist reading, or, conversely, how the text seems to beg for a reading that

ignores the full humanity of its female characters. Likewise, a feminist literary critic might deconstruct any text whose chief binary opposition implies a hierarchy in which the masculine

elements are predominant. 

Many recent feminist critics have exposed the patriarchal nature of Freud's psychoanalytic theory, but rather than abandon it altogether they have expanded its models to include and acknowledge, for example, those homoerotic relations between mother and daughter or between female subjects that Freud's theory would ignore or discount as mere "perversions."