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Feminist approaches to literature.

This essay offers a very basic introduction to feminist literary theory, and a compendium of Great Writers Inspire resources that can be approached from a feminist perspective. It provides suggestions for how material on the Great Writers Inspire site can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about feminist approaches to literature. Questions for reflection or discussion are highlighted in the text. Links in the text point to resources in the Great Writers Inspire site. The resources can also be found via the ' Feminist Approaches to Literature' start page . Further material can be found via our library and via the various authors and theme pages.

The Traditions of Feminist Criticism

According to Yale Professor Paul Fry in his lecture The Classical Feminist Tradition from 25:07, there have been several prominent schools of thought in modern feminist literary criticism:

• First Wave Feminism: Men's Treatment of Women In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists' demeaning treatment or marginalisation of female characters. First wave feminist criticism includes books like Marry Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969), and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970). An example of first wave feminist literary analysis would be a critique of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for Petruchio's abuse of Katherina.
• The 'Feminine' Phase - in the feminine phase, female writers tried to adhere to male values, writing as men, and usually did not enter into debate regarding women's place in society. Female writers often employed male pseudonyms during this period.
• The 'Feminist' Phase - in the feminist phase, the central theme of works by female writers was the criticism of the role of women in society and the oppression of women.
• The 'Female' Phase - during the 'female' phase, women writers were no longer trying to prove the legitimacy of a woman's perspective. Rather, it was assumed that the works of a women writer were authentic and valid. The female phase lacked the anger and combative consciousness of the feminist phase.

Do you agree with Showalter's 'phases'? How does your favourite female writer fit into these phases?

Read Jane Eyre with the madwoman thesis in mind. Are there connections between Jane's subversive thoughts and Bertha's appearances in the text? How does it change your view of the novel to consider Bertha as an alter ego for Jane, unencumbered by societal norms? Look closely at Rochester's explanation of the early symptoms of Bertha's madness. How do they differ from his licentious behaviour?

How does Jane Austen fit into French Feminism? She uses very concise language, yet speaks from a woman's perspective with confidence. Can she be placed in Showalter's phases of women's writing?

Dr. Simon Swift of the University of Leeds gives a podcast titled 'How Words, Form, and Structure Create Meaning: Women and Writing' that uses the works of Virginia Woolf and Silvia Plath to analyse the form and structural aspects of texts to ask whether or not women writers have a voice inherently different from that of men (podcast part 1 and part 2 ).

In Professor Deborah Cameron's podcast English and Gender , Cameron discusses the differences and similarities in use of the English language between men and women.

In another of Professor Paul Fry's podcasts, Queer Theory and Gender Performativity , Fry discusses sexuality, the nature of performing gender (14:53), and gendered reading (46:20).

How do more modern A-level set texts, like those of Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, or Maya Angelou, fit into any of these traditions of criticism?

Depictions of Women by Men

Students could begin approaching Great Writers Inspire by considering the range of women depicted in early English literature: from Chaucer's bawdy 'Wife of Bath' in The Canterbury Tales to Spenser's interminably pure Una in The Faerie Queene .

How might the reign of Queen Elizabeth I have dictated the way Elizabethan writers were permitted to present women? How did each male poet handle the challenge of depicting women?

By 1610 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl presented at The Fortune a play based on the life of Mary Firth. The heroine was a man playing a woman dressed as a man. In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on The Roaring Girl , Smith breaks down both the gender issues of the play and of the real life accusations against Mary Frith.

In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi , a frequent A-level set text, Smith discusses Webster's treatment of female autonomy. Placing Middleton or Webster's female characters against those of Shakespeare could be brought to bear on A-level Paper 4 on Drama or Paper 5 on Shakespeare and other pre-20th Century Texts.

Smith's podcast on The Comedy of Errors from 11:21 alludes to the valuation of Elizabethan comedy as a commentary on gender and sexuality, and how The Comedy of Errors at first seems to defy this tradition.

What are the differences between depictions of women written by male and female novelists?

Students can compare the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë or Jane Austen with, for example, Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles or D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or Women in Love .

How do Lawrence's sexually charged novels compare with what Emma Smith said about Webster's treatment of women's sexuality in The Duchess of Malfi ?

Dr. Abigail Williams' podcast on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing-Room discusses the ways in which Swift uses and complicates contemporary stereotypes about the vanity of women.

Rise of the Woman Writer

With the movement from Renaissance to Restoration theatre, the depiction of women on stage changed dramatically, in no small part because women could portray women for the first time. Dr. Abigail Williams' adapted lecture, Behn and the Restoration Theatre , discusses Behn's use and abuse of the woman on stage.

What were the feminist advantages and disadvantages to women's introduction to the stage?

The essay Who is Aphra Behn? addresses the transformation of Behn into a feminist icon by later writers, especially Bloomsbury Group member Virginia Woolf in her novella/essay A Room of One's Own .

How might Woolf's description and analysis of Behn indicate her own feminist agenda?

Behn created an obstacle for later women writers in that her scandalous life did little to undermine the perception that women writing for money were little better than whores.

In what position did that place chaste female novelists like Frances Burney or Jane Austen ?

To what extent was the perception of women and the literary vogue for female heroines impacted by Samuel Richardson's Pamela ? Students could examine a passage from Pamela and evaluate Richardson's success and failures, and look for his influence in novels with which they are more familiar, like those of Austen or the Brontë sisters.

In Dr. Catherine's Brown's podcast on Eliot's Reception History , Dr. Brown discusses feminist criticism of Eliot's novels. In the podcast Genre and Justice , she discusses Eliot's use of women as scapegoats to illustrate the injustice of the distribution of happiness in Victorian England.

Professor Sir Richard Evans' Gresham College lecture The Victorians: Gender and Sexuality can provide crucial background for any study of women in Victorian literature.

Women Writers and Class

Can women's financial and social plights be separated? How do Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë bring to bear financial concerns regarding literature depicting women in the 18th and 19th century?

How did class barriers affect the work of 18th century kitchen maid and poet Mary Leapor ?

Listen to the podcast by Yale's Professor Paul Fry titled "The Classical Feminist Tradition" . At 9:20, Fry questions whether or not any novel can be evaluated without consideration of financial and class concerns, and to what extent Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own suggests a female novelist can only create successful work if she is of independent means.

What are the different problems faced by a wealthy character like Austen's Emma , as opposed to a poor character like Brontë's Jane Eyre ?

Also see sections on the following writers:

• Jane Austen
• Charlotte Brontë
• George Eliot
• Thomas Hardy
• D.H. Lawrence
• Mary Leapor
• Thomas Middleton
• Katherine Mansfield
• Olive Schreiner
• William Shakespeare
• John Webster
• Virginina Woolf

If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: Feminist Approaches to Literature at http://writersinspire.org/content/feminist-approaches-literature by Kate O'Connor, licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK).

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Article contents

Feminist theory.

• Pelagia Goulimari Pelagia Goulimari Department of English, University of Oxford
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.976
• Published online: 19 November 2020

Feminist theory in the 21st century is an enormously diverse field. Mapping its genealogy of multiple intersecting traditions offers a toolkit for 21st-century feminist literary criticism, indeed for literary criticism tout court. Feminist phenomenologists (Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Toril Moi, Miranda Fricker, Pamela Sue Anderson, Sara Ahmed, Alia Al-Saji) have contributed concepts and analyses of situation, lived experience, embodiment, and orientation. African American feminists (Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Hortense J. Spillers, Saidiya V. Hartman) have theorized race, intersectionality, and heterogeneity, particularly differences among women and among black women. Postcolonial feminists (Assia Djebar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Florence Stratton, Saba Mahmood, Jasbir K. Puar) have focused on the subaltern, specificity, and agency. Queer and transgender feminists (Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Susan Stryker) have theorized performativity, resignification, continuous transition, and self-identification. Questions of representation have been central to all traditions of feminist theory.

• continuous transition
• heterogeneity
• intersectionality
• lived experience
• performativity
• resignification
• self-identification
• the subaltern

Mapping 21st-Century Feminist Theory

Feminist theory is a vast, enormously diverse, interdisciplinary field that cuts across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. As a result, this article cannot offer a historical overview or even an exhaustive account of 21st-century feminist theory. But it offers a genealogy and a toolkit for 21st-century feminist criticism. 1 The aim of this article is to outline the questions and issues 21st-century feminist theorists have been addressing; the concepts, figures, and narratives they have been honing; and the practices they have been experimenting with—some inherited, others new. This account of feminist theory will include African American, postcolonial, and Islamic feminists as well as queer and transgender theorists and writers who identify as feminists. While these fields are distinct and while they need to reckon with their respective Eurocentrism, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, or transphobia, this article will focus on their mutual allyship, in spite of continuing tensions. Particularly troubling are feminists who define themselves against queer and transgender theory and activism; by way of response, this article will be highlighting feminist queer theory and transfeminism.

On the one hand, literary criticism is not high on the agenda of many 21st-century feminist theorists. This means that literary critics need to imaginatively transpose feminist concepts to literature. On the other hand, a lot of feminist theorists practice literature; they write in an experimental way that combines academic work, creative writing, and life-writing; they combine narrative and figurative language with concepts and arguments. Contemporary feminist theory offers a powerful mix of experimental writing, big issues, quirky personal accounts, and utopian thinking of a new kind.

Feminists have been combining theory, criticism, and literature; Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Hélène Cixous, and Alice Walker have written across these genres. In African Sexualities: A Reader ( 2011 ), Sylvia Tamale’s decision to place academic scholarship side by side with poems, fiction, life-writing, political declarations, and reports is supported by feminist traditions. 2 Furthermore, the border between feminist theory, literature, and life-writing has been increasingly permeable in the 21st century , hence the centrality of texts in hybrid genres: theory with literary and life-writing elements, literature with meta-literary elements, and so on. Early 21st-century terms such as autofiction and autotheory register the prevalence of the tendency. This is at least partly a question of addressing different audiences—aiming for public engagement and connection with activism outside universities and bypassing the technical jargon of academic feminist theory. Another reason is that feminist theorists, especially those from marginalized groups, have found some of the conventions of academic scholarship objectionable or false—for example, the assumption of a universal, disembodied, or unsituated perspective.

Nevertheless, recent feminist experiments with genre—for example, by Anne Carson, Paul B. Preciado, Maggie Nelson, or Alison Bechdel—nod toward an integral part of women’s writing and feminist writing. 3 Historic experiments in mixed genre, going back to Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s poem-novel Aurora Leigh , include: Virginia Woolf’s critical-theoretical-fictional A Room of One’s Own ; Julia Kristeva’s poetico-theoretical “Stabat Mater”; Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time , oscillating between speculative science fiction and naturalist novel; Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami ; the mix of theory, fiction, and life-writing in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick ; or Qurratulain Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist , hovering between historical fiction and romance. 4

Twenty-first-century feminist theory also tends to be thematically expansive and more than feminist theory narrowly understood, in that it is not only about “women” (those assigned female at birth or socially counted as women or self-identifying as women). It is a mature field that addresses structural injustice, social justice, and the future of the planet. As a result, cross-fertilization with other academic fields abounds. Relatively new academic fields such as feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory—emerging since the 1960s, established in the 1980s, and having initially to cement their distinctiveness and place within the academy—have been increasingly coming together and cross-fertilizing in the 21st century . Distinct feminist perspectives (phenomenological, poststructuralist, African American intersectional, postcolonial, Islamic, queer, transgender) have also been coming together and variously informing 21st-century feminist theory. While this article will introduce these perspectives, it will aim to show that feminist theorists are increasingly difficult to put in a box, and this is a good thing.

Feminist Phenomenology (Beauvoir, Young, Moi, Fricker, Anderson, Ahmed, Al-Saji): Situation, Lived Experience, Embodiment, Orientation

Simone de Beauvoir initiates feminist phenomenology, her existentialism emerging within the broader tradition of phenomenology. While the present account of feminist theory begins with Beauvoir, it is important to acknowledge the continuing influence of older feminists and proto-feminists, as “feminism” only acquired its current ( 20th- and 21st-century ) meaning in the late 19th century , according to the Oxford English Dictionary. See, for example, Christine de Pizan, “Jane Anger,” Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Anne Finch, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Davies, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and Virginia Woolf.

All contemporary feminist theory has been influenced by Beauvoir, in some respect or other. Her famous claim that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” opening volume 2 of The Second Sex ( 1949 ), points to the asymmetrical socialization of men and women. 5 In her philosophical terms, man is the One, the universal, subject, freedom, transcendence, mind, spirit, culture; woman is the Other, the particular, object, situation, immanence, body, flesh, nature. Patriarchy for Beauvoir is a system of binary oppositions, whose terms are mutually exclusive: the One/the Other, the universal/the particular, subject/object, freedom/situation, transcendence/immanence, mind/body, spirit/flesh, culture/nature. Men have been socialized to aim for—indeed to become—the valued terms in each binary opposition (the One, the universal, subject, freedom, transcendence, mind, spirit, culture); while the undesirable terms (the Other, the particular, object, situation, immanence, body, flesh, nature) are projected onto women, who are socialized to become those terms—to become object, for example. Emerging from this system is the illusion of a transhistorical feminine essence or a norm of femininity that misconstrues, disciplines, and oppresses actual, historical women. Women for Beauvoir are an oppressed group, and her aim is their liberation. 6

Beauvoir critiques the social aims and myths of patriarchy, pointing to the pervasiveness of patriarchal myths in philosophy, literature, and culture. But she also critiques the very forms of patriarchy—binary opposition, dualistic thinking, essentialism, universalism, abstraction—while not completely able to free her own analysis from them. Instead of them, Beauvoir advocates attention to concrete situation and close phenomenological description; indeed The Second Sex abounds in vivid and richly detailed descriptions of early 20th-century French women’s lives. Such close attention and description allow her to demonstrate that all humans are, potentially, both subject and object, free and situated, transcendent and immanent, spirit and flesh, hence the ambiguity of the human condition. 7

The philosophy of existentialism and the broader philosophical movement of phenomenology, within which Beauvoir situates her work, claim to offer radical aims and methods. Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon) is committed to the phenomenological description of the particular in order to avoid the abstractions of scientism. It aims to avoid traditional philosophical dualisms such as mind/body. It re-describes human beings not as disembodied minds but as intentional beings engaged with the world, being-in-the-world (Heidegger’s term), situated in a particular time and place; as lived bodies that are centers of perception, action, and lived experience rather than mere objects; and as being-with and being-for others in inter-subjective relationships rather than just subject/object relationships. Human beings immerse themselves in their projects, using the world and their own bodies—with all their acquired skills, competencies, and sedimented habits—as instruments. While these instruments are indispensable to their projects, they are usually unperceived and remain in the background. They are the background against which objects of perception and action objectives come into view. And yet what is backgrounded can always come to the foreground, suddenly and rudely—when the world resists one, when a blunt knife does not cut the bread, when one’s body is in pain or sick and intrudes, interrupting one’s vision and plans. 8

Without minimizing the novelty of Beauvoir’s theorization of patriarchy, the present quick sketch of phenomenology ought to have highlighted its suitability for feminist appropriations. Nevertheless, Sartre, Beauvoir’s closest collaborator, for example, continues to think that one is distinctively human only to the extent that they transcend their situation. This arguably universalizes Sartre’s particular situation as a member of a privileged group determined to be free, while effectively blaming the situation of oppressed groups on their members, blaming the victims for lacking humanity. 9 By contrast, Beauvoir sheds light on women’s social situation and lived experience: men have “far more concrete opportunities” to be effective; women experience the world not as tools for their projects but as resistance to them; their “energy” is “thrown into the world” but “fails to grasp any object”; a woman’s body is not the “pure instrument of her grasp on the world” but painfully objectified and foregrounded. 10 Beauvoir goes on to distinguish between a variety of unequal social situations with different degrees of freedom inherent in them. Yes, on the whole, French men are freer, less constrained than French women. But Beauvoir discusses the “concrete situation” of other groups “kept in a situation of inferiority”—workers, the colonized, African American slaves, her contemporary African Americans, Jews—while explicitly acknowledging that women themselves are socially divided by class and race. 11

Beauvoir outlines impediments to women’s collective and individual liberation and sketches out paths to collective action and to the “independent woman” of the future, placing literature center stage. She claims that women lack the “concrete means” to organize themselves “in opposition” to patriarchy, in that they lack a shared collective space, such as the factory and the racially segregated community for working-class and black struggles, instead living dispersed private lives. 12 While white middle-class women “are in solidarity” with men of their class and race, rather than with working-class and black women, Beauvoir calls for solidarity among women across class and race boundaries. 13 She addresses white middle-class women like herself, who benefit materially from their connection to white middle-class men, asking them to abandon these benefits for the precarious pursuit of women’s solidarity and freedom. To the extent that women lack freedom by virtue of their social situation qua women, they need to claim their freedom in collective “revolt.” 14 Beauvoir’s 1949 call to organized political action was “the movement before the movement,” according to Michèle Le Doeuff. 15

However, Beauvoir also advocates writing literature as a means of liberation for women and considers all her writing—philosophical, literary, life-writing—a form of activism. Beauvoir devotes considerable space to literary criticism throughout The Second Sex . She shows how writers have reproduced patriarchal myths, often unwittingly. 16 But her future-oriented, crucial chapter “The Independent Woman” centers on a discussion of women writers and even addresses women writers. Having sketched out a history of women’s writing, she turns to young writers to offer advice, based on her analysis of women’s “situation.” 17 To overcome women’s socially imposed apprenticeship in “reasonable modesty,” they need to undertake a counter-practice of “abandonment and transcendence,” “pride” and boldness; they need to become “women insurgents” who feel “responsible for the universe.” 18 Her call, “The free woman is just being born” energizes new women writers to live and write freely—and has been answered by many. 19 But this is not triumphalist empty rhetoric; women writers also need to understand the “ambiguity” of the human condition and of truth itself. 20

Iris Marion Young returns to Beauvoir’s description of women’s social situation and lived experience in “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality” ( 1980 ). Young takes Beauvoir’s description as the starting point for her own phenomenology of women’s project-oriented bodily movement in “contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society,” arguing that their movement is inhibited, ambiguous, discontinuous, and ineffective. 21 Women exhibit a form of socially induced dyspraxia. Young contends that women’s movement “exhibits an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings.” 22 Young turns to women’s bodies in their “orientation toward and action upon and within” their surroundings, particularly the “confrontation of the body’s capacities and possibilities with the resistance and malleability of things” when the body “aims to accomplish a definite purpose or task.” 23 It will be remembered that the phenomenological tradition theorizes the human body as a lived body that is the locus of subjectivity, perception, and action, a capable body extending itself into the world rather than a thing; this is especially the case with Merleau-Ponty. Young’s description of the deviation of women’s bodily experience from this norm is a powerful indictment of women’s social situation.

Firstly, Young identifies that women experience their bodies as ambiguously transcendent: both as a “capacity” and as a “ thing ”; both striving to act upon the world and a “burden.” 24 Secondly, they experience an inhibited intentionality: while acting, they hesitate, their “hesitancy” resulting in “wasted motion . . . from the effort of testing and reorientation.” 25 Thirdly, they experience their bodies as discontinuous with the world: rather than extending themselves and acting upon their surroundings, which is the norm, they live their bodies as objects “ positioned in space.” 26 Or rather, the “space that belongs to her and is available to her grasp and manipulation” is experienced as “constricted,” while “the space beyond is not available to her.” 27 In other words, she experiences her surroundings not as at-hand and within-reach for her projects but as out-of-reach. This discontinuity between “aim and capacity to realize” it is the secret of women’s “tentativeness and uncertainty.” 28 Even more ominously, they live the “ever-present possibility” of becoming the “object of another subject’s . . . manipulations.” 29 In the very exercise of bodily freedom—for example, in opening up the “body in free, active, open extension and bold outward-directedness”—women risk “objectification,” Young argues. 30

Young describes the situation of women as one in which they have to learn “actively to hamper” their “movements.” 31 If this has been the norm of genderization in modern Western urban societies, is it still at work and is it lived differently depending on one’s class, race, sexuality, and so on? 32 Similarly with Beauvoir’s theorization of the situation of women: does it continue to be relevant and useful?

The emergence of “sexual difference” feminism or écriture féminine in France in the mid-1970s, with landmark publications by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, brought with it a critique of Beauvoir. 33 In view of the present discussion of Beauvoir, one might argue that Beauvoir’s aim is the abolition of gender. Her horizon is the abolition of gender binarism and an end to the oppression of women. However, in “Equal or Different?” ( 1986 ) Irigaray reads this as a pursuit of equality through women’s adoption of male norms, at a great cost, that of “suppress[ing] sexual difference.” 34 In Irigaray’s eyes, Beauvoir’s work is assimilationist, while her own work is radical—it aims to redefine femininity in positive terms. Irigaray insists on the political autonomy of women’s struggles from other liberation movements and, controversially, the priority of feminism over other movements because of the priority of gender over class, race, and so on. Gender is “the primary and irreducible division.” 35

In 1994 feminist literary critic Toril Moi compares Beauvoir to Irigaray and Frantz Fanon, one of the founders of postcolonial theory. Like Fanon who redefined blackness positively and viewed anticolonial struggles as autonomous, Irigaray aims to redefine femininity and mobilize it autonomously, while Beauvoir failed to “grasp the progressive potential of ‘femininity’ as a political discourse” and also “vastly underestimated the potential political impact of an independent woman’s movement.” 36 However, Moi sides with Beauvoir against Irigaray and other “sexual difference” feminists, when comparing their aims. Beauvoir’s ultimate aim is the disappearance of gender, while difference feminists “focus on women’s difference, often without regard for other social movements,” claiming that “women’s interests are best served by the establishment of an enduring regime of sexual difference.” 37

Aiming toward the disappearance of gender does not mean blinding oneself to the situation and lived experience of women. In a 2009 piece on women writers, literature, and feminist theory, Moi turns to Beauvoir to analyze the social situation of women writers. Importantly, Beauvoir focuses on what happens “ once somebody has been taken to be a woman ”—the woman in question might or might not be assigned female at birth and might or might not identify as a woman. 38 While the body of someone taken to be a man is viewed as a “direct and normal connection with the world” that he “apprehends objectively,” the body of someone taken to be a woman is viewed as “weighed down by everything specific to it: an obstacle, a prison.” 39 Concomitantly, male writers and their perspectives and concerns are associated with universality—women writers associated with biased particularity. But if women writers adopt male perspectives and concerns to lay claim to universality, they are alienated from their own lived experience. This is how a “sexist (or racist) society” forces “women and blacks, and other raced minorities, to ‘eliminate’ their gendered (or raced) subjectivity” and “masquerade as some kind of generic universal human being, in ways that devalue their actual experiences as embodied human beings in the world.” 40 All too often women writers have declared “I am not a woman writer,” but this has to be understood as a “ defensive speech act”: a “ response ” to those who have tried to use her gender “against her.” 41

In 2001 feminist philosopher and Beauvoir scholar Michèle Le Doeuff announces a renaissance in Beauvoir studies, in her keynote for the Ninth International Simone de Beauvoir Conference: “It is no longer possible to claim, in the light of a certain New French Feminism, that Beauvoir is obsolete.” 42 She prioritizes the need for scholarship on the conflicts between Sartre and Beauvoir, with a view to making the case for Beauvoir’s originality as a philosopher, in spite of Beauvoir’s self-identification as a writer and reluctance to clash with Sartre philosophically.

Feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker returns more than once to the question of whether Beauvoir is a philosopher or a writer. In 2003 Fricker locates Beauvoir’s originality in her understanding of ambiguity and argues that life-writing has been the medium most suited to her thought, focusing on Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life ( La Force de l’age , 1960 ). 43 Beauvoir found in the institution of philosophy, as she experienced it, a pathological, obsessional attitude—a demand for abstract theorizing that divorces thinkers from their situation to lend their thought universal applicability. This imperious, sovereign role was seriously at odds with Beauvoir’s sense of reality, history, and the self. For Beauvoir, reality is “full of ambiguities, baffling, and impenetrable” and history a violent shock to the self: “History burst over me, and I dissolved into fragments . . . scattered over the four quarters of the globe, linked by every nerve in me to each and every other individual.” 44 Beauvoir uses narrative, particularly life-writing, to connect with her past selves but also to appeal to the reader: “self-knowledge is impossible, and the best one can hope for is self-revelation” to the reader. 45 Fricker claims that Beauvoir primarily addresses female readers; and Beauvoir’s alliance-building with her readers—her “feminist commitment to female solidarity”—promises to bring out, through the reader, “the ‘unity’ to that ‘scattered, broken’ object that is her life.” 46

An example of the role of the reader is Fricker’s 2007 reading of Beauvoir’s under-written account of an early epistemic clash with Sartre. 47 Beauvoir’s first-person narrative voice doesn’t quite say that Sartre undermined her as a knower, but Fricker interprets this incident as an epistemic attack by Sartre that Beauvoir had the resilience to survive, and which contributed to her self-identification as a writer rather than a philosopher. Here the violence of history and the institution of philosophy take very concrete, embodied, intimate form. But the incident also serves as a springboard for Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice and its two forms: testimonial injustice, and hermeneutical injustice and lacunas. For Fricker, Sartre in this instance does Beauvoir a “testimonial injustice” in that he erodes her confidence and her credibility as a knower. 48 This process might also be “ongoing” and involve “persistent petty intellectual underminings.” 49 Hermeneutical (or interpretive) injustice, on the other hand, has to do with a gap in collective interpretative resources, where a name should be to describe a social experience. 50 For example, the relatively recent term “sexual harassment” has described a social experience where previously there was a hermeneutic lacuna, according to Fricker. Such lacunas are often due to the systemic epistemic marginalization of some groups, and any progress (for example, in adopting a proposed new term) is contingent upon a “virtuous hearer” who will try to listen without prejudice but also requires systemic change. 51 In George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss Maggie Tulliver suffers both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. 52

This article will now turn to feminist phenomenology within queer theory and critical race theory. Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology ( 2006 ), offers not a phenomenology of queerness but rather a phenomenological account of heteronormativity as well as a feminist queer critique of phenomenology. In an important reversal of perspective, Ahmed denaturalizes being straight—denaturalizes heteronormativity—by asking: how does one become straight? This is not simply a matter of sexual orientation and choice of love-object. Rather heteronormativity is itself “something that we are oriented around, even if it disappears from view”; “bodies become straight by ‘lining up’” with normative “lines that are already given.” 53 Being straight is “an effect of being ‘in line.’” 54 Unlike earlier phenomenologists such as Heidegger, what is usually being backgrounded and thus invisible is a naturalized system that Ahmed hopes to foreground and bring “into view”: heteronormativity. 55 Ahmed thus extends Beauvoir’s and Young’s analyses of the systematic oppression and incapacitation of women, respectively. 56 Ahmed puts Young’s language to use in order to talk about lesbian lives: heteronormativity “puts some things in reach and others out of reach,” in a manner that incapacitates lesbian lives. Ahmed searches for a different form of sociality, “a space in which the lesbian body can extend itself , as a body that gets near other bodies.” 57 Her critique of even the most promising phenomenologists is that in their work “the straight world is already in place” as an invisible background. 58

Ahmed extends her analysis of the production of heteronormativity to the production of whiteness in “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” ( 2007 ), asking: how does one become white? Ahmed thus furthers her critique of phenomenology from within. Phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty define the body as “successful,” as “‘able’ to extend itself (through objects) in order to act on and in the world,” as a body that “‘can do’ by flowing into space.” 59 However, far from this being a universal experience, it is the experience of a “bodily form of privilege” from which many groups are excluded. 60 Ahmed does not here acknowledge Young’s analysis of women’s socially induced dyspraxia but turns instead to Fanon’s “phenomenology of ‘being stopped.’” 61 Ahmed calls “discomfort” the social experience of being impeded and goes on to outline its critical potential in “bringing what is in the background, what gets over-looked” back into view. 62 More than a negative feeling, discomfort has the exhilarating potential of opening up a whole world that was previously obscured. 63 Ahmed’s subsequent work has focused on institutional critique, especially of universities in their continuing failure to become inclusive, hospitable spaces for certain groups, in spite of their managerial language of diversity. 64

Where Ahmed calls for critical and transformative “discomfort,” Alia Al-Saji calls for a critical and transformative “hesitation” in “A Phenomenology of Hesitation” ( 2014 ). Al-Saji’s concept of hesitation revises the work of Beauvoir and Young and enlarges their focus on gender to include race. Beauvoir’s analysis of patriarchy as a system that projects and naturalizes fixed, oppositional, hierarchical identities is redeployed toward a “race-critical and feminist” project, though Al-Saji does not acknowledge Beauvoir explicitly but credits Fanon’s work. 65 The systematic and “socially pathological othering” of fluid, relational, contextual, contingent differences into rigid, frozen, naturalized hierarchies remains “hidden from view.” 66 Experience, affect, and vision, in their pathological form, are closed and rigid; in their healthy form, they have a “creative and critical potential . . . to hesitate”—they are ambiguous, open, fluid, responsive, receptive, dynamic, changing, improvisational, self-critical. 67 Al-Saji argues that the “paralyzing hesitation” analyzed by Young can be “mined” to extract a critical hesitation, as Young’s own work exemplifies. 68 By contrast, the “normative ‘I can’ – posited as human but in fact correlated to white, male bodies”—rigidly “excludes other ways of seeing and acting”; it is “objectifying – racializing and sexist[,] . . . reifying and othering .” 69 The alternative to both thoughtless action and paralyzing inaction is: “ acting hesitantly ” and responsively. 70

Feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson’s last writings on “vulnerability” build on Michèle Le Doeuff’s critique of unexamined myths and narratives underlying the Western “imaginary.” One values and strives for invulnerability and equates vulnerability with exposure to violence and suffering. One projects vulnerability onto “the vulnerable” to disavow their own vulnerability: “a dark social imaginary continues to stigmatize those needing to be cared for as a drain on an economy, carefully separating ‘the cared for’ from those who are thought to be ‘in control’ of their lives and of the world.” 71 Furthermore, members of privileged groups often exhibit a “wilful ignorance” of systemic forms of social vulnerability and social injustice. 72 But Anderson also outlines “ethical” vulnerability as a capability for a transformative and life-enhancing openness to others and mutual affection—occasioned by ontological vulnerability. Ethical vulnerability is envisaged as a project where reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, concepts, arguments, myths and narrative all have a role to play, while also needing to be reimagined and rethought.

African American Feminisms (Morrison, Lorde, Walker, Spillers, Hartman): Race, Intersectionality, Differences among Women and among Black Women

African American and postcolonial feminists have struggled to create space for themselves, caught between a predominantly white women’s movement on the one hand, and male-led civil-rights and anticolonial struggles and postcolonial elites on the other hand. They have fought against assumptions that “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men” and that white women are “saving brown women from brown men.” 73 African American and postcolonial writers and thinkers (from Toni Morrison to Chandra Talpade Mohanty) have hesitated to self-identify with a primarily white movement that, they argued powerfully, effectively excluded them in unthinkingly prioritizing the concerns of white, middle-class women. Some have avoided self-identifying as a feminist, self-identifying as a “black woman writer” instead. Alice Walker invented the term “womanism” to signal black feminism. “Intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and other African American feminists to highlight the intersections of gender and race, feminist and antiracist struggles, creating a space between the white women’s movement and the male-led civil-rights movement. 74 Postcolonial feminists (Assia Djebar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty) similarly created a space between Western feminists and male-led anticolonial struggles and postcolonial elites.

African American feminists have been critical of Beauvoir and of the women’s movements of the 1960s. They have been reconstructing oral, written, and activist traditions of black women such as abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs, and modernists Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen—all previously neglected and marginalized. 75 These traditions prioritize: collectivism; the need to critique and resist internalized but unlivable white middle-class norms; waywardness or willfulness rather than individualism; differences among women; difference among black women; and friendship and solidarity among black women across their differences. (By contrast, contemporary white American feminist critics such as Elaine Showalter emphasized self-realization and self-actualization. 76 ) African American women writers—rather than literary critics—have led the way, inspired by orators, musicians, and collective oral forms, as critics have acknowledged. 77

Toni Morrison, as a self-identified black woman writer, announces these strategic priorities in her first novel, The Bluest Eye ( 1970 ). 78 In The Bluest Eye she revises Beauvoir’s analysis of patriarchy as a binary opposition—man/woman—that projects onto “woman” what men disown in themselves. She examines a related binary opposition: white, light-skinned, middle-class, beautiful, proper lady vs. dark-skinned, poor, ugly girl (the racialized opposition between angelic and demonic woman). The first novel to focus on black girls, The Bluest Eye shows the systemic propagation and internalization of white norms of beauty and femininity, leading to hierarchical oppositions between black and white girls as well as between black girls (light-skinned middle-class Maureen, solidly working-class Claudia and Frieda, and precariously poor Pecola). The projection, by everyone, of all ugliness onto poor, dark-skinned Pecola, combined with white norms that are impossible for her, lead to Pecola’s madness. Her attempts at existential affirmation are crushed by the judgment of the world. Pecola’s Bildungsroman turns out naturalist tragedy. However, Claudia, the narrator, develops anagnorisis and shares her increasingly complex critique with the readers.

In “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib” ( 1971 ) Morrison uses Beauvoir’s language to bring attention both to the situation of African American women and to their traditions of resistance. Reminding readers of two segregation-era signs—“White Ladies” and “Black Women”—she asserts that many black women rejected ladylike behavior and “frequently kicked back . . . [O]ut of the profound desolation of her reality” the black woman “may very well have invented herself.” 79 Black women have been working and heading single-parent households in a hostile world. If ladies are all “softness, helplessness and modesty,” black women have been “tough, capable, independent and immodest.” 80

Audre Lorde explores similar themes. Her poem, “Who Said It Was Simple” ( 1973 ) illustrates the hierarchy between white “ladies,” in their feminist struggle for self-realization, and black “girls” on whose work they rely. Sister Outsider , Lorde’s essays and speeches from 1976 to 1984 , theorizes intersections of race, sexuality, class, and age that are particularly binding and threatening for black lesbian women. 81 White feminists are ignorant of racism and wrongly assume their concerns to be universally shared by all women, thus replicating the patriarchal elevation of men to the universal analyzed by Beauvoir; they need to drop the “pretense to a homogeneity of experience,” educate themselves about black women, read their work, and listen. 82 In “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” delivered during a Beauvoir conference, Lorde argues that Beauvoir’s call to know “the genuine conditions of our lives” must include racism and homophobia. 83 Black men misdirect their anger for the racism they encounter toward black women, who, paid less and more socially devalued, are easy targets. Falsely equating anti-sexist with anti-Black, black men are hostile to black feminists and especially lesbians; so black men’s sexism is different from the sexism of privileged white men analyzed by Beauvoir. 84 Black women have also been hostile toward each other, due to internalized racism and sexism, projected toward the most marginalized among them; identifying with their oppressors, black women suffer a “misnaming” and “distortion” in their understanding of their situation. 85

But Lorde also exalts traditions of black women’s solidarity across their differences. Once differences among women and among black women are properly understood and named, they can be creative and generative. To achieve this, she extols recording, examining, and naming one’s experience, perceptions, and feelings, as a path to clarity, precision, and illumination, leading to concepts and theories but also to empowerment. Anger, unlike hatred, is potentially both full of information and generative. 86 Affect, more broadly, can be a path to understanding, as affect and rationality are not mutually exclusive: “I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy.” 87 Particularly innovative is Lorde’s theorization of the “erotic.” In contrast to the pornographic, the erotic is a power intrinsically connected to (and cutting across) love, friendship, self-connection, joy, the spiritual, creativity, work, collaboration, and the political—especially among black women. 88 But relations of interdependence and mutuality among women are only possible in a context of non-hierarchical differences among equals and peers, Lorde stresses repeatedly. 89

Alice Walker attends to many of these themes in Color Purple ( 1982 ). 90 In her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose ( 1983 ), she pays tribute to black women’s traditions of resistance, due to which “womanish” connotes “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.” 91 Her term “womanism” honors these collectivist traditions and their commitment to the “survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” 92 But she also calls for the reconstruction of a written tradition of forgotten black women writers, resurrecting Zora Neale Hurston from oblivion in “Looking for Zora,” initially published in Ms . magazine in 1975 . 93

In 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination established the enforced privatization and entrapped idleness of 19th-century white middle-class women. 94 In 1987 Hortense J. Spillers powerfully added that this was made possible by the enforced hard labor of black women, as house or field slaves and later as domestic servants who often headed single-parent households. 95 Furthermore, the gender polarization within the white middle-class family was accompanied by the ungendering of African American slaves, who were not allowed to marry and raise their children, and the structural rape of black women. In the late 1980s Crenshaw and Collins formally introduced the concept of intersectionality, though intersectionality-like ideas—that the black woman is the “mule uh de world”—have been a part of black women’s thought for a long time. 96

“Slavery and gender” has been a core topic since the 1980s, with publications such as Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death ( 1982 ), Toni Morrison’s Beloved ( 1987 ) and Playing in the Dark ( 1992 ), and Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection ( 1997 ). 97 Hartman’s abiding topic has been a lost history of black girls and women that can only partially be retrieved and that requires new methodologies. Archives and official records are full of gaps, systematically “dissimulate the extreme violence” of slavery, and “disavow the pain” and “deny the sorrow” of slaves. 98 Even while reading them “against the grain,” Hartman underlines the “ impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved.” 99 In Lose Your Mother ( 2006 ) Hartman’s concept of the “afterlife of slavery” describes the persistence of “devalued” and “imperiled” black lives, racialized violence, “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.” 100 In “Venus in Two Acts” ( 2008 ), Hartman defines her method as “critical fabulation”: mixing critical use of archival research, theorization, and multiple speculative narratives, in an experimental writing that acknowledges its own failure and refuses “to fill in the gaps” to “provide closure.” 101 This writing is:

straining against the limits of the archive . . . and . . . enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration . . . [in order] to displace the . . . authorized account, . . . to imagine what might have happened[,] . . . to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity[,] . . . to illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierarchy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices. 102

In “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner” ( 2018 ) Hartman returns to “critical fabulation” and offers a “speculative history” of Esther Brown, her friends, and their life in Harlem around 1917 . 103 Their experiments in “free love and free motherhood” were criminalized as “Loitering. Riotous and Disorderly. Solicitation. Violation of the Tenement House Law. . . . Vagrancy.” 104 Questions such as “ Is this man your husband? Where is the father of your child ?”—meant to detect the “likelihood” of their “future criminality” and moral depravity—might render them “three years confined at Bedford and . . . entangled with the criminal justice system and under state surveillance for a decade.” 105 In official records, these measures were narrated as rescuing, reforming, and rehabilitating, therapeutic interventions for the benefit of young black women.

Reading such records against the grain, Hartman tells the story of a “ revolution in a minor key ”: of “ too fast girls and surplus women and whores ” as “social visionaries, radical thinkers, and innovators.” 106 Their “wild and wayward” collective experiments, at the beginning of the 20th century , were building on centuries of black women’s “mutual aid societies” conducted “in stealth.” 107 Their aspiration has been “singularity and freedom”—not the “individuality and sovereignty” coveted by white liberal feminists. 108

Hartman’s work emerges out of African American feminist traditions but also out of postcolonial feminists, whose work pays particular attention to impossibility, failure, aporia, and the limits of representing the subaltern, as well as the heterogeneity and specificity of women’s agency.

Postcolonial Feminisms (Djebar, Spivak, Mohanty, Stratton, Mahmood, Puar): The Subaltern, Specificity, Agency

Colonized women had to contend not only with the “imbalances of their relations with their own men but also the baroque and violent array of hierarchical rules and restrictions that structured their new relations with imperial men and women.” 109 Furthermore, they were central to powerful orientalist fantasies that rendered their actual lives invisible. The relation of colonized land to colonizer was figured as that of a nubile, sexually available woman waiting for her lover, as in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines where the map of the land centers around “Sheba’s Breasts” and “Mouth of treasure cave.” 110 Algerian writer Assia Djebar exposes this colonial fantasy in Fantasia ( 1985 ). 111 The city of Algiers is seen by the arriving colonizers as a virginal bride waiting for her groom to possess her. She is an “Impregnable City” that “sheds her veils,” as if this was “mutual love at first sight” and “the invaders were coming as lovers!” 112 The Victorian patriarchal, hierarchical nuclear family, ruled by a benign and loving husband and father, was key to the colonial “civilizing mission” because it was the perfect metaphor for the relation between colonizer and colonized in colonial ideology. 113 However, in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment ( 1980 ; mirroring the title of Eugène Delacroix’s orientalist paintings) Djebar reminds her readers that women took part in large numbers in the Algerian anticolonial struggle and suffered torture, rape, and loss of life, but that their contribution was marginalized in post-independence narratives, while they were expected to return to a patriarchal mold ostensibly for the good of the new nation. 114 By contrast, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment foregrounds Algerian women’s heterogeneity but also the intergenerational transmission of their socially repressed, traumatic history, which cannot be fully recovered—hence the self-conscious aporia of Djebar’s project.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” ( 1983 , 1988 , 1999 ) is a subtle theorization of what remains outside colonial, anticolonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, and even “liberal multiculturalist” elites and discourses. 115 Spivak’s starting point is the unpresentability of the “subaltern” (those most marginalized and excluded). The subaltern exceeds any representation treating it as a full identity with a fixed meaning. The subaltern is an inaccessible social unconscious that can only be ethically presented in its unpresentability—fleetingly visible in fragments.

Rather than documenting “subaltern” resistance in its “taxonomic” difference from the elite and rather than assuming that political forces are self-conscious and already constituted identities, Spivak assumes that political identities are being constituted through political action. 116 Many subaltern groups are highly articulate about their aims and their relations to elites and other subaltern groups, but Spivak understands the “subaltern” as singular acts of resistance that are “irretrievably heterogeneous” in relation to constituted identities. 117 Rather than asking for the recognition of “subjugated” and previously “disqualified” forms of knowledge, Spivak is intent on acknowledging her privileged positionality and insists that what she calls the “subaltern” is irretrievably silenced; the “subaltern” is what escapes—or is excluded from—any discourse. 118

Spivak’s heterogeneous subaltern is a (Derridean) singularity that cannot be translated fully or repeated exactly but can only be repeated differently. 119 The singularity in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is Talu’s suicide, as retold by Spivak. Spivak interprets it as a complex political intervention, by a young middle-class woman activist, that remained illegible as such. Entrusted with a political assassination in the context of the struggle for Indian independence, Spivak claims that Talu’s suicide was a complex refusal to do her mission without betraying the cause. Talu questioned anticolonial nationalism, sati suicide, and female “imprisonment” in heteronormativity, but her “Speech Act was refused” by everyone because it resisted translation into established discourses. 120 Spivak iterates Talu’s singularity differently: as a postcolonial feminist heroine. She does not present her version of Talu’s story as restoring speech to the subaltern. Speech acts are addressed to others and completed by others; they involve “distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception.” 121 To claim that Talu has finally spoken through Spivak would be a neocolonial “missionary” claim of saving the subaltern. 122 To avoid this, Spivak self-dramatizes her privileged institutional “positionality” and calls for “unlearning” one’s privilege. 123

Postcolonial feminists have been telling the story of the marginalization of women of color within anticolonial movements, postcolonial states, and within Western feminist movements. In “Three Women’sTexts and a Critique of Imperialism” ( 1985 ), Spivak argues that Gilbert and Gubar, in their reading of Jane Eyre in Madwoman in the Attic , unwittingly reproduce the “axioms of imperialism.” 124 For Spivak, in Jane Eyre Bertha, a dark colonial woman, sets the house on fire and kills herself so that Jane Eyre “can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction”; she is “sacrificed as an insane animal” for her British “sister’s consolidation” in a manner that is exemplary of the “epistemic violence” of imperialism. 125 Gilbert and Gubar fail to see this and only read Jane and Bertha in individual, “psychological terms.” 126 By contrast, Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea ( 1966 ) makes this visible and enables Spivak’s critique. 127 Rhys allows Bertha to tell her story and keeps Bertha’s “humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact.” 128 In “Does the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak articulates the value of postcolonial feminism but refuses to defend it as a redemptive breakthrough. Instead she issues a call for self-reflexivity.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in “Under Western Eyes” ( 1984 ), calls for studies of local collective struggles and for localized theorizing by investigators. 129 The category of “Third World Woman” is an essentialist fabrication reducing the irreducible “heterogeneity” of women in the Third World. 130 Mohanty’s call for specificity is a rejection of white middle-class feminists’ generalizations on “women” and “Third World women” as neocolonial:

Women are constituted as women through the complex interaction between class, culture, religion and other ideological institutions and frameworks. . . . [R]eductive cross-cultural comparisons result in the colonization of the conflicts and contradictions which characterize women of different social classes and cultures. 131

Mohanty is here remarkably close to African American feminists. What is at stake for Mohanty is for groups of marginalized women to represent themselves and to retrieve forms of agency within their own traditions. As she stresses in Feminism without Borders ( 2003 ): the “application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the Third World colonizes and appropriates the pluralities” of their complex location and “robs them of their historical and political agency .” 132

Saba Mahmood, in “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival” ( 2001 ), argues that rather than reading a specific cultural phenomenon through an established conception of agency, agency should be theorized through the specific phenomenon studied. 133 Her target is the Western feminist equation of feminist agency with secularism, resistance, and transgression, which she finds unhelpful when studying the “urban women’s mosque movement that is part of the larger Islamic revival in Cairo.” 134 While in some contexts feminist agency might take the form of “dramatic transgression and defiance,” for these Egyptian women it took the form of active participation and engagement with a religious movement. 135 It would be a neocolonial gesture to understand their involvement as due to “false consciousness” or internalized patriarchy. 136 Mahmood’s “situated analysis” thus endorses plural, local theories and concepts. 137

Florence Stratton focuses on gender in African postcolonial literature and criticism. She analyses the multiplicity of “ways in which women writers have been written out of the African literary tradition.” 138 They have been ignored by critics, marginalized by definitions of the African canon that universalize the tropes and themes of male writers, and silenced by “gender definitions which . . . maintain the status quo of women’s exclusion from public life.” 139 Particularly pernicious has been the “iteration in African men’s writing of the conventional colonial trope of Africa as female.” 140 Stratton discerns a ubiquitous pattern in African postcolonial men’s writing. Women are cast as symbols of the nation, in sexualized or bodily roles: as nubile virgin to be impregnated or as mother (Stratton calls this the “pot of culture” trope); or, alternatively, as degraded prostitute (the “sweep of history” trope). 141 So women are figured either as embodiments of an ostensibly static traditional culture (trope 1) or as passive victims of historical change (trope 2). This is coupled with a male quest narrative, where the male hero and his vision actively transform prostitute into mother Africa. Underlying this is a patriarchal division of active/passive and subject/object, which denies women as artists and citizens and neglects women’s issues (so actual sex work is totally obscured by its metaphorical role). Stratton goes on to show how African women writers have been “initiators” of “dialogue” with African male writers in order to self-authorize their work and make space for it in the African literary canon. 142 Stratton is also critical of white feminists who read African women writers through their own formal and thematic priorities, oblivious to African feminist traditions. 143

Jasbir K. Puar analyses how the “war on terror” and rising Islamophobia in the West, particularly the United States, have coopted feminist and queer struggles. While colonial orientalist fantasies projected sexual license onto the Middle East, 21st-century orientalist fantasies are “Islamophobic constructions” othering Muslims as “homophobic and perverse,” while constructing the West as “‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal.” 144 On the one hand, Muslims are presented as “fundamentalist, patriarchal, and, often even homophobic.” 145 On the other hand, a “rhetoric of sexual modernization” turns American queer bodies into “normative patriot bodies.” 146 This involves the loss of an intersectional perspective and the “fissuring of race from sexuality.” 147 Muslims are seen as only marked by race and “presumptively sexually repressed, perverse, or both,” while Western queers are seen as only marked by sexuality and “presumptively white,” male, and “gender normative.” 148

Queer and Transgender Feminisms (Butler, Halberstam, Stryker): Performativity, Resignification, Continuous Transition, Self-Identification

Queer theory emerged in the period from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, in the midst of the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. 149 Queer theory, as an academic field, can be located at the intersection of poststructuralism (especially the work of Michel Foucault, but also Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze), Francophone feminism from Beauvoir to Irigaray, and African American feminism. Queer theorists have negotiated this genealogy variously; some are predominantly influenced by Foucault, less by feminist thought. The present account will focus on feminist queer theory, especially the work of Judith Butler, and its relation to earlier and subsequent feminist, queer, and transgender thought. As queer theory evolved, postcolonial feminists also became increasingly influential.

In brief, feminist queer theory, while indebted to “sexual difference” feminists such as Irigaray, critiques them through African American feminism. A core theoretical insight of African American feminism is that gender must not be considered on its own or as primary in relation to other social categories and hierarchies. Queer theorists adopt this insight. For queer theorists, sexual orientation is at least as important as gender. Indeed, they contend that what underpins the gender binary (the polarization of two genders) is the institution of “compulsory heterosexuality” or heteronormativity.

Transgender theory emerged in the mid to late 1990s, within the orbit of queer theory but also through its critique. The crux of this critique is that, despite queer theorists’ best intentions, the queer subject is primarily or implicitly white, Western, gender-normative, and cisgender. In attending to sexual orientation, queer theory neglected the spectrum of gender identities and translated issues of gender identification into issues of sexual orientation. Strands of queer activism—for example, figures such as Sylvia Rivera or Stormé DeLarverie in the United States—were marginalized by a politics of respectability led by affluent, white, cisgender queers. 150 This is particularly ironic, given the aspirations invested in the term “queer.”

In queer theory, the term “queer” was intended as an appropriation and resignification of a term of abuse but also as a floating signifier without a fixed meaning or definition and thus open to multiple and changing uses, in keeping with poststructuralist theory. “Queer” has been defined as beyond definition, transgressive, excessive, beyond polar opposites, and exceeding false polarization. So “queer” is both a particular social identity but also exemplary of a potential for openness, fluidity, and transformation in all identities (what poststructuralist theory calls the infinite deferral of the signified). It is important to point out that Spivak defined the “subaltern” and Irigaray the “feminine” in similar terms, also within a poststructuralist frame. A problem with such terms is that, though they are intended to be inclusive, they are exclusive in some of their effects. The chosen term is privileged as the only term that stands for marginality, potential for change, or openness to the past or future. In the process, the privileged term also loses specificity and becomes a metaphor. This is perhaps replicated in some uses of the term “trans” or “trans*,” where once again the term becomes a metaphor for the element of fluidity and openness in all identities.

Retracing one’s steps back to the beginnings of queer theory, while Beauvoir called for equality and the disappearance of gender, “sexual difference” feminists, such as Irigaray and Cixous, called for autonomous women’s struggles and a radical, utopian revisioning of the “feminine” to be performed by their écriture féminine . Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ( 1990 ), one of queer theory’s inaugural texts, questions Irigaray’s utopianism and takes as her starting point Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” 151 Forty years after The Second Sex , Butler contends that societies continue to systematically produce two “discreet and polar genders,” as a prerequisite of heteronormativity; two “[d]iscreet genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary society; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right.” 152 One is produced as a recognizably human individual in their very repetition of genderizing practices, performance of gender norms, and iteration of speech acts that bring about gender and its effect of timeless naturalness. But the performativity and iterability of gender show up the “ imitative structure of gender ” and its historical “ contingency .” 153 In spite of the pervasiveness of genderizing practices and the unavailability of a position outside gender, the very performativity and iterability of gender open up the possibility of repeating it slightly differently. Butler hopes for destabilized and constantly resignified genders: “a fluidity of identities,” “an openness to resignification,” and “proliferating gender configurations.” 154 While gender is a normalizing, disciplinary force, it is possible to engage consciously with gender norms and open them to resignification. However, the success or failure of an attempt at resignification also depends on its audience or addressees and the authority they are prepared to attribute to it.

In the context of feminist theory, Butler’s call for continuous resignification takes the form of resignifying “woman” and “feminism” itself. As part of her “radical democratic” feminist politics, she aims to “release” the term “woman” into a “future of multiple significations.” 155 In resignifying feminism, she writes against those feminists who assume that there is an “ontological specificity to women. . . . In the 1980s, the feminist ‘we’ rightly came under attack by women of color who claimed that the ‘we’ was invariably white.” 156 Not only heterogeneity but contentions among feminists ought to be valued: “the rifts among women over the content” of the term “woman” ought to be “safeguarded and prized.” 157 Furthermore, Butler distrusts the utopianism of those feminists who believe they are “beyond the play of power,” asking instead for self-reflexive recognition of feminists’ inevitable embeddedness in power relations. 158

One of the targets of Butler’s critique is Irigaray. Her nuanced reading of Irigaray in Bodies That Matter defends her from accusations of essentialism but rejects the primacy of sexual difference over other forms of difference—race, class, sexual orientation, and so on—in Irigaray’s work. For example, Butler finds that Irigaray’s alternative mythology of two labial lips touching and being touched by each other is a self-conscious textual “rhetorical strategy” intended to counter established understandings of women’s genitals as a lack, a wound, and so on. 159 Rather than describing an essential sexual difference, Irigaray’s reparative, positive figuration of the two lips is a deliberately improper and catachrestic form of mimicry akin to Butler’s resignification; it is “not itself a natural relation, but a symbolic articulation.” 160 Irigaray distinguishes between the false feminine within gender binaries and a true feminine “excluded in and by such a binary opposition” and appearing “only in catachresis .” 161 The true feminine is an “ excessive feminine” in that it “exceeds its figuration”; its essence is to have no essence, to undermine binary oppositions and their essences, and to exceed conceptuality. 162 Irigaray’s textual practice is intended as the “very operation of the feminine in language.” 163 Butler seems to endorse Irigaray’s purely strategic essentialism. However, it is troubling that Irigaray’s true feminine is a name for all that escapes binary oppositions and social hierarchies.

Butler’s critique of Irigaray is that her exclusive focus on the feminine is an implicitly white, middle-class, heterosexual position attending to the marginalization of women qua women but neglecting other forms of social marginalization. Since Irigaray’s true feminine is “exactly what is excluded” from binary oppositions, it “monopolizes the sphere of exclusion,” resulting in Irigaray’s “constitutive exclusions” of other forms of difference. 164 For Irigaray “the outside is ‘always’ the feminine,” breaking its link to race, class, sexual orientation, and so on. 165 By contrast, Butler embraces intersectionality. Whereas for Irigaray sexual difference is “autonomous” and “more fundamental” than other differences, which are viewed as “ derived from” it, for Butler gender is “articulated through or as other vectors of power.” 166

Butler acknowledges her debt to African American literature and feminist thought, in a rare foray into literary criticism, her close reading of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing . She also pays tribute to feminists of color, such as Chicana feminist Norma Alarcón, who similarly theorized women of color as multiply rather than singly positioned and marginalized. In Passing and in related African American literary criticism by Barbara Christian, Hazel Carby, Deborah McDowell, and others, Butler finds valuable theoretical insights that “ racializing norms ” and gender norms are “articulated through one another.” 167 But these texts also identify the value of solidarity among black women and the many obstacles to this solidarity. Versions of “racial uplift” adhering to the white middle-class nuclear family have been obstructive; they have been “masculine uplift” whose disproportionate “cost . . . for black women” has been the “impossibility of sexual freedom” for them. 168 Larsen’s critique of “racial uplift”—and its promotion of white middle-class gender norms, marriage, nuclear family, and heteronormativity—grasps the interimplication of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. By contrast, Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s Sula uphold the precarious “promise of connection” among black women. 169

If “racial uplift” has been obstructive, Irigaray’s exclusive focus on the feminine is equally obstructive, according to Butler. Irigaray seems to assume that sexual difference is “unmarked by race” and that “whiteness is not a form of racial difference.” 170 By contrast, Larsen highlights historical articulations “of racialized gender, of gendered race, of the sexualization of racial ideals, or the racialization of gender norms.” 171 In Passing Clare passes as white, and Butler’s reading particularly traces the convergence of race and sexuality. Clare’s “risk-taking” takes the dual form of “racial crossing and sexual infidelity” that undermines middle-class norms, questioning both the “sanctity of marriage” and the “clarity of racial demarcations.” 172 Sexual and racial closeting are also interlinked: “the muteness of homosexuality converges in the story with the illegibility of Clare’s blackness.” 173 The word “queering” in Passing is “a term for betraying what ought to remain concealed,” in relation to both race and sexuality. 174

If some early commentators interpreted Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender and her call for gender resignification as a voluntarist, individualist, consumerist lifestyle choice for privileged Westerners, this article has tried to show just how constrained gender resignification is, and how inextricable from other social struggles. In Butler’s more recent work, issues of gender and sexual orientation are situated in interlocking frames of social exclusion and social precarity. Neither gender nor sexual orientation on their own can determine what counts as a human, livable, and grievable life. 175

Susan Stryker, one of the founders of transgender theory, addresses her first publication, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” ( 1994 ), to feminist and queer communities and exposes their exclusion and abjection of the “transgendered subject” as a monster. 176 Through a close reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , she expresses her affinity with Frankenstein’s monster. 177 She criticizes the medical discourse that “produced sex reassignment techniques” for its “deeply conservative attempt to stabilize gendered identity in service of the naturalized heterosexual order” and insists on the disjunction between the “naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve” and the “subjective experience” of this transformation. 178 She rejects the continuing pathologization of the transgendered subject by psychiatrists, with the effect that “the sounds that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed.” 179 Notable here is an emphasis on self-identification and lived experience, which inherits the insights of phenomenological feminists that the body is not an object but a center of perception. To honor this emphasis, Stryker enlists a mixed form that combines criticism, diary entry, poetry, and theory.

Jack Halberstam’s 1998 Female Masculinity is a complex negotiation between feminist theory, queer theory, and the emerging field of transgender theory. While in medical discourse the approved narrative for the authorization of hormones and gender confirmation surgery is that of being in the wrong body and transitioning toward the right body, Halberstam warns that the “metaphor of crossing over and indeed migrating to the right body from the wrong body merely leaves the politics of stable gender identities, and therefore stable gender hierarchies, completely intact.” 180 Indeed he endorses the very “refusal of the dialectic of home and border” in Chicana/o studies and postcolonial studies. 181 Taking a broadly intersectional position, he argues that “alternative masculinities, ultimately, will fail to change existing gender hierarchies to the extent to which they fail to be feminist, antiracist, and queer.” 182

In his 2018 “Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition” of Female Masculinity Halberstam defines “female masculinity” and “the butch” in a manner that bears a family resemblance to Irigaray’s “feminine,” Spivak’s “subaltern,” and queer theory’s “queer.” “Female masculinity” includes “multiple modes of identification and gender assignation” without “stabilizing” their “meanings.” 183 “The butch” is a “placeholder for the unassimilable, for that which remains indefinable or unspeakable within the many identifications that we make and that we claim”; “let the butch stand as all that cannot be absorbed into systems of signification, legitimation, legibility, recognition, and legality.” 184 The butch is “neither cis-gender nor simply transgender” but a “bodily catachresis . . . the rhetorical practice of misnaming something for which there would otherwise be no words.” 185 In Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability ( 2018 ) Halberstam defines trans* in similar terms. In keeping with his commitment to gender identity as “continuous transition,” the term trans* “embraces the nonspecificity of the term ‘trans’ and uses it to open the term up to a shifting set of conditions and possibilities rather than to attach it only to the life narratives of a specific group of people”; the asterisk “keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be.” 186 His 2018 “Theory in the Wild,” co-written with Tavia Nyong’o, folds a “range of concerns” in addition to gender and sexuality—“race, coloniality, ecology, anarchy”—in a language that stretches from academic to creative writing. 187

In “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” ( 2004 ), Susan Stryker launches transgender studies as an academic field “born of the union of sexuality studies and feminism” but distinct from them. The rationale for this autonomization is that “all too often queer remains a code word for ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’” while “transgender phenomena are misapprehended through a lens that privileges sexual orientation.” 188 Transgender studies is intended to disrupt the “privileged . . . narratives that favor sexual identity labels” at the expense of “gender categories.” 189 But Stryker is keen to acknowledge her own Western privilege: transgender studies is “marked by its First World point of origin” and the new field risks reproducing the “power structures of colonialism by subsuming non-Western configurations of personhood into Western constructs of sexuality and gender.” 190

In “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies” ( 2006 ), Stryker continues to argue that, within queer theory, “the entire discussion of ‘gender diversity’” was “subsumed within a discussion of sexual desire—as if the only reason to express gender was to signal the mode of one’s attractions.” 191 While the term transgender “began as a buzzword of the early 1990s,” in the 21st century it is established as the name for a “wide range of phenomena that call attention to the fact that ‘gender,’ as it is lived, embodied, experienced, performed, and encountered, is more complex and varied” than previously thought. 192 As this definition suggests, transgender studies draws on the insights of all the strands of feminist theory discussed in this article—phenomenological, poststructuralist, intersectional, and postcolonial. Stryker reminds readers that, since at least Sojourner Truth, “fighting for representation within the term ‘woman’ has been . . . a part of the feminist tradition,” and “the fight over transgender inclusion within feminism is not significantly different.” 193 As with African American and postcolonial feminisms, transgender theory calls for feminists’ examination of their “exclusionary assumptions.” 194 In turn, transgender theorists need to reckon with the “whiteness” of their academic field and the “First World origin” of the term transgender, as it is being exported globally across “racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic communities.” 195 Arundati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness explores the clash, in India, between the terms of transgender theory—emanating from the United States and disseminated by NGOs, magazines, and other publications—and the terminology, self-understanding, and practices of hijras . 196

Stryker is particularly critical of the modern Western correlation of biological or bodily sex (particularly genital status) and gender identity, where gender is taken to be merely the “representation of an objectively knowable material sex.” 197 Stryker is adamant that “Sex . . . is not the foundation of gender.” 198 Nor is sex as self-evident as it appears to be, in that the different components of sex—chromosomal, anatomical, reproductive, and morphological—do not necessarily line up. (For example, one’s chromosomal status might not line up with their anatomical sex.) This supposedly “objective” correlation is based on the “assumed correlation of a particular” component of “biological sex with a particular,” normative “social gender,” with the result that transgender people (among others) are forever viewed as making “false representations of an underlying material truth.” 199 Many feminist strands have shed light on the correlation of biological sex and “gender normativity,” and Stryker promises that transgender theory will continue to analyze the “operations of systems and institutions that simultaneously produce various possibilities of viable personhood, and eliminate others.” 200 In recognizing diversity beyond “Eurocentric norms,” Stryker notes that “relationships between bodily sex, subjective gender identity, social gender roles, sexual behaviors, and kinship status” have varied greatly. 201 Of central importance to transgender theory is subjective gender identity, which Stryker understands within the tradition of feminist phenomenology.

It is important to distinguish between gender as a social category within social classifications and hierarchies and gender as one’s self-identification and sense of self. Stryker focuses on the latter and connects it to the body, as the “contingent ground of all our knowledge.” 202 The antidote to fake objectivity is the recognition of “embodiment,” “embodied experience,” and “experiential knowledge”; one’s “gendered sense of self” and “lived complexity” of gender are “inalienable.” 203 All voices are embodied and no voice should be allowed to “mask” its “particularities and specificities” under the cloak of “false universality.” 204 It is therefore imperative to either speak from “direct experience” or to represent others “in an ethical fashion.” 205 It is equally vital to include forms of knowledge previously “disqualified as nonconceptual[,] . . . naïve” and “hierarchically inferior.” 206 Once again, Stryker here joins several strands of feminist theory that have practiced formal innovation—for example, in mixing theory, literature, and life-writing—not for its own sake but in the pursuit of truth and justice.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Julie Rak and Jean Wyatt for their suggestions for revision, John Frow for his comments, and Ian Richards-Karamarkovich for his in-house editorial support.

Further Reading

• Ahmed, Sara . Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
• Al-Saji, Alia . “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racialized Habits of Seeing.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment . Edited by Emily S. Lee , 133–172. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.
• Anderson, Pamela Sue . “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance.” In “Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson.” Edited by Pelagia Goulimari . Special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1–2 (February–April 2020): 36–45.
• Beauvoir, Simone de . The Second Sex . Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier . London: Vintage, 2011.
• Butler, Judith . Gender Trouble . London: Routledge, 1990.
• Cixous, Hélène . “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen . Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–893.
• Collins, Patricia Hill . Black Feminist Thought . Rev. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams . “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299.
• Djebar, Assia . Women of Algiers in Their Apartment . Translated by Marjolijn De Jager . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
• Fricker, Miranda . Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Gilbert, Sandra , and Susan Gubar . The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
• Halberstam, Jack . Female Masculinity . 20th anniversary ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
• Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Irigaray, Luce . This Sex Which Is Not One . Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
• Lorde, Audre . Your Silence Will Not Protect You . Preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge , introduction by Sara Ahmed . London: Silver Press, 2017.
• Mahmood, Saba . “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (May 2001): 202–236.
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade . “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2 12–13 (Spring–Autumn 1984): 333–358.
• Moi, Toril . “‘ I Am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today .” Eurozine , June 2009.
• Morrison, Toni . The Bluest Eye . London: Picador, 1990.
• Puar, Jasbir K. “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.” Social Text 23, no. 3–4 (2005): 121–139.
• Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s May Be: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty . “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present , by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , 198–311. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Stratton, Florence . “Periodic Embodiments: A Ubiquitous Trope in African Men’s Writing.” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 111–126.
• Stryker, Susan . “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix.” GLQ 1, no. 3 (1994): 237–254.
• Walker, Alice . In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose . Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.
• Young, Iris Marion . “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.” In On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays , by Iris Marion Young , 27–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

1. See also the companion, complementary piece by Pelagia Goulimari, “Genders,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (March 2020).

2. Sylvia Tamale, ed., African Sexualities: A Reader (Oxford: Pambazuka, 2011).

3. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006); Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012); Anne Carson, Antigonick , ill. Bianca Stone (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2012); Maggie Nelson, Jane: A Murder (London: Zed Books, 2019); Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (London: Melville House, 2016); and Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era , trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013).

4. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Aurora Leigh , new ed., ed. Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin, 2004); Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Poetics Today 6.1–2 (January 1985): 133–152; Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (London: Women’s Press, 2000); Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; A Biomythography (London: Penguin, 2018); Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues: A Novel (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1993); Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2016); and Qurratulain Hyder, Fireflies in the Mist (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2008).

5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex , trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London: Vintage, 2011), 293 .

6. For example, the situation of women is a form of “slavery of half of humanity” and Beauvoir calls for its abolition; Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 782.

7. For example, “every existent [human being] is at once immanence and transcendence,” Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 276; if woman is flesh for man, “man is also flesh for woman; and woman is other than a carnal object” (277); “The same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence, plays itself out in both sexes,” and both sexes should assume the “ambiguity” of their situation (779–780). See also Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity , trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 2015).

8. See further Pelagia Goulimari, Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 2015), ch. 10.

9. See Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc ., trans. Trista Selous (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 60.

10. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 672, 654, 663, 672. This description by Beauvoir is the starting point for Iris Marion Young’s work. Beauvoir adds that, lacking the means to grasp the world, a woman might offer herself as a “gift” (679). Hélène Cixous will return to this offering and reappraise it more positively in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–893.

11. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 4, 12, 15, 654.

12. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 8.

13. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 9.

14. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 680.

15. Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice , 57.

16. See, for example, the section on D. H. Lawrence in Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 236–244.

17. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 767.

18. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 762, 765, 762, 766.

19. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 767. For example, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément echo Beauvoir in their book, The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

20. “[T]ruth itself is ambiguity,” Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 763.

21. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays , by Iris Marion Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27–45, 30.

22. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 35.

23. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 29, 35, 30.

24. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 35–36 (emphasis added).

25. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 37. Alia Al-Saji will adopt Young’s discussion of hesitation to build her own phenomenology of hesitation.

26. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 39 (emphasis added).

27. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 40.

28. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 40–41.

29. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 44.

30. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 45.

31. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 43.

32. For example, Dianne Chisholm claims that Young’s phenomenological description is out of date and no longer relevant. Dianne Chisholm, “Climbing Like a Girl: An Exemplary Adventure in Feminist Phenomenology,” Hypatia 23, no. 1 (January–March 2008): 9–40.

33. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” in This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, by Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 23–33; Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” in This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, by Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 68–85; and Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa.”

34. Luce Irigaray, “Equal or Different?,” trans. David Macey, in The Irigaray Reader , ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 30–33, 32.

35. Irigaray, “Equal or Different?,” 32–33.

36. Toril Moi, “‘Independent Women’ and Narratives of Liberation,” in Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader , ed. Elizabeth Fallaize (London: Routledge, 1998), 72–92, 86.

37. Moi, “Independent Women,” 87–88.

38. Toril Moi, “‘ I Am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today ,” Eurozine (June 2009), 8 (emphasis added).

39. Moi, “I Am Not a Woman Writer,” 6, quoting Beauvoir, translation amended by Moi.

40. Moi, “I Am Not a Woman Writer,” 7.

41. Moi, “I Am Not a Woman Writer,” 7 (emphasis added).

42. Michèle Le Doeuff, “Engaging with Simone de Beauvoir,” in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir , ed. Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 11–19, 12.

43. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life , trans. Peter Green (London: Penguin, 2001).

44. Beauvoir quoted in Miranda Fricker, “Life-Story in Beauvoir’s Memoirs,” in The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir , ed. Claudia Card (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 208–227, 219, 225.

45. Beauvoir quoted in Fricker, “Life-Story,” 223.

46. Fricker, “Life-Story,” 226.

47. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 50–51.

48. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice , 50.

49. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice , 51.

50. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice , 150–152; see also 158–159.

51. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice , 169–175.

52. George Eliot, Mill on the Floss , ed. Gordon Sherman Haight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See Dorota Filipczak, “The Disavowal of the Female ‘Knower’: Reading Literature in the Light of Pamela Sue Anderson’s Project on Vulnerability,” in “Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson,” ed. Pelagia Goulimari, special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1–2 (February–April 2020): 156–164.

53. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 90–91, 23.

54. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology , 66.

55. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology , 87.

56. Ahmed’s work is also informed by Michel Foucault on disciplinary practices producing capable but docile bodies and Pierre Bourdieu on the “habitus” (naturalized socio-cultural habits).

57. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology , 101–102, 105 (emphasis added).

58. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology , 106.

59. Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (August 2007): 149–168, 161.

60. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161.

61. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161.

62. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 163.

63. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 163.

64. See Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

65. Alia Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racialized Habits of Seeing,” in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment , ed. Emily S. Lee (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 133–172, 138 .

66. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 136.

67. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 142.

68. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 155.

69. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 153 (emphasis added).

70. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 154 (emphasis added).

71. Pamela Sue Anderson, “Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion,” in “Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson,” ed. Pelagia Goulimari, special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1–2 (February–April 2020): 46–53, 49 .

72. Pamela Sue Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance,” in “Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson,” ed. Pelagia Goulimari, special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1–2 (February–April 2020): 36–45 .

73. See Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies , 2nd ed. (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2015). See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present , by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 284 .

74. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299 ; and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought , rev. 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000) .

75. See Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?,” in Women in Culture: An Intersectional Anthology for Gender and Women’s Studies , ed. Bonnie Kime Scott et al., 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2017); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism , ed. Frances Smith Foster and Richard Yarborough, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God , introd. Zadie Smith, afterword by Sherley Anne Williams (London: Virago, 2018); and Nella Larsen, Passing , ed. Thadious M. Davis (New York: Penguin, 2003).

76. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing , new ed. (London: Virago, 1999). See further Goulimari, Literary Criticism and Theory , ch. 9.

77. Indeed Barbara Christian argues that black women writers have had to include self-theorizing in their texts, becoming their own critics. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (April 1988): 67–79.

78. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (London: Picador, 1990) .

79. Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction , ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 18–30, 24.

80. Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks,” 18, 19.

81. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2007). Also included in Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You , preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge, introd. Sara Ahmed (London: Silver Press, 2017) .

82. Lorde, Your Silence , 96.

83. Lorde, Your Silence , 113.

84. Lorde, Your Silence , 12.

85. Lorde, Your Silence , 29, and see the chapter “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger.”

86. See “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” in Lorde, Your Silence .

87. Lorde, Your Silence , 78.

88. See “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Lorde, Your Silence .

89. See “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” in Lorde, Your Silence .

90. Alice Walker, Color Purple (London: Women’s Press, 1983).

91. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004) , xi (emphasis added).

92. Walker, In Search , xi (emphasis added).

93. Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose , by Alice Walker (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004), 93–118 .

94. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination , 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000) .

95. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s May Be: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81 .

96. Hurston, Their Eyes , 29.

97. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Picador, 1988); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) .

98. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection , 23, 36.

99. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection , 10 (emphasis added).

100. Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 6.

101. Saidiya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14, 12.

102. Hartman, “Venus,” 11–12.

103. Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 465–490, 470, 486.

104. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 471, 473.

105. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 474, 486 (emphasis added).

106. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 471, 470 (emphasis added).

107. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 469, 466, 471.

108. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 471. See further Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).

109. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (London: Routledge, 1995), 6.

110. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines , ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 2007), 24.

111. Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade , trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Quartet, 1989).

112. Djebar, Fantasia , 6, 8.

113. McClintock, Imperial Leather , 45.

114. Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment , trans. Marjolijn De Jager (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) .

115. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 309. Delivered as a lecture in 1983, it was published in different versions of varying length. This article discusses the version in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) .

116. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 271.

117. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 270.

118. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 267.

119. See Goulimari, Literary Criticism and Theory , ch. 11. See also Hartman on singularity, as discussed in the section “ African American Feminisms (Morrison, Lorde, Walker, Spillers, Hartman): Race, Intersectionality, Differences among Women and among Black Women ” in this article.

120. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 307, 273.

121. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 309.

122. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 310.

123. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 283, 284.

124. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1985): 243–261, 243; and Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre , 3rd ed., ed. Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

125. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 251.

126. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 248.

127. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea , ed. Angela Smith (London: Penguin, 1997).

128. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 249.

129. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 2 12–13 (Spring–Autumn 1984): 333–358 .

130. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 333.

131. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 344.

132. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 39 (emphasis added).

133. Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (May 2001): 202–236 .

134. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory,” 202.

135. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory,” 217.

136. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory,” 205.

137. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory,” 224.

138. Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London: Routledge, 1994), 1.

139. Stratton, Contemporary African Literature , 10.

140. Stratton, Contemporary African Literature , 18.

141. Florence Stratton, “Periodic Embodiments: A Ubiquitous Trope in African Men’s Writing,” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 111–126, 112 .

142. Stratton, Contemporary African Literature , 11.

143. Stratton, Contemporary African Literature , 11.

144. Jasbir K. Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Social Text 23.3–4 (2005): 121–139, 122 (emphasis added).

145. Puar, “Queer Times,” 131.

146. Puar, “Queer Times,” 122, 121.

147. Puar, “Queer Times,” 126.

148. Puar, “Queer Times,” 126.

149. See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire , 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

150. See Eileen Myles, “ The Lady Who Appears to Be a Gentleman ,” Harper’s Magazine , June 2019.

151. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 293.

152. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 140, 139–140.

153. Butler, Gender Trouble , 137 (emphasis added).

154. Butler, Gender Trouble , 138, 141.

155. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange , by Seyla Benhabib, et al. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 35–58, 50–51.

156. Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 49.

157. Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 50.

158. Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 39.

159. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), 38; and Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, by Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 205–218 .

160. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 46 (emphasis added).

161. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 37 (emphasis added).

162. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 39, 41 (emphasis added).

163. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 46.

164. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 37, 42.

165. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 49.

166. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 167 (emphasis added).

167. Nella Larsen, Passing , ed. Thadious M. Davis (New York: Penguin, 2003); and Butler, Bodies That Matter , 182 (emphasis added).

168. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 178.

169. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 183; and Toni Morrison, Sula (London: Picador, 1991).

170. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 181–182.

171. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 182.

172. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 169.

173. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 175.

174. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 176.

175. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); and Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016).

176. Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” GLQ 1, no. 3 (1994): 237–254 , 241. See also 251n2: “transgender” as “an umbrella term that refers to all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, move between, or otherwise queer socially constructed sex/gender boundaries.”

177. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein , 2nd ed., ed. J. Paul Hunter (London: W. W. Norton, 2012).

178. Stryker, “My Words,” 242.

179. Stryker, “My Words,” 244.

180. Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity , 20th anniversary ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 171 .

181. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , 170.

182. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , 173.

183. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , xii.

184. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , xx, xxi.

185. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , xx.

186. Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 95, 52–53, 4.

187. Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o, “Introduction: Theory in the Wild,” in “Wildness,” ed. Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 453–464, 462.

188. Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” GLQ 10, no. 2 (2004): 212–215, 214.

189. Stryker, “Transgender Studies,” 212.

190. Stryker, “Transgender Studies,” 214–215.

191. Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader , ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–18, 1.

192. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 3.

193. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 7.

194. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 7.

195. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 14–15.

196. Arundati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017). On the expression of third-gender and non-normative gender identities in non-Western cultures, see, for example, the Rae-rae (Tahitian trans women), Faʻafafine (Samoan third gender), and Māhū (Polynesian “middle” or third gender).

197. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 8.

198. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 9.

199. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 9.

200. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 13, 3.

201. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 14.

202. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 12.

203. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 12, 13, 10, 7.

204. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 12.

205. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 13.

206. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 13.

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Feminist Literature - Study Guide

Modern Feminist Literature is a genre that's not just for and about women. We offer a suggested framework for teachers and students to better understand its origins, and identify exemplary works by authors who explore themes of gender and identity.

Overview of Feminist Literature , Exemplary Works , Historical Context , Quotes , Discussion Questions , Useful Links , and Notes/Teacher Comments

Overview of Feminist Literature

"My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable ot stand alone." -- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The definitions of Feminist Literature are far-ranging, so we offer more questions than answers. Which authors and works qualify? Can only women be feminists, or are males considered? Do feminists have to hate men or attempt to "get even" by suppressing them? Is it adequate to define the genre as women authors who give voice to their inner struggles, feeling forced to maintain outward appearances, when they would rather satisfy their own needs and wants? Does Feminist Literature have to be "provocative" "controversial" "shocking" "non-judgemental" "unconventional" and "anti-men"? Is it enough for its authors to write great stories featuring strong characters who grip our hearts and minds (and might make us laugh)? Do they have to involve an interesting female twist on a traditional male archetype? Case in point: Luella Miller is a female vampire who inflicts her victims with stifling feminine traits such as dependency and helplessness, also a great example of Gothic Literature .

When did feminist literature become "modern"? Some scholars set the date as works published during or after the 1960s ( Betty Friedan , Gloria Steinem , et al), while others credit Kate Chopin 's The Story of An Hour (1894) for kicking-off the "modern" genre. We concur with the latter. For more insights on this story, we offer The Story of An Hour Study Guide .

Women have always conveyed their philosophies through literary expressions, but with fluctuating levels of influence. A contemporary advocacy organization, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media ( SeeJane.org ) aims to empower women to influence, create, be seen and heard (both in front of and behind the camera), and create positive role models for girls. Have we evolved to the point where we no longer label contemporary work as "Feminist Literature"? Focus on skilled storytelling by authors who deliver interesting, flawed characters, evolving on a road to find their own happiness? While we're at it, perhaps we ditch "literature" in favor of "media."

Note : This introduction to the genre of Modern Feminist Literature is by no means complete. We offer it for our readers' enjoyment to highlight outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction featured at American Literature. Please use the many Useful Links , Quotes , and Discussion Questions to pursue your interest further.

Exemplary Works

The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin . This provocative story may have kicked-off "modern" feminist lit. Here's The Story of An Hour - Study Guide

The Awakening , also by Kate Chopin about a woman's discovery of her own sexual needs and desire for independence, caused Chopin to be ostracized and question her confidence as a writer, shortly after it was published in 1899. (Fortunate for us, she went on to create an incredible canon of masterful short stories).

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft , considered the "mother of feminism" argues in her famous work published in 1792 that women are not inferior to men by nature, but lack education. Reason should be the basis of social order to achieve equality.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a powerful call to change the public's perception about women's rights to make decisions about their own health and medical treatment. She offers a fascinating account of the work's impact in Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper . You may also enjoy reading her collection of Suffrage Songs and Verses .

The Declaration of Sentiments , Seneca Falls Convention, New York (1848) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton articulated the many grievances against women, galvanizing the women's suffrage movement calling for equal rights of women.

A New England Nun by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman , an account of a woman challenging social conventions by embracing her own happiness as a single woman.

Virginia Woolf 's essay, A Room of One's Own (1929) is not yet in the public domain, but we share a summary, considered one of the most influential works of feminist literature. Among many topics including access to education, the four Marys, lesbianism, and women's writing, Woolf discusses the sharp contrast between how women are idealized in fiction written by men versus how they are treated in real life.

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte (published under the pseudonym, Currier Bell) is widely considered a "feminist manifesto."

Historical Context

Feminist literature, both fiction and non-fiction, supports feminist goals for the equal rights of women in their economic, social, civic, and political status relative to men. Literature dealing with the alientation of women living in a patriarchal society dates back to the 15th century with The Tale of Joan of Arc by Christine de Pisan , followed in the 18th century by Mary Wollstonecraft . The field started getting crowded early in the 19th century: Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Charlotte Bronte , Florence Nightingale , Margaret Fuller (who wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845, considered the first major American feminist work), Virginia Woolf , and Elizabeth Perkins Gilman , who advocated for women's health rights. Ida Tarbell pioneered investigative journalism, helped dissolve Standard Oil, and wrote The Business of Being a Woman .

Kate Chopin 's best known novel, The Awakening (1899) and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman 's A New England Nun (1891) led the emerging modern feminist literary movement into the 20th century, during which women earned the right to vote, fought for economic, social, political, educational, and reproductive rights and led to the 1960s and 70s Women's Liberation Movement , led by such authors as with Gloria Steinem .

The 21st century brought women screenwriters and directors, such as Nora Ephron 's ( When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle ), Judy Blume 's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret , and in 2017, a resurgence of interest in Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid's Tale with a new streaming video series . The Women's March After President Trump's Inauguration (2017) drew more than a million protesters in cities throughout America and the world.

It's helpful to know the list of grievances and demands a group of activitists (mostly women) published in The Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. Principal author and first women's conference organizer was Elizabeth Cady Stanton , with high-profile support from abolitionist Frederick Douglass . Many more struggles and attempts to change public opinion followed the conference; it took 72 more years for women to secure the right to vote. Feminism, and the literature which gives it voice, have evolved over time in meaning, intent, and expression across multiple arenas: political, moral, and social, in what's been classified as three "waves." What is the meaning of "Feminism"?

Explain the significance of the following quotes in the context of feminist literature:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." -- The Declaration of Sentiments , Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world." -- The Awakening , Kate Chopin

"Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream." -- A Room of One's Own (summary) , Virginia Woolf

"I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves." -- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , Mary Wollstonecraft

"She was a 'greenhorn' janitress, she was twenty-two and dowryless, and, according to the traditions of her people, condemned to be shelved aside as an unated thing-- a creature of pity and ridicule." "I want a little life! I want a little joy!" -- Wings , Anzia Yezierska

"What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!" -- The Story of An Hour , Kate Chopin

"'Free, free, free!'' The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright." -- The Story of An Hour , Kate Chopin

"I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him." -- The Yellow Wallpaper , Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"...she had fallen into a way of placing [marriage] so far in the future that it was almost equal to placing it over the boundaries of another life." -- A New England Nun , Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

"I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an indepndent will, which I now exert to leave you." -- Jane Eyre , Charlotte Bronte

"I know how things can be—for women. I tell you, it's queer, Mrs Peters. We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing." -- Trifles , Susan Glaspell

"Now, 'women will be women.' Mark the change; Calm motherhood in place of boisterous youth; No warfare now; to manage and arrange, To nurture with wise care, is woman's way, In peace and fruitful industry her sway, In love and truth." -- Suffrage Songs and Verses , Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Discussion Questions

2. Frederick Douglass supported women's suffrage, attended and voted for The Declaration of Sentiments in 1846. After reviewing his writings, can Douglass be considered a contributor to the genre of Feminist Literature? Can you identify other male authors who might qualify for the genre?

5. Read Chopin's allegory about freedom from a cage, her short-short story, Emancipation: A Life Fable . Compare its theme, tone, symbols, and use of irony to modern feminist literature.

7. Florence Nightingale was considered by many to be one of the first feminists in her advocacy to educate women and professionalize the field of nursing; others criticized her for not giving feminism enough voice. Consider her quote, and discuss whether being gender-blind (writing about one's achievements or goals, rather than one's sex) is also a form of feminist literature: "I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse."

8. Read Mary E. Wilkins Freeman 's story, Luella Miller , a fine example of Gothic Literature . It is about a female vampire who is a parasitic host, consuming her victims with her own dependency, helplessness, and fear. Explain whether you consider it a "feminist parable."

9. After reviewing the history of feminism and the genre of literature, do you think "Feminist Literature" is an outdated term for modern works? Cite examples of authors and their works to support your position.

Essay prompt : Pick a contemporary female author, read her biographical profile. How does her personal story reflect in her writing? ( Consider Malala Yousafzai 's I Am Malala , Mary Gaitskill 's Somebody With a Little Hammer , or J.K. Rowling )

Useful Links

Feminist Approaches to Literature , read more about the genre

History of Feminism , an introduction

Kate Chopin's "The Awakening": Searching for Women & Identity

A Feminist Critique of The Yellow Wallpaper

Bronte's Feminist Flair in Jane Eyre : "I will not sell my soul to buy bliss."

The "Trifles" of Feminism (an analysis of Trifles by Susan Glaspell )

The Story of An Hour - Study Guide

Biography and Works by Kate Chopin

Biography and Works by Mary Wollstonecraft

Discussion & Activities: Mary Wollstonecraft Debates Jean-Jacque Rouseau

Biography and Works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Biography and Works by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Biography and Works by Julia Ward Howe

American Literature's biographies of featured Women Writers

Women's Liberation: America in the 1960s and 1970s

Top Ten Most Influential Feminist Books , including Betty Friedan 's The Feminine Mystique

List of Feminist Literature from the 15th to 21st centuries

Notes/Teacher Comments

Visit our Teacher Resources , supporting literacy instruction across all grade levels

American Literature's Study Guides

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › British Literature › Feminist Literary Criticism

Feminist Literary Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 7, 2022

Feminist literary criticism has its origins in the intellectual and political feminist movement. It advocates a critique of maledominated language and performs “resistant” readings of literary texts or histories. Based on the premise that social systems are patriarchal—organized to privilege men—it seeks to trace how such power relations in society are reflected, supported, or questioned by literary texts and expression.

One of the founders of this kind of approach was Virginia Woolf , who showed in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own how women’s material and intellectual deprivation were obstacles to authorship. Woolf illustrated her case with the abortive artistic aspirations of Shakespeare’s fictitious sister Judith. In another essay, “Professions for Women,” Woolf also announced the necessity for women writers to kill the “angel in the house,” taking her cue from Coventry Patmore’s mid-Victorian poem of the same name that glorified a domestic (or domesticated) femininity devoid of any critical spirit.

Another important source of inspiration has been Simone de Beauvoir ’s 1949 The Second Sex . Here de Beauvoir wrote that “one is not born a woman, one becomes one.” De Beauvoir’s point behind her muchquoted comment was that “ ‘woman’ is a cultural construction, rather than a biological one.” As Ruth Robbins notes, this remark is important because it highlights the fact that “the ideas about male and female roles which any given society may have come to regard as natural are not really so and that given that they are not natural they may even be changed” (118). All three texts provided ammunition for the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s and are useful starting points for discussions of short stories that take women and the feminine as central concerns.

The ensuing critical response may best be described as bifurcating into an Anglo-American and a French strand. The former was defined by the greater importance British feminists such as Sheila Rowbotham, Germaine Greer, and Michèle Barrett attached to class. Literary critics working in this school were interested in representations of women in literary texts, an approach most famously encapsulated in Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970)—probably the world’s best-selling doctoral thesis. Groundbreaking as the book turned out to be in reading canonized authors (e.g., Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence) against the grain and in drawing attention to their suffocating (and often misogynist) representations of women, it was also criticized for its insistence on a male conspiracy. There were objections that its readings were too often based on the assumption that literature simply mirrors reality.

Left, Susan Gubar. Right, Sandra M. Gilbert. | Left, Eli Setiya. Right, Peter Basmajian. Via Vox

Subsequent critics sought to redress the gaps in Millet’s book by setting out to discover and reevaluate neglected female writing. Among those mapping this dark continent (in Sigmund Freud’s trope) was Ellen Moers, whose Literary Women (1976) is often seen as pioneering in its attempts to focus on noncanonical women writers such as Mary Shelley. The book has since been criticized on account of its unqualified appraisal of “heroinism,” an appraisal that leaves the concept of the “great writer”—a central category of male literary historiography—intact. One of the terms used by Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own (1977) is “ gynocriticism ,” a term intended to indicate her concern with the history of women as authors. In A Literature of Their Own Showalter posited the idea of a “feminine” period of literary history (1840–80) in which the experiences of women such as the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot—notably their use of male pseudonyms and imitation of male standards—demonstrate the obstacles women writers have tended to face. Showalter then described a second phase (1880–1920) that comprised so-called New Woman writers (e.g., Vernon Lee, George Egeron, Ella D’Arcy) dedicated to protest and minority rights. After 1920, this feminist stage was transcended by a female phase whose major representatives, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf are said to move beyond mimicry or opposition by asserting feminine identities, no matter how fragile or provisional these might be. Their narratives explore allegedly minor yet personally significant, even epiphanic moments and experiment with gender roles including androgyny and homosexuality. Literary texts of this period can also be said to anticipate postmodernist views of gender in their emphasis on the cultural interpretation of the body as distinguished from the physical characteristics that make people male or female.

Further landmarks in the field of feminist research were provided by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (1979) and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985). The Madwoman, runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize in 1980, attributed an “anxiety of authorship” to writers such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot. It also posited the widespread imagery of guilt or rage in texts by 19th-century women writers as part of a specifically female aesthetic—an aesthetic whose distinctness from male writers was emphasized in the canon of women’s literature as established by the 1985 Norton Anthology. Gilbert and Gubar have remained extremely influential, although some critics have questioned the clearcut separatism of their canon (male versus female) on the grounds that it unconsciously validates the implicit patriarchal ideology.

French feminism shifted the focus onto language. Its proponents drew on Freudian models of infant development that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had connected with processes of language acquisition and the construction of sexual difference. Lacan’s disciples Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray started from the premise that a child’s entry into language coincides with the disruption of its dyadic relationship with the mother. Language then reflects a binary logic that works through oppositions such as male/female, nature/culture. This pattern connecting oppression and language tends to group positive qualities with the masculine side. Woman, it is argued, is therefore alienated from linguistic structures and is liable to turn to a different discourse, derived from a preoedipal, “semiotic” period of fusion of mother and child. As so-called écriture feminine , this form of writing disturbs the organizing principles of “symbolic” masculinized language. It dissolves generic boundaries, causal plot, stable perspectives, and meaning in favor of rhythmic and highly allusive writing. Such transgression, though, is not gender-specific but can be performed by anyone—indeed, James Joyce is cited as the major representative of “writing one’s body” on the margins of dominant culture.

Both the French celebration of disruptive textual pleasure and the Anglo-American analysis of textual content have come under attack for their underlying assumption that all women—African slave and European housewife—share the same oppression. Postcolonial feminism, as advanced by Alice Walker, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, took issue with the reductive ways of representing nonwhite women as sexually constrained, uneducated, and in need of being spoken for. They also objected to feminism’s insistence that women needed to reinforce their homogeneity as a sex, because they felt that this thinking demonstrated an ignorance of plurality and in fact perpetuated the very hierarchies on which patriarchy and Western imperialism had thrived.

From today’s perspective, so much has been done to improve female presence that some commentators have suggested that we live in an age of postfeminism . However, there are many who would argue that even in a postfeminist age much needs to be done to highlight the importance of interrogating seemingly natural signs of male/female difference. Critics following Judith Butler have begun to entertain the idea that the very assumption of an innate biological sex might itself be a cultural strategy to justify gender attributes. Whether one accepts this position or not, seeing identities as the embodiments of cultural practices may prompt change. This, in turn, might pave the way for a correspondingly flexible critical approach to identities as things that are entwined with other categories: ethnicity, sexual orientation, social status, health, age, or belief. In this sense, the prefix post- should not be read as meaning after feminism or as suggesting a rejection of feminism; rather, it should suggest a more self-reflexive working on the blind spots of former readings.

Key Ideas of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Post-Feminism: An Essay

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics

Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex

Feminism: An Essay

Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

BIBLIOGRAPHY Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1999. Eagleton, Mary. Working with Feminist Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. London: Routledge, 2001. Hanson, Clare, ed. Re-reading the Short Story. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985. Ruth Robbins, “Feminist Approaches.” in Literary Theories, edited by Julian Wolfreys and William Baker, 103–126. London: Macmillan, 1998. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

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Literary Research: Feminist Theory

What is feminist theory.

"An extension of feminism’s critique of male power and ideology, feminist theory combines elements of other theoretical models such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction to interrogate the role of gender in the writing, interpretation, and dissemination of literary texts. Originally concerned with the politics of women’s authorship and representations of women in literature, feminist theory has recently begun to examine ideas of gender and sexuality across a wide range of disciplines including film studies, geography, and even economics."

Brief Overviews:

• Feminism (Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory)
• Feminism (Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory)
• Feminist Literary Theory (Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion)
• Feminist Theory (Literary Theory Handbook)
• Feminist Theory (Oxford Research Encyclopedias)

Notable Scholars:

Luce Irigaray

• Irigaray, Luce., and Margaret Whitford.  The Irigaray Reader . Basil Blackwell, 1991.
• Irigaray, Luce, and Gillian Gill. Speculum of the Other Woman . Cornell University Press, 1985.
• Irigaray, Luce., and Carolyn Burke. This Sex Which Is Not One . Cornell University Press, 1985.

Julia Kristeva

• Kristeva, Julia, and Toril. Moi. The Kristeva Reader. Basil Blackwell, 1986.
• Kristeva, Julia, et al. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Columbia University Press, 1980.

Kate Millett

• Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics . Doubleday, 1970.

Jennifer Nash

• Nash, Jennifer C. Birthing Black Mothers. Duke University Press, 2021.
• Nash, Jennifer C. The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography . Duke University Press, 2014.
• Nash, Jennifer C. Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality . Duke University Press, 2019.

Christina Sharpe

• Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: In Blackness and Being . Duke University Press, 2016.
• Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects . Duke University Press, 2010.

Elaine Showalter

• Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing .  Princeton University Press, 1999.

Hortense Spillers

• Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture . University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition . Indiana University Press, 1985.

Introductions & Anthologies

Also see other  recent eBooks discussing or using feminist theory in literature and scholar-recommended sources on Julia Kristeva  and Luce Irigaray via Oxford Bibliographies.

Definition from: " Feminist Theory ." Glossary of Poetic Terms. Poetry Foundation.(24 July 2023)

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Cambridge University Press 9780521852555 - A History of Feminist Literary Criticism - Edited by Gill Plain and Susan Sellers Excerpt

Introduction

Gill Plain and Susan Sellers

The impact of feminism on literary criticism over the past thirty-five years has been profound and wide-ranging. It has transformed the academic study of literary texts, fundamentally altering the canon of what is taught and setting a new agenda for analysis, as well as radically influencing the parallel processes of publishing, reviewing and literary reception. A host of related disciplines have been affected by feminist literary enquiry, including linguistics, philosophy, history, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, film and media studies, cultural studies, musicology, geography, economics and law.

Why is it, then, that the term feminist continues to provoke such ambivalent responses? It is as if the very success of the feminist project has resulted in a curious case of amnesia, as women within and without the academy forget the debt they owe to a critical and political project that undid the hegemony of universal man. The result of this amnesia is a tension in contemporary criticism between the power of feminism and its increasing spectrality. Journalists and commentators write of ‘post-feminism’, as if to suggest that the need to challenge patriarchal power or to analyse the complexities of gendered subjectivities had suddenly gone away, and as if texts were no longer the products of material realities in which bodies are shaped and categorised not only by gender, but by class, race, religion and sexuality. This is not a ‘post-feminist’ history that marks the passing of an era, but rather a ‘still-feminist’ one that aims to explore exactly what feminist criticism has done and is doing from the medieval era to the present. It is a history that both records and appraises, examining the impact of ideas in their original contexts and their ongoing significance for a new generation of students and researchers. Above all, A History of Feminist Literary Criticism regards the feminist critical project as a vital dimension of literary studies, and it aims to provide an accessible introduction to this vast and vibrant field.

DEFINING FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

Feminist literary criticism properly begins in the aftermath of ‘second-wave’ feminism, the term usually given to the emergence of women’s movements in the United States and Europe during the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s. Clearly, though, a feminist literary criticism did not emerge fully formed from this moment. Rather, its eventual self-conscious expression was the culmination of centuries of women’s writing, of women writing about women writing, and of women – and men – writing about women’s minds, bodies, art and ideas. Woman, as Virginia Woolf observes in A Room of One’s Own , her formative text of feminist literary criticism, is ‘the most discussed animal in the universe’ (1929/1977: 27). 1 Whether misogynist or emancipatory, the speculation excited by the concept of woman, let alone by actual women and their desires, created a rich history upon which second-wave feminism could be built. From the beginning feminist literary criticism was keen to uncover its own origins, seeking to establish traditions of women’s writing and early ‘feminist’ thought to counter the unquestioning acceptance of ‘man’ and male genius as the norm. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism thus begins by illustrating the remarkable ‘protofeminist’ writing that would eventually form the basis of modern feminist thought.

As the title of the book indicates, in this history of feminism our principal emphasis is on literary criticism and textuality. However, as the reader progresses through the volume, it will become clear that the boundaries between literature and politics, activism and the academy, are fluid and, consequently, can be difficult to determine. Although these blurred boundaries are frequently productive, we would argue that feminist literary criticism can be distinguished from feminist political activism and social theory. Most obviously, the difference lies in the dimension of textuality. From Carolyn Dinshaw’s account of medieval symbolism, to Mary Eagleton’s consideration of patriarchal critique, to Heather Love’s analysis of queer bodies, debates around representation underpin all the chapters in this book. Across the centuries woman has been the subject of innumerable reconfigurations, and with every reinscription comes the necessity of re-reading. In the space of the text woman can be both defamed and defended, and it is here that the most persuasive possibilities can be found for imagining the future of the female subject.

USING A HISTORY OF FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

The book is divided into three parts, each of which is prefaced by an introduction explaining the rationale behind the territory covered. The chapters themselves have been produced by experts in the diverse fields of feminist literary criticism, and have been written in an accessible manner to provide orientation in the subject area for the beginner. However, because each chapter has been freshly commissioned for this project, and the contributors asked to return to the original sources, the resulting essays do more than provide an overview – they also offer new insights into the material, its history, reception and ongoing relevance, and these new readings will be of interest to scholars working in all areas of literary practice. Feminist literary criticism is a field characterised by the extensive cross-fertilisation of ideas. A number of key thinkers and their essays will appear in different contexts, and it is important to acknowledge these productive overlaps. Texts such as Adrienne Rich’s ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Hélène Cixous’ ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble did not simply influence one school of feminist thought, but rather resonated across the entire spectrum of critical activity. The index will guide readers to the multiple locations in which discussions of key thinkers, essays, articles and books can be found. We recommend reading ‘across’ the book as well as through it in order to experience the divergent, dissonant and challenging encounters that characterise the feminist enterprise.

Despite the battles and the bad press, feminist literary criticism is a source of pleasure, stimulation, confirmation, insight, self-affirmation, doubt, questioning and reappraisal: it has the potential to alter the way we see ourselves, others and the world. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism is indebted to the many wonderful studies of women, gender and writing that have enriched our understanding of the potentialities of feminist enquiry. In looking afresh at this material we are both taking stock and embracing the emergence of new critical possibilities. Feminist literary criticism is a subject with a future and it deserves the considered reflection of a substantial history. We hope this volume will contribute to that process.

1. Virginia Woolf (1929/1977), A Room of One’s Own , London: Grafton.

Pioneers and protofeminism

Introduction to part i.

The history of feminist literary criticism properly begins some forty or fifty years ago with the emergence of what is commonly termed second-wave feminism. The history of this critical movement and its impact on culture and society will be charted in the second and third parts of this volume, but it is important to recognise that this story has a prequel. To write of pioneers and protofeminism is to explore the diverse texts, voices and lives that articulated feminist ideas and feminist critical positions before such categories existed. Medieval women were not ‘feminists’ and they had few opportunities to be critics, but as Carolyn Dinshaw observes in the opening essay, ‘texts affect lived lives, and … if women had relatively little opportunity to author texts, they nonetheless felt their effects’ (Dinshaw, 15). The history of women’s engagement with texts and textuality far exceeds the parameters of second-wave feminism, and this history is integral to contemporary understandings of feminist practice.

Yet the history of the representation of women, their writing, their reading and their literary critical acts would in total need not a single volume but a library of texts, and in consequence Part I of this book sets out a combination of overview and example that indicates the complexity of feminism’s origins without attempting an exhaustive survey. The overview begins with the first two chapters, Carolyn Dinshaw’s ‘Medieval Feminist Criticism’ and Helen Wilcox’s ‘Feminist Criticism in the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century’, which together establish the conditions of pre-Enlightenment female subjectivity. These chapters illustrate that ‘woman’ was a site of intense literary and critical activity that examined the power of the feminine as symbol even as it worked to contain and constrain women in practice. For Dinshaw, the tension between literary embodiments and lived reality is at the heart of the often fraught debates that surrounded narrative practice. These debates in many cases prefigured the concerns of contemporary feminist enquiry, but ultimately Dinshaw concludes that ‘medieval critical gestures’ cannot straightforwardly be regarded as ‘protofeminism’. Nonetheless, there are important historical continuities that need to be acknowledged, and a recognition of the relationship between gender and textuality is integral to understanding the literature and culture of the medieval period, from Chaucer’s iconic Wife of Bath to Margery Kempe’s autobiographical acts of self-construction.

By the early modern period, however, it is possible to trace a significant shift in women’s relationship to textual culture. Helen Wilcox observes that it is now possible to describe women as ‘feminists’, and to define a range of ‘phenomena’ that might be termed feminist literary criticism. Indeed, she argues that a woman writer could ‘play the part of a protofeminist simply by virtue of her decision to write’ (Wilcox, 31). This was a period in which ‘continuing constraints as well as new freedoms’ provoked ‘an outburst of writing by women’ (37), and although in general women’s literacy levels remained low, they nonetheless acquired far greater visibility as both producers and consumers of texts. From pamphlets to poetry and from devotional literature to advice books, women became active participants in literary culture. Their position, however, was not uncontested, and Wilcox traces the dominant debates that circulated around women’s character, her writing, her place in society and her relationship to the legacy of Eve. Drawing on a remarkable range of often anonymous publications, Wilcox finds a dynamic political engagement taking shape in women’s licensed and unlicensed engagement with the practices of reading and writing.

Dinshaw and Wilcox together provide a crucial mapping of the often evasive and unexpected territory of women’s textual encounters, and their work gives a clear indication of the historical embeddedness of literary critical practice. The remaining chapters of Part I, however, adopt a contrasting but supplementary approach. Across the historical expanse of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many women could have stood as pioneers of ‘protofeminism’: writers and activists whose thinking, writing and ‘living’ challenged the tenets of patriarchal social organisation and questioned the prescriptive norms of gender. In Britain writers such as Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot produced unconventional texts – and in some cases lived unconventional lives – which have long since been recognised as prefiguring the concerns of later feminist enquiry. Similarly political ‘feminist’ activists from Frances Power Cobbe to Millicent Garrett Fawcett produced groundbreaking journalism, polemics and cultural criticism. Much of this work has slipped from view, but it stands as a pertinent reminder of the symbiotic relationship between feminist politics and textual practice. 1 Even the seemingly conventional Jane Austen can be seen as a contributor to a history of pre-feminist writing, producing in Northanger Abbey (1803/1818) both a witty demonstration of the value of women’s education and a powerful defence of that most ‘female’ of literary forms, the novel.

Fiction, then, was a crucial means through which women engaged with politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in America too the literary and the political were inescapably intertwined. As Elaine Showalter has observed, ‘there were few novels by English women in the nineteenth century as radical or outspoken with regard to the woman question as those by their American counterparts’ (1991: 3): from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Louisa May Alcott, from Margaret Fuller to Sojourner Truth, American women wrote, articulated and embodied a discourse that acknowledged the agency and independence of the female subject. The plenitude of pioneers around the world continues into the fin de siècle and the early twentieth century. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner and Winifred Holtby were just some of the influential writers whose textual practice was profoundly political and whose fictions constituted vital acts of cultural criticism, women who left a legacy of argument and ideas that would enrich the later practice of feminist literary criticism. Yet, from this wealth of women writers and early feminist activists, one woman stands out as exemplary. The influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on over two hundred years of feminist enquiry cannot be overstated, and Susan Manly’s chapter offers a detailed analysis of Wollstonecraft as a literary critic and advocate of reason, who eloquently anticipated the concerns of second-wave feminism. At the heart of Wollstonecraft’s work is an attack on the authority of Edmund Burke, John Milton and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘fellow authors of a fictitious femininity, and patriarchal enemies in league against female emancipation’ (Manly, 49). Manly demonstrates the critical strategies through which Wollstonecraft exposed Burke’s sentimental ‘aestheticisation of beauty’, Rousseau’s construction of an ideal, objectified woman, and the flawed misogynistic construction of Milton’s Eve. In her detailed readings of these texts, Wollstonecraft reveals herself adept at the deployment of what would later be termed feminist critique. But this is not the limit of her achievement. As Manly illustrates, Wollstonecraft also struggled to escape the confines of gendered subjectivity by exposing ‘the fictionality of both femininity and masculinity’ (50). Wollstonecraft’s argument for the constructed nature of gender was a strategic one: if writing and thinking could demonstrably be seen to transcend the body, then there would be no argument for excluding women from the public sphere. Yet her eloquent exposure of gendered textuality makes more than a transient political point: it also makes explicit the extent to which textual constructions shape subjectivities. Wollstonecraft viewed the woman writer as rational, ethical and humane, the antithesis of ‘false sensibility’ (49), an achievement which, over a century later, would see her Vindication of the Rights of Woman acclaimed by Winifred Holtby as ‘the bible of the women’s movement in Great Britain’ (1934: 41).

Manly’s chapter traces the legacy of Wollstonecraft across the nineteenth century, exploring her often unacknowledged influence on writers from Maria Edgeworth to George Eliot. But it would not be until the twentieth century that another writer would leave a legacy of feminist thought and critical enquiry to rival that of Wollstonecraft. Our second ‘pioneer’, then, is Virginia Woolf, ‘the founder of modern feminist literary criticism’ (Goldman, 66). As Jane Goldman demonstrates, Woolf’s groundbreaking essay A Room of One’s Own constitutes a ‘modern primer’ for feminist criticism, and her influence on later generations of feminist thought has been immense. Woolf matters to feminist literary criticism not simply as a writer and critic, but also as a subject of critical enquiry. The rescuing of Woolf from the apolitical prisons of Bloomsbury and madness was one of the formative projects of second-wave feminist literary criticism (see Carr, Chapter 7), giving rise to a constructive relationship between the writer, her criticism and her critics. It is Woolf we must thank for the provocative concepts of thinking back through our mothers, the woman’s sentence and the androgynous mind. It is Woolf who wrote of killing the angel in the house and demanded the adaptation of the book to the body. Goldman’s chapter illustrates how, in Woolf’s creative contradictions and her disruptive boundary-crossing imagination, we find sources for the many, often conflicting, theoretical positions of contemporary feminist thought.

Finally, Part I of this book examines the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir. Like Woolf, Beauvoir has left feminism with a rich lexicon of images and ideas, not least of which is her definitive assertion that ‘one is not born a woman’. This concept is implicit in the work and debates surrounding all our protofeminists and pioneers, but in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex this fundamental idea receives explicit articulation. As discussed in the general introduction, the recognition of the social construction of gender and the coercive nature of gendered subjectivities has been at the centre of feminist literary criticism, enabling it as a discourse to challenge humanist assumptions about identity, nature and progress, and to scrutinise the potent mythical formations of femininity and masculinity. From Kate Millett to Judith Butler, feminist critics have been inspired by Beauvoir, but, as Elizabeth Fallaize argues, the full substance of her monumental work is hardly known. Since the 1990s, a new generation of feminist literary critics have been working to revise the limited perceptions of Beauvoir’s work, and Fallaize contributes to this vital process through a study of Beauvoir’s analysis of myth. Myth, claimed Beauvoir, was instrumental in ‘persuading women of the naturalness of their fate’, and Fallaize traces her examination of feminine archetypes from Stendhal to Sade, in the process finding an ecumenical methodology that anticipates later literary-critical movements from Marxism to structuralism to psychoanalysis. The Second Sex prefaces the point at which A History of Feminist Literary Criticism more obviously begins and, as with Wollstonecraft and Woolf, the echoes of Beauvoir’s influence will resonate throughout its pages.

1. See Barbara Caine (1997), English Feminism 1780–1980 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Holtby, Winifred (1934), Women and a Changing Civilization , London: John Lane.

Showalter, Elaine (1991), Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

© Cambridge University Press

Feminist Literary Criticism

Feminism Definition

• History Of Feminism
• Important Figures
• Women's Suffrage
• Women & War
• Laws & Womens Rights
• Feminist Texts
• American History
• African American History
• African History
• Ancient History and Culture
• Asian History
• European History
• Latin American History
• Medieval & Renaissance History
• Military History
• The 20th Century
• J.D., Hofstra University
• B.A., English and Print Journalism, University of Southern California

Feminist literary criticism (also known as feminist criticism) is the literary analysis that arises from the viewpoint of feminism , ​ feminist theory , and/or feminist politics.

Critical Methodology

A feminist literary critic resists traditional assumptions while reading a text. In addition to challenging assumptions which were thought to be universal, feminist literary criticism actively supports including women's knowledge in literature and valuing women's experiences. The basic methods of feminist literary criticism include:

• Identifying with female characters: By examining the way female characters are defined, critics challenge the male-centered outlook of authors. Feminist literary criticism suggests that women in literature have been historically presented as objects seen from a male perspective.
• Reevaluating literature and the world in which literature is read: By revisiting the classic literature, the critic can question whether society has predominantly valued male authors and their literary works because it has valued males more than females.

Embodying or Undercutting Stereotypes

Feminist literary criticism recognizes that literature both reflects and shapes stereotypes and other cultural assumptions. Thus, feminist literary criticism examines how works of literature embody patriarchal attitudes or undercut them, sometimes both happening within the same work.

Feminist theory and various forms of feminist critique began long before the formal naming of the school of literary criticism. In so-called first-wave feminism, the "Woman's Bible," written in the late 19th century by Elizabeth Cady Stanton , is an example of a work of criticism firmly in this school, looking beyond the more obvious male-centered outlook and interpretation.

During the period of second-wave feminism, academic circles increasingly challenged the male literary canon. Feminist literary criticism has since intertwined with postmodernism and increasingly complex questions of gender and societal roles.

Tools of the Feminist Literary Critic

Feminist literary criticism may bring in tools from other critical disciplines, such as historical analysis, psychology, linguistics, sociological analysis, and economic analysis. Feminist criticism may also look at intersectionality , looking at how factors including race, sexuality, physical ability, and class are also involved.

Feminist literary criticism may use any of the following methods:

• Deconstructing the way that women characters are described in novels, stories, plays, biographies, and histories, especially if the author is male
• Deconstructing how one's own gender influences how one reads and interprets a text, and which characters and how the reader identifies depending on the reader's gender
• Deconstructing how women autobiographers and biographers of women treat their subjects, and how biographers treat women who are secondary to the main subject
• Describing relationships between the literary text and ideas about power and sexuality and gender
• Critique of patriarchal or woman-marginalizing language, such as a "universal" use of the masculine pronouns "he" and "him"
• Noticing and unpacking differences in how men and women write: a style, for instance, where women use more reflexive language and men use more direct language (example: "she let herself in" versus "he opened the door")
• Reclaiming women writers who are little known or have been marginalized or undervalued, sometimes referred to as expanding or criticizing the canon—the usual list of "important" authors and works (Examples include raising up the contributions of early playwright ​ Aphra Behn and showing how she was treated differently than male writers from her own time forward, and the retrieval of Zora Neale Hurston 's writing by Alice Walker .)
• Reclaiming the "female voice" as a valuable contribution to literature, even if formerly marginalized or ignored
• Analyzing multiple works in a genre as an overview of a feminist approach to that genre: for example, science fiction or detective fiction
• Analyzing multiple works by a single author (often female)
• Examining how relationships between men and women and those assuming male and female roles are depicted in the text, including power relations
• Examining the text to find ways in which patriarchy is resisted or could have been resisted

Feminist literary criticism is distinguished from gynocriticism because feminist literary criticism may also analyze and deconstruct literary works of men.

Gynocriticism

Gynocriticism, or gynocritics, refers to the literary study of women as writers. It is a critical practice exploring and recording female creativity. Gynocriticism attempts to understand women’s writing as a fundamental part of female reality. Some critics now use “gynocriticism” to refer to the practice and “gynocritics” to refer to the practitioners.

American literary critic Elaine Showalter coined the term "gynocritics" in her 1979 essay “Towards a Feminist Poetics.” Unlike feminist literary criticism, which might analyze works by male authors from a feminist perspective, gynocriticism wanted to establish a literary tradition of women without incorporating male authors. Showalter felt that feminist criticism still worked within male assumptions, while gynocriticism would begin a new phase of women’s self-discovery.

Resources and Further Reading

• Alcott, Louisa May. The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman's Power . Edited by Madeleine B. Stern, Northeastern University, 1996.
• Barr, Marleen S. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond . University of North Carolina, 1993.
• Bolin, Alice. Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession . William Morrow, 2018.
• Burke, Sally. American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History . Twayne, 1996.
• Carlin, Deborah. Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading . University of Massachusetts, 1992.
• Castillo, Debra A. Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism . Cornell University, 1992.
• Chocano, Carina. You Play the Girl . Mariner, 2017.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, editors. Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader . Norton, 2007.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, editors. Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets . Indiana University, 1993.
• Lauret, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America . Routledge, 1994.
• Lavigne, Carlen. Cyberpunk Women, Feminism and Science Fiction: A Critical Study . McFarland, 2013.
• Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches . Penguin, 2020.
• Perreault, Jeanne. Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography . University of Minnesota, 1995.
• Plain, Gill, and Susan Sellers, editors. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism . Cambridge University, 2012.
• Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, editors. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography . University of Minnesota, 1992.

This article was edited and with significant additions by Jone Johnson Lewis

• 1970s Feminist Activities
• Goals of the Feminist Movement
• Stylistics and Elements of Style in Literature
• Womanist: Definition and Examples
• Rhetorical Analysis Definition and Examples
• What Literature Can Teach Us
• Definition of Belles-Lettres in English Grammer
• Feminist Philosophy
• Socialist Feminism vs. Other Types of Feminism
• Feminist Theory in Sociology
• Feminist Utopia/Dystopia
• Geoffrey Chaucer: Early Feminist?
• Books on Women in Prehistory
• The Story of a Murdered Farmer in "Trifles" By Susan Glaspell
• 'Jane Eyre' Questions for Study and Discussion
• Liberal Feminism

'Toward a Feminist Poetics' by Elaine Showalter: Explained

' Toward a Feminist Poetics ' is a groundbreaking essay by Elaine Showalter. The essay was first presented in 1978 as an introductory lecture on the first series on literature and women at University of Oxford. It was published in 1979. This seminal essay examines and questions the relationship between feminist literary theory and criticism , and the conventional literary theories. It is in 'Toward a Feminist Poetics' that Showalter first develops and coins the term " gynocriticism ".

This blog aims to simplify the essay, and provides its key points and concepts.

Section I: Status of Feminist Criticism in the 1970s

In the very beginning of  ' Toward a Feminist Poetics', Showalter refers to ‘ Contemporary Approaches to English Study ’. She highlights how all the contributions to it were made by men, including George Steiner, Raymond Williams, Christopher Butler, Jonathan Culler, Terry Eagleton, and Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James. Showalter highlights that during the 1970s, out of all the critical approaches to literature and English studies, feminist criticism was the most secluded and least understood of all. Most proficient members of the English department were against it and as a result, never read it. Even when they read it, they did so with a prejudiced and stereotypical mindset. Showalter then proceeds to provide examples of such preconceived notions explicit among most critics during the 1970s.

She highlights Robert Partlow's perception of feminist criticism as “women’s lib propaganda masquerading as literary criticism”. Next, Showalter mentions Robert Boyers who wrote ‘ A Case Against Feminist Criticism ’ in Winter 1977 issue of Partisan Review. In it, Boyers assumed that feminist criticism will be “obsessed with destroying great male artists”. Interestingly, he based his comments on a single work by Joan Mellen titled ‘ Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film ’. For Boyers, feminist criticism was the “insistence on asking the same questions of every work and demanding ideologically satisfactory answers to those questions as a means of evaluating it”. Showalter describes Boyers’ response as intimidating, forcing women into adapt and mould themselves into a discourse that is more acceptable to academia. Expecting them to become stiff, rigid and indifferent to external stimuli.

Showalter observes that feminist criticism suffers such prejudice and attacks because it lacks a clear articulated theory. Even feminist critics are unaware what they mean to defend and profess.

Section II: Suspicion of Theory

Another obstacle in the way of feminist critical practice is the ‘suspicion of theory’. This suspicion of theory among feminist activists arises from the prevalent sexism among prominent theorists such as Harold Bloom, Robert Boyers, and Norman Mailer. It is significantly harder for feminists to rely on theory that's patriarchal. Most literary quarterlies of 1970s describe male experiences and perceptions and consider them to be universal. This suspicion of theory by feminist activists and theorists results in further isolation. Mary Daly in ' Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women's Liberation ' writes:

“The God Method is in fact a subordinate deity, serving higher powers. These are social and cultural institutions whose survival depends upon the classification of disruptive and disturbing information as nondata. Under patriarchy, Method has wiped out women’s questions so totally that even women have not been able to hear and formulate our own questions, to meet our own experiences.”  (Daly, p. 12-13)

Therefore, to a feminist need for authenticity, the academic demand for theory seems like an intimidating threat. This further marginalises feminist criticism.

Section III: Feminists' resistance to Academia

Where on one hand feminist critical theory is marginalised in academia, on the other hand, in the United States there is a resistance to being included in academia. Some believe that the activism and empiricism are the greatest strengths of feminist criticism, and that if the feminist critical theory is perfected and becomes a part of academia, the movement will die. Showalter suggests that this fear and resistance to include feminist theory in academia is a form of rationalization of the psychic barrier among women that has resulted due to their perpetual exclusion from theoretical discourse. Conventionally, women have always played the supporting role, whereas men have played the lead protagonist in the field of literary scholarship. While male critics in the twentieth century have openly established schools and coteries and have considered themselves as important as the writer, women have remained confined in the roles like that of translators, interpreters, hostesses, editors, etc.

This is why Showalter in 'Toward a Feminist Poetics' has outlined a brief classification of feminist criticism so that it can serve as an introduction to a literature that requires to be seen as a significant contribution of English studies. She also aims to reconstruct the political, social and cultural experiences of women.

Section IV: Woman as a Reader and Woman as a Writer

In ' Toward a Feminist Poetics ', Showalter divides feminist criticism into two different categories – woman as a reader and woman as writer .

Woman as a reader or Feminist critique is the kind of feminist criticism where the woman consumes the literature produced by men. The supposition of female reader alters our grasp and understanding of a literary work as it makes us aware of the importance of its sexual codes. Showalter calls this kind of analysis of a literary work as a feminist critique. Just like other criticisms, it is founded on historical inquiry and explores ideological assumptions in literary texts. It studies the stereotypes of women in literature, the marginalization and misconceptions about women in criticism, and gaps in a male-constructed literary criticism and theory. Feminist critique also studies how women audience is manipulated and exploited in films and popular culture. It also analyzes woman-as-sign in semiotic systems.

Woman as writer or Gynocriticism is the second type of feminist criticism. Here, the woman creates the text and textual meaning, history, themes, genres and literary structures. This kind of feminist criticism studies the “ psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works .” Since there had not been any term exclusively for this kind of criticism, Showalter utilises the French term ‘la gynocritique’ or ‘gynocritics’

Difference between the feminist critique and gynocriticism

Feminist critique is a more political stream of criticism. It also has theoretical relations with Marxism and aesthetics. On the other hand, gynocriticism is more experimental and is self-contained. It is more connected to the other modes of feminist theory and research. Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson (editor of the journal Signs: Women in Culture and Society) compare feminist critique to the Old Testament that looks for the sins and the errors of the past. On the other hand, they compare gynocritics and gynocriticism to the New Testaments, seeking and depending on imagination. Both kinds of criticisms are essential for feminist vision.

Section V: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy- an example of feminist critique

Showalter analyzes Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ through feminist critique. The very beginning of the novel where a drunk Michael Henchard sells his wife and infant daughter for as less as five guineas, is praised by the male critic Irving Howe in his work titled ' Thomas Hardy ' (1968). To Howe, the beginning of the novel is brilliant. However, it would be different if the critic was a woman. According to Showalter, unless a woman has been trained/taught to ideologically identify with a male culture, she will have a different response and experience for the beginning of the novel. Howe describes Henchard’s wife as a “drooping rag” who is passive. However, no where in the beginning of the novel is she described as drooping. Through his critique, Howe indicates his fantasies as a male critic and in the process distorts the meaning of the text. Susan Henchard’s role is passive and and is further constrained by a female child. She has almost no second chances at life and has hardly any control in life. Male critics like Howe ignore that in the beginning of the novel, Henchard not only sells his wife but also his child who is a female. Henchard could only sell his child because she was a female since sons are seldom sold in patriarchal society. By selling his daughter and wife, Henchard is cutting himself off from the female community and completely including himself in male community. Henchard’s tragedy lies in realizing how insufficient a male community with its male code of paternity, money, and legal contract, is, and his inability to regain the love and warmth he eventually desperately needs.

The relation between Michael Henchard and his wife Susan Henchard are not the emotional center of the novel. It is rather his realization and appreciation of the strength and dignity of his daughter Elizabeth-Jane. Henchard is a self-proclaimed “women-hater” who feels nothing but condescending pity for womankind. He is eventually humbled and “unmanned” when he loses his position of mayor and his dignity. When Hardy shows Henchard as weak and vulnerable, he portrays the man at his best. “ Thus Hardy’s female characters in The Mayor of Casterbridge, as in his other novels, are somewhat idealized and melancholy projections of a repressed male self ”.

The above analysis of the novel is a feminist critique, and as we can see, it is an extremely male-oriented critique of a literary text. In ' Toward a Feminist Poetics ', Showalter emphasizes that if we limit our study to stereotypical women, the sexist perception of male critics, and the confined role of women in literary history, we will never be able to learn about women’s experiences. We will only be able to know what men have taught women to be and feel. Feminist critique also tends to see women as natural victims by discussing it inevitably and obsessively. Additionally, there also exists celebration of seduction of betrayal, and the women being victims and seeing their victimization as opportunities. In order to understand women’s experience and emotions, we require help and training from male theorists such as Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Lacan, etc, and learn the application of theory of signs and myths to male texts and films. Undergoing this intellectual exercise “increases resistance to questioning it, and to seeing its historical and ideological boundaries.”

Section VI: Gynocriticism and the Female Culture

Gynocriticism is different and in contrast to the fixation (negative or positive) on male literature. Gynocriticism creates a female framework to analyze women’s literature. It develops new models that are based on female experiences and sheds away male models and theories. Gynocriticism begins at the point when we free ourselves from the established male literary history, and stop attempting to adjust and fit women in male tradition. Gynocriticism instead focuses on a new world of female culture. Showalter says that :

“Gynocritics is related to feminist research in history, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, all of which have developed hypotheses of a female subculture including not only the ascribed status, and the internalized constructs of femininity, but also the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women.”

Gynocriticism is not just confined to literature and history by men. Instead it is a feminist research in multiple fields that create a subculture exclusive to women. This subculture includes but goes beyond the established societal status of women and the conventional sense of femininity. It includes consciousness, interactions, and occupations of women. Michelle Z. Rosaldo in ‘ Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview ’ states that:

“ The very symbolic and social conceptions that appear to set women apart and to circumscribe their activities may be used by women as a basis for female solidarity and worth. When men live apart from women, they in fact cannot control them, and unwittingly they may provide them with symbols and social resources on which to build a society of their own.”  (Rosaldo, p 39)

Similarly in literature, feminine values undercut and penetrate the very masculine system that contains them. For instance, women have utilized the myth of Amazon, and a secluded female society in many literary works and across genres from Victorian age to the contemporary science fiction.

Section VII: Prominent Feminist critics in Gynocriticism

Showalter further mentions groundbreaking work by young American feminist scholars who have provided new ways to understand the culture of American women in the 19th century and their literature through which it was mostly expressed.

The first work Showalter mentions is ‘ The Female World of Love and Ritual ’ by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. It outlines the 19th century homosocial and emotional world through numerous archives of letters between women.

The second significant work Showalter mentions is ‘ The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 ’ by Nancy Cott. It emphasizes on the sisterly solidarity, loyalty, and shared experience among women that arises due to a legacy of submission and pain and cultural bondage.

The third work is ‘ The Feminization of American Culture ’ by Ann Douglas. This bold work by Douglas traces the origin of American mass culture found in sentimental literature of women and clergymen that were “two allied and “disestablished” post industrial groups.

All the three works mentioned above are by social historians.

The fourth significant work is by Nina Auerbach titled ‘ Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction ’. The work explores female bonds through women’s literature- from the matriarchal households found in the works of Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Gaskell, to the schools and colleges for women found in the works of Dorothy Sayers, Sylvia Plath, and Muriel Spark. Such works that are based on English women are extremely significant and urgently required. There is no dearth of sources for research as there is an abundance of manuscripts that are undiscovered.

Section VIII: Importance of a female tradition and women's experiences

Showalter says that gynocriticism must consider political, social, and personal histories while studying women’s literary choices and careers. Virginia Woolf in her essay ' Women and Fiction ' (1929) writes that “ In dealing with women as writers, as much elasticity as possible is desirable; it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides their work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art. ”

As an example Showalter mentions the case of ‘ Aurora Leigh ’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the novel’s introduction, Cora Kaplan discusses the writer’s intellectual milieu and defines her feminism as romantic and bourgeois, one that depends upon the transforming powers of art, love, and Christian charity. However, Kaplan misses the discussion of one male poet who must had the biggest influence on her work in the 1850s- Robert Browning. Since we are aware how vulnerable women are to the established value system and aesthetics of male tradition, and to male approval, we must also be receptive to the marriage between two artists. Marriage between two writers or artists in most cases amounts to internal conflicts and eventually  complete self-erasure for women. This is visible in Barrett Browning’s letters of 1850s addressed to Mrs. David Ogilvy. In 1854, she writes to her friend:

“I am behind hand with my poem…Robert swears he shall have his book ready in spite of everything for print when we shall be in London for the purpose, but, as for mine, it must wait for the next spring I begin to see clearly. Also it may be better not to bring out the two works together…If mine were ready I might not say so perhaps.”  

Browning’s letters display a very familiar struggle between her own ambition and commitment to her work and her love and ambition for her husband. In a way, she wants her husband to be more successful, to be the better writer.

Therefore, without a complete understanding of the “framework of the female subculture”, we are bound to misunderstand and misread the themes and structures of women’s literature. We might also be unable to establish important connections within a tradition.

Section IX: The pain of feminist awakening

Florence Nightingale, in a passage from her essay ' Cassandra ' in ' The Cause: A History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain ', considers the pain and discomfort of feminist awakening as its very essence and causes progress and guarantee of free will. She protests against the complacent lives of middle class Victorian women and states:

“ Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts--suffering rather than indifferentism--for out of suffering may come the cure. Better to have pain than paralysis: A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers a new world .” (p. 398)

Waking up from the pleasant and comfortable sleep of the Victorian womanhood was naturally painful. As evident in the works of George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Olive Schreiner, women wake to a world where they cannot become what they aspire to be, and rather than struggling, they die. Female suffering is consumed by both men and women as a literary commodity. The fulfilment in the plots of many significant novels such as ‘ The Mill on the Floss ’, ‘ The Story of an African Farm ’, and ‘ The House of Mirth ’ occurs when a male mourner visits the grave of a heroine.

Even for Dame Rebecca West in ' And They All Lived Unhappily Ever After ' (1974), misery and unhappiness are still a central theme of contemporary fiction by English women. For instance, in ‘ Down Among the Women’ and ‘Female Friends ’ by Fay Weldon, suicide by the heroine becomes like a domestic accomplishment. Similarly, ‘ The Driver’s Seat ’ by Muriel Spark is a desperate attempt of the heroine “to hunt down a woman-hating psychopath and persuade him to murder her”. The protagonist, Lise, selects the dress she wanted to be murdered in, patiently pursues her assassin and gives him the knife. Through this, Spark provides us with significant feminine wisdom: “that a woman creates her identity by choosing her clothes, that she creates her history by choosing her man.” She further questions if the woman’s only form of self-assertion is to select her destroyer, and whether it is the man or the woman who is in the driver’s seat. If we assume the violence of these self-destructive novels as neurotic expressions of some personal pathology, we would be ignoring the possibility that these worlds and circumstances might be true. We might be ignoring according to Annette Kolodny:

“...the possibility that the worlds they inhabit may in fact be real, or true, and for them the only worlds available, and further, to deny the possibility that their apparently “odd” or unusual responses may in fact be justifiable or even necessary.”

Showalter emphasizes that women’s literature should rise above death, suffering, madness, and compromises. However she asserts that initial suffering is inevitable to discover a new world and life. Some recent literature by women has begun to place the transformational pain to history. Adrienne Rich is one such female writers whose writings explore the will to change. Her book ‘ Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution ’ challenges and questions the rejection and alienation of the mothers by their daughters due to patriarchy. The literature in the past have commonly dealt with the fear of becoming one’s own mother or “matrophobia”. Hatred towards her mother was like a feminist enlightenment for a woman. However, women’s literature of the 1970s, attempts to recover from matrophobia like in ‘ Surfacing ’ by Margaret Atwood, and ' Kinflicks ' by Lisa Alther. Just like the death of the father used to be a significant event in a male protagonist’s life, a mother’s death in the life of a female protagonist is now treated with the same gravity and profundity in female literature. Studying these changes and awakenings and new mythologies of female culture are one of the major tasks of gynocriticism.

Section X : Women and the Novel: The “Precious Speciality”

One of the most consistent and significant assumption of feminist reading is that various women’s experience will be expressed through a specific and distinctive genres and forms in art. While exploring the meaning of women’s literature and its future, Victorian reviewers such as G.H. Lewes, Richard Hutton, and Richard Simpson focused on “educational, experimental, and biological handicaps of the woman novelist..". Women, too shared this perception. According to the novelist Fanny Fern, women had been allowed to write novels in order to harmlessly channel their frustrations and fantasies that would have otherwise threatened a conventional family, church, and the state. It was a safe outlet for women living a stifling and loveless life. She urged women to write their deepest thoughts and desires so that when they have long gone, and their works are found by either their husband or their father, they would realise, they hardly knew their wife or daughter. It must be noted that although Fern’s writing was fierce, she was completely controlled by her need to provoke a masculine response. During the end of the 20th century, Women Writers Suffrage League had begun to examine the mental bondage of women’s literature to a male dominated publishing industry. The first president of Women Writers Suffrage League, a novelist, and an actress, Elizabeth Robins had argued that no female writer had been free of the mental bondage to truly explore a female consciousness. In ' Woman's Secret '  Robins states:

"The realization that she had access to a rich and as yet unrifled storehouse may have crossed her mind, but there were cogent reasons for concealing her knowledge. With that wariness of ages which has come to be instinct, she contented herself with echoing the old fables, presenting to a man-governed world puppets as nearly as possible like those that had from the beginning found such favour in men’s sight.

   Contrary to the popular impression, to say in print what she thinks is the last thing the woman-novelist or journalist is so rash as to attempt. There even more than elsewhere (unless she is reckless) she must wear the aspect that shall have the best chance of pleasing her brothers. Her publishers are not women.”

In order to combat this prevailing male dominance in the publishing industry of the 19th century, many women organized publishing houses- beginning with Victory Press of Emily Faithfull that was established in 1870s. The Women Writers Suffrage League believed that once the male domination is overthrown, all the undocumented and marginalized female psyche will find its distinct literary expression. Writers like George Eliot and Virginia Woolf firmly believed that literature produced by women had a promise of distinctly female vision and a “precious speciality”.

Section XI: Feminine, Feminist, Female

This section of ' Toward a Feminist Poetics ' focuses on the three stages of Feminine, Feminist, and Female in feminist criticism. According to Showalter in her book ‘ A Literature of Their Own ’, Feminine, Feminist, and Female are three themes or stages of the feminist literary criticism of the 1960s and 1970s.

The feminine phase in the feminist literary criticism was around the years 1840 to 1880. During this stage, women wrote mainly in order to compete with male writers. They constantly compared their intellect to that of the male writers and had internalized perceptions about female nature. One of the distinct characteristic of this phase is adoption of a male pseudonym by many female writers- George Eliot, Currer Bell, Acton Bell, and Ellis Bell, etc. This male pseudonym was not just a name, it impacted the tone, characterization, structure of the novel. Adopting the male pseudonym also indicated how women were aware about the liabilities of being a female author in a male dominant literary world.

While English women adopted male pseudonyms, American writers adopted extremely feminine pseudonyms such as Fanny Fern, Fanny Forester, Grace Greenwood, etc. Behind these little-me names were hidden professional skills and boundless energy of women writers. There also existed female writers who created an illusion of a male writer with an encoded domestic message of femininity. An example of such writer is Harriet Parr, a victorian novelist who wrote under the pen name of Holme Lee. The literature produced during this phase is usually oblique, subversive, ironic, and displaced, and one needs to read between the lines to catch any missed meanings or possibilities in the text.

The feminist phase in the feminist literary criticism spans through the years 1880 to 1920. Women during this phase reject the traditional perceptions of femininity. Through literature, they emphasize and dramatize the experiences of all the injustice and wrongs done to women. Female novelists belonging to this phase such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Frances Trollope express a personal sense of injustice through their novels of class struggle and factory life. Writers of the feminist phase redefine the role of a female artist in terms of responsibility towards suffering sisters. Typical works belonging to this phase are the Amazon utopias of the 1890s. They include perfect societies by women set in future America or England that are explicitly against the male government, laws and medicine. One such author belonging to the Amazon utopia is Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She examines the obsession of masculine literature with war and sex, and explores the possibilities of feminist literature free of such elements. Gilman carries the idea of “precious speciality” introduced by Eliot to its matriarchal extremes. She compares her perception of sisterhood to that of a beehive in ' The Man-made World: or, Our Androcentric Culture '. Gilman writes:

“...the bee’s fiction would be rich and broad, full of the complex tasks of comb-building and filling, the care and feeding of the young…It would treat of the vast fecundity of motherhood, the educative and selective processes of the group-mothers, and the passion of loyalty, of social service, which holds the hives together”

The feminist phase was a Feminist Socialist Realism with a vengeance. However, female writers could not be limited to maternal topics and similar didactic formulas.

The Female phase has been ongoing since the 1920s. In this phase of feminist literary criticism, women reject imitation as well as the protest of male literature, which was in both cases a form of dependency. Instead, they turn their focus to female experience for source of art that is free of the male influence and control. They offer a feminist analysis of forms and techniques of literature. Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson are the representatives of the female phase of the feminist literary criticism. They think in terms of male and female sentences and also divide their work into “masculine” journalism and “feminine” fictions. Additionally, they redefine and sexualize external and internal experiences.

Showalter suggests that all three phases of feminist literary criticism are significant and it is extremely significant to approach them with historical awareness. We must reconstruct the past and rediscover large amount of literature –  novels, poems, plays – by women that have been ignored. We must build a continuous female tradition spanning “from decade to decade, rather than from Great Woman to Great Woman.” Once we create a timeline of literary tradition, we will be able to see the “patterns of influence and response from one generation to the next, we can also begin to challenge the periodicity of orthodox literary history and its enshrined canons of achievement.” Showalter further stresses that since we have always studied female literature in isolation, their literary connection and tradition has escaped us. However, if we begin to go beyond Austen, Brontës, Eliot, and begin to read hundreds of ignored works written by fellow female writers, we are bound to discover patterns and phases in the evolution of a female tradition that reflect the developmental phases of any subcultural art.

Section XII: Feminist Criticism, Marxism, and Structuralism

While creating a tradition, feminist criticism refers to various theories, and also revises and subverts prominent theories and ideologies, specially Marxist aesthetics and structuralism. It also attempts to alter their vocabulary and methods in order to make them inclusive of gender. However, Showalter believes that this is still not satisfactory, and that feminist criticism cannot always survive upon “men’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs”. Instead, they must free themselves from the established terminologies and methods and create and analyse art through their own impulses. This is what gynocriticism attempts to do. However, it does not imply that feminist criticism needs to reject all professional literary terms. The historical conditions under which critical ideologies are created are the reason why their feminist adaptations have reached a dead-end. Both Marxism and Structuralism are considered significant and elite critical approaches. “Science” is a key element in both the critical approaches. Both Marxism and Structuralism are considered to be the “sciences of the text”. Both the theories consider the author to be a producer of the text that is determined by historical and economical factors, rather than a creator. Structuralism too deals with the science of meanings, a grammar of genres.

Theories like Marxism and Structuralism did not rise to prominence accidentally. The era around the year 1950s was the time of scientific competition, when a lot of money flowed into laboratories and research. This was also the time when male humanist academia was at its lowest. Northrop Frye in his 1957 ‘ Anatomy of Criticism ’ presented the very first idea of a systematic critical theory that could help literary studies attain qualities of science. Thus, the new sciences of the text that were based on linguistics, structuralism, deconstructionism, neoformalism, psychoaesthetics, etc, gave literary critics the chance to show that their work too could be and was as aggressive and masculine as nuclear physics. In this process it excluded the notion that literary studies could be intuitive, expressive, and feminine.

Showalter very accurately observes that

“Literary science, in its manic generation of difficult terminology, its establishment of seminars and institutes of postgraduate study, creates an elite crops of specialists who spend more and more time mastering the theory, less and less time reading the books. We are moving towards a two-tiered system of “higher” and “lower” criticism, the higher concerned with the “scientific” problems of form and structure, the “lower” concerned with the “humanistic” problems of content and interpretation.”

This higher and lower criticism eventually assume subtler gender identities and assume sexual polarity. According to Showalter a synthesis between feminist literary theory and Marxism and Structuralism, but is just a one-sided exchange. While scientific literary theories attempt to get rid of the subjective, feminist criticism asserts the ‘ Authority of Experience ’. Women’s experience can easily vanish, become mute, invisible, or get lost in diagrams of theories likes structuralism, and the class conflict of Marxism. We must fiercely protest against the equation of feminine with the irrational. We must also recognize that questions that must be asked the most-such as repressed messages of women in history, psychology, anthropology-- cannot be answered by science.

According to Showalter the dead end in feminist literary criticism goes beyond the lack of appropriate definitions and terminologies. It arises from our own divided conscience.

“We are both the daughters of the male tradition, of our teachers, our professors, our dissertation advisers, and our publishers-a tradition which asks us to be rational, marginal, and grateful; and sisters in a new women's movement which engenders another kind of awareness and commitment, which demands that we renounce the pseudo-success of token womanhood and the ironic masks of academic debate.”

It is rather comfortable to continue to stick to the male dominated academics and theory and to be the teachers, anthropologists, psychologists, and critics of male literature, while considering to be universal. However, we must not under any circumstance become complacent and must continue to accept this intellectual challenge. We must rewrite anatomy, rhetoric, poetry and history.

Towards the end of  ' Toward a Feminist Poetics ', Showalter concludes,

“The task of feminist critics is to find a new language, a new way of reading that can integrate our intelligence and our experience, our reason and our suffering, our skepticism and our vision. This enterprise should not be confined to women. I invite Criticus, Poeticus, and Plutarchus to share it with us. One thing is certain: feminist criticism is not visiting. It is here to stay, and we must make it a permanent home.”

' Toward a Feminist Poetics ' by Elaine Showalter

Summary and overview, 'toward a feminist poetics' by elaine showalter : a summary.

• Feminist literary criticism was marginalised and most prominent literary critics of the 1970s were prejudiced against it. This was because feminist theory was not articulate.
• Suspicion of theory is another factor that prevents the development of feminist critical practice. Since literary theory has always been patriarchal, feminist critics are unable to comfortably rely on it. This isolates feminist theory even further.
• Many feminist critics in the United States believe that the inclusion of feminist theory in male dominant academia will deprive it of its very essence
• Showalter categorizes feminist criticism into woman as a reader , and woman as a writer . Woman as a reader or feminist critique focuses on literature written by men. It highlights the stereotypical perception of womanhood and explores traditional ideological assumptions in literary works by men. On the other hand, woman as a writer or gynocriticism focuses on woman as a writer where she is the one who creates the text, history, meaning, etc.
• ' Toward a Feminist Poetics ' examines Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge through feminist critique. Showalter shows how feminist critique focuses solely upon the conditions and treatment of women with respect to men. She points out that if we continue to do so, we will never be able to shift our focus to women's experiences without a masculine influence.
• In contrast to the male obsessed feminist critique, gynocriticism goes beyond and attempts to create a tradition of women's experiences, literature, and theory free of conventional assumptions.
• Showalter provides examples of gynocriticism through the works of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Nancy Cott, Ann Douglas, and Nina Auerbach.
• Women's literature must be read and studied in relation with their personal history, political, and social situation. Showalter provides an example through Cora Kaplan's review about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's ' Aurora Leigh '. She emphasizes how Kaplan completely ignores the factor that must have impacted Browning's writer the most– her relationship with her husband, Robert Browning, who himself was a celebrated writer.
• Showalter mentions how Florence Nightingale considers the pain and suffering of feminist awakening a guarantee of new change and progress. Female suffering has always been a popular literary commodity, and many significant and popular works have included it in their plots. However, Showalter suggests that women's literature must not stay confined to the themes of death, madness, and suffering, and must go beyond it.
• Since the publishing industry was male dominated too, women could not write anything without being free of mental bondage to get appreciation or acceptance from a male publisher. According to Showalter, only when all such mental barriers are removed, will women be able to create a literature with a distinct and 'precious speciality'.
• ' Toward a Feminist Poetics ' by Showalter also refers to the three phases or stages of feminist literary criticism. The first phase is the feminine phase where women aimed to compete with male writers, and compared their craft with that of their male contemporaries. The second phase is the feminist phase where the critics focus on the injustices and wrongs done to women in literary texts, and reject the conventional roles of females. Finally, the female phase is independent of the dependency on and obsession with the male literature. It instead aims to focus on creating a female literary tradition that includes women's internal experiences and personal history.
• Showalter further talks about how feminist literary criticism and theory has reached a dead-end despite interacting with prominent theories such as Marxism and Structuralism. These theories constitute a higher criticism that is considered professional and scientific, while the subjective and humanistic feminist criticism is either excluded or is seen as lower criticism. Feminist criticism realises that we are the products of both, a male dominated literature, theory, academia, and publishing, and a new female movement that accepts the intellectual challenge of rewriting history, poetry, and rhetoric according to women's intellect, experience, suffering, and vision.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory : An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 1995. 4th ed., Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1911.

Daly, Mary F. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston, Beacon Press, 1973. (p. 12-13)

Diamond, Arlyn, and Lee R Edwards. The Authority of Experience. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy . Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company, 1973.

Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, et al. Woman, Culture, and Society . Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, , Printing, 1974. (p. 39)

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own : British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. London Virago, 1978

Showalter, Elaine. The New Feminist Criticism. New York : Pantheon, 1985.

guide to feminist literary theory

#metoo in the classroom or book club: how to read unreliable female narrators like a feminist.

According to recent bestseller lists, unreliable female narrators are having a heyday. Popular titles like A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl are set in the present moment, but they contain echoes of much older works of literature commonly used in the classroom, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper . 

In all of these works of literature, and many more, a female narrator goes through a confusing experience; her reactions to the experience are documented in her narration, but something about her renders her voice untrustworthy to the reader. Sometimes, she is too young to be taken seriously, or she is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or physically unwell. Often, however, her most unreliable quality may be her gender, which is why these works of literature (see the Book List at the end of this article) make for rich study when discussed through the lens of feminist literary theory. 

What is Feminist Literary Theory?

Readers unfamiliar with literary theory, or literary criticism, as an academic pursuit may benefit from learning that literary theory is simply the practice of applying a specific frame of reference to the study of a work of literature. Anyone can engage in this scholarly practice and discover new meaning in the books they read. If you’re looking for more guidance, see our Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism . 

Here, we’ll examine how to apply established principles of feminist theory to works of literature. Feminist literary theory is the practice of examining a book from a feminist perspective — that is, with issues of gender inequities in mind. In the 1960s and 70s, feminism, a political and social movement that advocated for women’s rights, gathered momentum in America; this movement continues to inspire scholars to examine literature as a reflection of both society at large and of the political and social ideology of specific writers. Here’s how:

• Feminist critics examine literary portrayals of women to expose the ways in which writers misrepresent, underrepresent, or marginalize women. The writers need not always be male. 
• Feminist critics explore the nature of being female, seeking to illuminate the experiences of women who have been suppressed, silenced, or ignored.
• Feminist literary theory also concerns itself with power; in the case of female unreliable narrators, they lack power because their voices are considered inconstant or untrue.

Resources: 

• Feminism : Get your bearings with this definition and history of feminism.
• Literary Theory : This comprehensive discussion includes examples of several different literary theories.
• Feminist Literary Theory : Here, learn about what feminist theory is and how it is often applied to literature.  
• Key Events in the History of Feminism : See this timeline for a broad overview of the feminist movement in America.
• Feminist Approaches to Literature : Peruse this essay to learn about the traditions of feminist literary criticism.

Conversation Starter : Ask a group of readers or students to write down what they think of when they think of a feminist. Group members can continue writing independently, or, if they prefer, discuss with a partner what it might feel like to talk about feminism in a group setting. What worries them about the process and what excites them?

What is an Unreliable Narrator?

According to literary critic Wayne C. Booth , who coined the term, an unreliable narrator is the narrator of a work of literature who does not speak or act “in accordance with the norms of the work” ( The Rhetoric of Fiction, pages 158–59).

The norms of a literary work might involve the reporting of events and conversations, the interpretation of characters’ acts and behaviors, and/or the evaluation of situations that involve the narrator.

Clues that you’re in the hands of an unreliable narrator:

• The narrator’s reports of events include a subtext that may or may not accurately reflect the thoughts and feelings of the individuals involved, such as in Ian McEwan’s Atonement . 
• The narrator interprets another character’s behavior as dangerous or transgressive though the circumstances surrounding the behavior appear anodyne to others, or vice versa.
• The narrator evaluates an objectively positive situation as negative, or, as in Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller , an objectively negative situation as positive. The unreliability of the narrator is compounded by the unexpected or “inappropriate” nature of the narrator’s evaluation as viewed by other characters. 
• What is Subtext? Read this thorough definition and set of examples of subtext.
• Lesson Plan: Evaluating Legitimate Sources : Common Sense Education offers this set of teaching resources for evaluating the reliability of sources in real-world media.
• Lesson Plan: Women in Literature : This resource provides inspiration for classroom activities that examine how women are portrayed in literature.
• The Cult of the Unreliable Female Narrator Must Be Stopped : In this opinion piece, the author discusses the phenomenon of unreliable female narrators in a real-world setting.
• “ What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? It's Complicated ”: This thought-provoking Time article examines the experience of being a woman in modern society.

Conversation Starter : Have the group reflect on the notion of “norms” for a few minutes. In a classroom setting, students can write their responses in journals or discuss the questions with a partner. Ask: What norms do you observe in school, at work, or in other community settings? And what happens when someone violates those norms?

Feminism, Power, and Voice

Feminist literary scholars often explore a work of literature in terms of power. In the case of an unreliable female narrator, her power, or rather, her lack of power, lies in the matter of her voice. She lacks authority over her own story, so when she uses her own voice to seek help, for example, she is often denied the assistance she needs. 

When a female narrator’s judgment is impaired, she becomes more vulnerable: drugs or alcohol, or emotions like fear and anger, or other concerns like mental health problems or physical illness often afflict female narrators, which weaken them in the eyes of the male characters and sometimes, the readers themselves. In many cases, the male characters of a novel have more authority, more knowledge, and, therefore, more confidence and credibility than their female counterparts.

• Power as a resource or an asset: Some unreliable female narrators are deemed unworthy of a voice while others find that when they talk, no one listens. See discussion of The Yellow Wallpaper in the “Book List” section below.
• Power as a controlling force: At times, when an unreliable female narrator attempts to impact a person or a situation, her attempts may appear incoherent, sloppy, ineffectual, or even disastrous. See discussion of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine in the “Book List” section below.
• Power as having the potential to act: Unreliable female narrators sometimes seize power in ways that upset or offend other characters, and their energy is sometimes misconstrued as melodrama, a form of attention-seeking, or female emotion gone awry. See discussions of Gone Girl and My Sister, the Serial Killer in the “Book List” section below.
• Feminist Perspectives on Power : This academic paper discusses power as domination, as resource, and as tool of empowerment.
• A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy: Power & Authority : The Vanderbilt Center for Teaching provides this resource for applying key feminist theory questions such as “Who has the power here?” in a classroom setting.
• How Power Makes People Selfish : In this brief video, University of California Berkeley psychologist Dacher Kelter explains the “The Cookie Monster Study” and what he’s learned about power in society.
• How “Strong Female Characters” Still End Up Weak And Powerless : This article explores how to write female characters, and poses: “Do they pass the action figure test?”
• #MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women : The New York Times has documented how #MeToo actually shifted power dynamics.

Conversation Starter : Ask the group to reflect on the idea of power within the context of relationships: Think of a relationship that can exist between two people (younger brother/older sister, boss/employee, etc.) and how power might impact that relationship. For example, what does it mean for the older sister to have power over her little brother?

Reading the #MeToo Movement

Many feminists assert that the phenomenon of the unreliable female is not just a literary one, especially in light of the revelations of the #MeToo Movement. Despite an increased awareness around the world of the oppression of women, past and present, the words of women are often still doubted, dismissed, and denigrated, especially when the women are involved in conflicts with men. 

By applying tenets of feminist literary criticism to the sampling of titles discussed in the next “Book List” section , students and the general reader will be better able to appreciate the links between literature and real-world issues of gender discrimination, abuse, and harassment.

• Do Works by Men Implicated by #MeToo Belong in the Classroom? ( New York Times, October 7, 2019)
• Two Years on, the Literature of #MeToo Is Coming of Age ( The Guardian , October 14, 2019)
• One Year of #MeToo: ‘He Said, She Said’ Is a Literary Problem, Too ( The New Yorker , October 10, 2018)
• #MeToo Is All Too Real. But To Better Understand It, Turn To Fiction (New York Times, May 1, 2019)

Conversation Starter : Present the group with a real-world news article to help individuals understand and reflect on the link between feminist readings of texts and the #MeToo movement. Refer to the list above for ideas; one or more of these articles may prompt rich discussion of the books you are reading.

Book List: Read These 8 Books (and More) Like A Feminist 

All the texts listed below are appropriate for classroom study and book club discussions. Readers will quickly observe that all are narrated in the first person by an unreliable female. In these novels, authored by both men and women, when a woman or a young girl attempts to assert her power with her voice, efforts to discredit her move the events in the plot line forward.

1) The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Synopsis: In ten diary entries, the narrator of this short story writes openly about her postpartum struggles, which are exacerbated by her lack of agency over her own medical treatment. Published in 1892 in New England, the story is semi-autobiographical; Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself was forced to endure the rest cure prescribed to her by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell , and her narrator’s mental decline reflects Gilman’s own struggle to have some authority over her experience as a patient. 

Power dynamic: The narrator experiences a severe mental decline, and as she writes about her symptoms, they increase in severity and the details in her written narrative grow more terrifying. The narrator documents how her husband, a doctor, ignores her when she expresses what she needs, demonstrating to readers that her voice has been muted. 

Discussion point: What do the consequences of the narrator’s silencing reveal about the gender norms of the author’s time? 

Quote: “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” (Page 131)

The narrator appears to accept disrespectful treatment as a condition of marriage. Her resigned tone reveals the writer’s negative attitude toward marriage, a social institution at this time in American history that Gilman herself found unsatisfactory ; she divorced her husband soon after writing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” inviting criticism and disparagement from members of her society.

2) Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Synopsis: This 2012 thriller by author Gillian Flynn is often described as “ domestic ,” which is a term budding feminist scholars might enjoy exploring in its own right. The enraged anti-heroine, Amy Dunne, takes turns with her husband Nick to tell the story of Amy’s disappearance five years to the day after their wedding. Neither narrator is being completely honest, so the reader must attempt to read between the lines to find the truth. 

Power dynamic: As the reader learns that Amy’s rage stems from her discovery of Nick’s affair with a young, attractive female student, Amy’s desire to toy with Nick and punish him for his infidelity makes more sense. As well, when Nick narrates his side of the story, his descriptions of Amy reveal that he believes Amy is a hysteric ; Amy uses these assumptions about her character in devious ways, suggesting that the power in their relationship may actually be in her hands.

Discussion point: Does Amy’s rage make her a stronger female character with a more compelling, more authentic story or does she exhibit signs of what the patriarchy might identify as “female problems”? 

Quote: “My wife had a brilliant, popping brain, a greedy curiosity. But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women: Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it. She needed to be Amazing Amy all the time.”  ( Part One, Page 45 )

This passage appears in one of Nick’s sections of the novel, through which he narrates the story of Amy’s disappearance. In his description of Amy, he employs several negative stereotypes of heterosexual women that include an inherent need to impress men and to look attractive as well as a competitive approach to her relationships with other women. Nick does not address the possibility that Amy’s impulse to excel in so many aspects of her life may be fueled by a need to prove to the world that she is not merely an object and that she is, in fact, a capable, intelligent, multi-talented woman.

3) The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn 

Synopsis: Dr. Anna Fox, the protagonist of this 2018 novel, is a smart, well-educated child psychologist. Though she is a mental health professional herself, her self-sabotage and other effects of a traumatic experience lead others in her life to question her attachment to reality when she witnesses a murder. When Anna asks her friends and the police to believe her, they refuse to take her words to heart. Even the reader becomes complicit as Anna’s unreliable narration is fueled by a dangerous mixture of wine and psychotropic medications that renders her voice erratic as the events of the plot unfold.

Power dynamic: Anna is vulnerable and her observations are accurate, but the stigma of mental illness exacerbates her distressing situation. The police detectives and others in her life dismiss her fears as unfounded paranoia, and she is left to fend for herself. Ultimately, Anna’s voice is heard, but only after she saves herself from a potentially fatal attack and the evidence that proves her right is indisputable. 

Discussion point: Does the resolution of the novel suggest that women have the potential to defy convention and be their own rescuers, or is Anna just one of the lucky ones?

Quote: “Once more Jane enters the frame—but walking slowly, strangely. Staggering. A dark patch of crimson has stained the top of her blouse; even as I watch, it spreads to her stomach. Her hands scrabble at her chest. Something slender and silver has lodged there, like a hilt.” ( Chapter 32, Page 144 )

In this passage, Anna sees that Jane has been stabbed in the chest, but she does not yet know that Jane’s killer is her son, Ethan. Later, Anna learns the truth about Ethan, and the location of the stab wound suggests maternal tropes that enhance the shock value of Ethan’s murder of his own mother. For example, Jane is killed after sustaining a wound to the chest, which is the location of both her heart and her breasts; stereotypes of motherhood often place a child’s life at the center of the mother’s emotional world, represented by her heart, and they also often assume that a mother will nourish her child with her body, specifically, with her breasts. Ethan’s attack on his mother is all the more horrifying for the maternal stereotypes in play.

4) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Synopsis: Kathy is the protagonist and narrator of Never Let Me Go, a work of dystopian literature published in 2005. She tells the story of her past nostalgically, focusing on her personal experience of the events that mark her early life and upbringing. Kathy is a clone, so her understanding of herself and her role in the world has not been shaped by a childhood in a traditional family environment; instead, Kathy is influenced primarily by the adults who run Hailsham, the institution for young clones where she was brought up. 

Power dynamic: In her role as a carer for other clones whose organs have been harvested to save the lives of humans, Kathy falls into a stereotypical gender role , nurturing and caring for others in a maternal way. Kathy has some agency over herself, but her muddled self-perceptions lend her storytelling an untrustworthiness characteristic of unreliable narrators.

Discussion point: Kathy’s depth of emotion and her ability to think philosophically about art and life give her an unexpected humanity, but is her lack of credibility her fault, or the fault of the society that created her?

Quote: “There were other buildings, usually the outlying ones, that were virtually falling down, which we couldn’t use for much, but for which we felt in some way responsible.” ( Chapter 10, Page 71 )

From a young age, Kathy has been trained to be maternal by the guardians at Hailsham who assign her the role of carer. She and other carers look after clones who have been designated as organ donors, establishing that clones who function as mothers are essential to the organ donation industry that created the clones in the first place. When Kathy acknowledges that she and the other residents of the Cottages felt a sense of duty towards buildings that were in disrepair, she suggests that she felt genuine emotion towards the inanimate objects. Her memory of her emotional connection to the outbuildings reveals that Kathy’s impulse to nurture and to take care of others according to culturally-accepted maternal stereotypes has been ingrained into her character. 

5) Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Synopsis: In modern day Glasgow, Eleanor Oliphant, the title character of the novel published in 2017, is an eccentric 29-year-old woman whose mother is apparently in prison. Eleanor has an alcohol problem, a propensity towards social awkwardness, and a crush on a pop star; her infatuation with this singer inspires her to reinvent herself, but when the object of her affection proves to be unreachable, Eleanor is forced to face the reality of her painful past.

Power dynamic: Eleanor describes her experience with loneliness in clear, affecting prose, revealing her mental health struggles with humor and self-deprecation . The reader sees Eleanor as she sees herself, which is often the object of a darkly funny punchline. 

Discussion point: Eleanor’s use of humor to dispel the harshness of her reality may make her less reliable as a narrator, as she seems to protect her sensitivities with the distance of jokes, but what are her other options in a world that judges people who are lonely, preferring to look the other way?

Quote: “A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a potted plant, is she certifiable? I’m confident that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.” ( Chapter 6, Page 51 )

In this passage from the novel, Eleanor reveals that her houseplant’s name is Polly and that she has one-sided conversations with Polly, which she regards as a “perfectly normal” and acceptable behavior. Eleanor’s choice to anthropomorphize her houseplant by giving the houseplant a stereotypically female name suggests that Eleanor believes that a woman would offer Eleanor, in her loneliness, more sympathy than a man. Women are often stereotyped as talkative, which makes Polly’s role as a sympathetic listener even more poignant; as well, Polly’s inability to respond to Eleanor emphasizes the silence that characterizes Eleanor’s life on weekends, when she speaks to no one else. 

6) My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Synopsis: Korede, the protagonist of this 2019 satirical novel set in Lagos, Nigeria, takes care to cover the bloody tracks of her murderous sister Ayoola, whose sociopathic tendencies may stem from the abuse she sustained at the hands of their father. Braithwaite presents the themes of her debut novel with dark humor, examining the close relationship between the sisters through a love triangle that has the potential to go horribly wrong. 

Power dynamic: Korede’s attachment to Ayoola and her impulse to protect her suggest she is a loving and selfless sister, but her narration of the events concerning Ayoola may not be trustworthy as a result of Korede’s sisterly loyalty. The setting of the story further complicates matters; in Lagos, violence against women is alarmingly commonplace, which means that Ayoola’s murderous impulses could reflect an overreactive fight or flight response to any interaction with any man. 

Discussion point : How much does the culture of abuse and harassment into which the sisters are born contribute to their behaviors? Does the author’s satirical tone enhance the cautionary tone of this novel or detract from it?

Quote: “She didn’t mean to kill him; she wanted to warn him off, but he wasn’t scared of her weapon. He was over six feet tall and she must have looked like a doll to him, with her small frame, long eyelashes and rosy, full lips.

(Her description, not mine.)

She killed him on the first strike, a jab straight to the heart. But then she stabbed him twice more to be sure. He sank to the floor. She could hear her own breathing and nothing else.”

( Chapter 4, Page 7 )

In this passage, Koreda recalls Ayoola’s comparison of herself to a doll. This comparison juxtaposes Ayoola’s violent act of stabbing with what she believes is her perceived weakness as a young woman. By focusing the reader’s eye on stereotypically feminine details like her diminutive size in comparison to most men and her delicate, sexually alluring facial features, Koreda shocks the reader into realizing that this seemingly vulnerable young woman is actually a cold-hearted killer. Ayoola defies many stereotypes that surround women, all of which suggest that femininity is weakness. 

7) Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Synopsis: This 2012 novel opens as a young woman named Queenie, which is another alias for the protagonist also known as Verity and as Lady Julie Beaufort-Stuart, acknowledges to the reader, and to her Nazi captors, that she has a particular skill: pretending. From the start of the novel, Lady Julie warns the reader that she may or may not be telling the truth, which is a direct circumstance of her wartime duties as a spy. In this young adult novel set during World War II, unreliability and untrustworthiness are Julie’s superpowers and the keys to Julie’s survival. 

Power dynamic : As Julie writes the confession that makes up the entirety of the epistolary novel , she manipulates her Nazi captors, demonstrating that her ability to work as a double-agent is not merely a stereotypical feminine wile, but a life-saving strength. As well, the novel’s focus on Lady Julie’s friendship with another heroic young woman, Maddie examines the role of power between two equals.

Discussion point: Is the focus on the friendship between Lady Julie and Maddie enough to label Code Name Verity a feminist novel ? What other elements of the novel make it feminist?

Quote: “I am no longer afraid of getting old. In fact I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant.

But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.” ( Part 1, Page 114 )

Verity scolds her younger self in this passage for being so vain as to worry about the natural processes of aging; she criticizes her own youthful arrogance and her immature assumption that old age would negatively affect her. Young Verity’s fears can be explained by her existence in a culture that places inordinate amounts of value on a woman’s youth and appearance . As a product of that culture, Verity understandably places value on her own youth and appearance, lamenting the time when her youth will fade. Now, at this point in the novel, when Verity understands that her life is in danger, she finally appreciates the fact that living to an old age is a blessing. 

8) We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Synopsis: Cady, the rebellious 17-year-old narrator of this young adult novel published in 2014, is 15 years old when she suffers a mysterious accident she cannot remember. As she struggles with painful headaches in the years that follow her injuries, her mother refuses to tell her what happened to her, forcing Cady to draw up hazy memories of the incident on her own. 

Power dynamic : Cady’s resistant attitude towards her upbringing mirrors, in some ways, the experience of all young people as they seek to individuate themselves from their families. Cady’s unwillingness to live according to the norms set by her grandfather, however, diverges from typical adolescence when her rebellious ways cause a disaster from which she will never wholly recover.

Discussion points : What effect does Cady’s patriarchal family have on her development from a young girl into a woman with her own opinions about the world? Some critics describe Cady’s voice as authentic for its messiness, but does this reading of her character support difficult stereotypes of young women or challenge them?

Quote: “He married Tipper and kept her in the kitchen and the garden. He put her on display in pearls and on sailboats. She seemed to enjoy it.” ( Chapter 3, Page 6 )

Cady describes the relationship between her grandparents with cynicism, revealing her awareness that her grandfather’s treatment of her grandmother as a decorative object is objectionable. Cady scorns her grandmother for “enjoying” her life as a stereotypical “trophy wife,” which is a sexist term in its own right; that Cady describes her grandmother without using the term reflects her thoughtfulness and her resistance to the patriarchal norms that characterize the society of her grandparents. 

Social Media and Digital Resources

• On Twitter, follow feminist authors Roxane Gay ( @rgay ) and Margaret Atwood ( @MargaretAtwood ), among others — as well as hashtags associated with feminist discussion, such as #WomensReality and #EverydaySexism.
• Follow #Readwomen and the push for equal treatment for women writers.
• Find inspiration among these “ 6 Blogs And Podcasts For Book-Loving Feminists ” — including the Reading Women Podcast .
• View this TED Talk by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “ We Should All Be Feminists .”
• The documentary This Changes Everything explores underrepresentation of women in the entertainment industry.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

42 What Are Feminist Criticism, Postfeminist Criticism, and Queer Theory?

Feminist Criticism

Feminist criticism is a critical approach to literature that seeks to understand how gender and sexuality shape the meaning and representation of literary texts. While feminist criticism has its roots in the 1800s (First Wave), it became a critical force in the early 1970s (Second Wave) as part of the broader feminist movement and continues to be an important and influential approach to literary analysis.

Feminist critics explore the ways in which literature reflects and reinforces gender roles and expectations, as well as the ways in which it can challenge and subvert them. They examine the representation of female characters and the ways in which they are portrayed in relation to male characters, as well as the representation of gender and sexuality more broadly. With feminist criticism, we may consider both the woman as writer and the written woman.

As with New Historicism and Cultural Studies criticism, one of the key principles of feminist criticism is the idea that literature is not a neutral or objective reflection of reality, but rather, literary texts are shaped by the social and cultural context in which they are produced. Feminist critics are interested in gender stereotypes, exploring how literature reflects and reinforces patriarchal power structures and how it can be used to challenge and transform these structures.

Postfeminist Criticism

Postfeminist criticism is a critical approach to literature that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s as a response to earlier feminist literary criticism. It acknowledges the gains of feminism in terms of women’s rights and gender equality, but also recognizes that these gains have been uneven and that new forms of gender inequality have emerged.

The “post” in postfeminist can be understood like the “post” in post-structuralism or postcolonialism. Postfeminist critics are interested in exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed and represented in literature, but they also pay attention to the ways in which other factors such as race, class, and age intersect with gender to shape experiences and identities. They seek to move beyond the binary categories of male/female and masculine/feminine, and to explore the ways in which gender identity and expression are fluid and varied.

Postfeminist criticism also pays attention to the ways in which contemporary culture, including literature and popular media, reflects and shapes attitudes towards gender and sexuality. It explores the ways in which these representations can be empowering or constraining and seeks to identify and challenge problematic representations of gender and sexuality.

One of the key principles of postfeminist criticism is the importance of diversity and inclusivity. Postfeminist critics are interested in exploring the experiences of individuals who have been marginalized or excluded by traditional feminist discourse, including women of color, queer and trans individuals, and working-class women. If you are familiar with t he American Dirt controversy, where Oprah’s book pick was widely criticized because the author was a white woman, is an example of this type of approach.

Queer Theory

Queer theory is a critical approach to literature and culture that seeks to challenge and destabilize dominant assumptions about gender and sexuality. It emerged in the 1990s as a response to the limitations of traditional gay and lesbian studies, which tended to focus on issues of identity and representation within a binary understanding of gender and sexuality. According to Jennifer Miller,

“The film theorist Teresa de Lauretis (figure 1.1) coined the term at a University of California, Santa Cruz, conference about lesbian and gay sexualities in February 1990…. In her introduction to the special issue, de Lauretis outlines the central features of queer theory, sketching the field in broad strokes that have held up remarkably well.”

While queer theory was formalized as a critical approach in 1990, scholars built on earlier ideas from Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, as well as the works of Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, and others.

Queer theory is interested in exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed and performative, rather than innate or essential. As with feminist and postfeminist criticism, queer theory seeks to expose the ways in which these constructions are shaped by social, cultural, and historical factors, but additionally, queer theory seeks to challenge the rigid binaries of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Queer theory also emphasizes the importance of intersectionality, or the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with other forms of identity such as race, class, and ability. It seeks to uncover the complex and nuanced ways in which multiple forms of oppression and privilege intersect.

Queer theory focuses on the importance of resistance and subversion. Scholars are interested in exploring the ways in which marginalized individuals and communities have resisted and subverted the dominant culture’s norms and values, observing how these acts of resistance and subversion can be empowering and transformative.

Learning Objectives

• Use a variety of approaches to texts to support interpretations (CLO 1.2)
• Using a literary theory, choose appropriate elements of literature (formal, content, or context) to focus on in support of an interpretation (CLO 2.3)
• Be exposed to a variety of critical strategies through literary theory lenses, such as formalism/New Criticism, reader-response, structuralism, deconstruction, historical and cultural approaches (New Historicism, postcolonial, Marxism), psychological approaches, feminism, and queer theory (CLO 4.1)
• Understand how context impacts the reading of a text, and how different contexts can bring about different readings (CLO 4.3)
• Demonstrate awareness of critical approaches by pairing them with texts in productive and illuminating ways (CLO 5.5)
• Demonstrate through discussion and/or writing how textual interpretation can change given the context from which one reads (CLO 6.2)
• Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)

Scholarship: Examples from Feminist, Postfeminist, and Queer Theory Critics

Feminist criticism could technically be considered to be as old as writing. Since Sappho of Lesbos wrote her famous lyrics, women authors have been an active and important part of their cultures’ literary traditions. Why, then, are we sometimes not as familiar with the works of women authors? One of the earliest feminist critics is the French existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). In her important book, The Second Sex, she lays the groundwork for feminist literary criticism by considering how in most societies, “man” is normal, and “woman” is “the Other.” You may have heard this famous quote: “One is not born a woman but becomes one.” (French: “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient”). This phrase encapsulates the essential feminist idea that “woman” is a social construct.

Feminist: Excerpt from Introduction to The Second Sex (1949), translated by H.M. Parshley

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”? To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer. The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that my only defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man’, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete 3 hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam. Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being …’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself … Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’ The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged. Excerpt from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (translated by H.M. Parshley) is licensed All Rights Reserved and is used here under Fair Use exception.

How do you feel about de Beauvoir’s conception of woman as “Other”? How are her approaches to gender similar to what we have learned about deconstruction and New Historicism? Could feminist criticism, like Marxist, postcolonial, and ethnic studies criticism, also be thought of as having “power” as its central concern?

Let’s move on to postfeminist criticism. When you think of Emily Dickinson, sadomasochism is probably the last thing that comes to mind, unless you’re postfeminist scholar and critic Camille Paglia . No stranger to culture wars, Paglia has often courted controversy; a 2012 New York Times article noted that “ [a]nyone who has been following the body count of the culture wars over the past decades knows Paglia.” Paglia continues to write and publish both scholarship and popular works. Her fourth essay collection, Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education , was published by  Pantheon in 2018.

This excerpt from her 1990 book Sexual Personae , which drew on her doctoral dissertation research, demonstrates Paglia’s creative and confrontational approach to scholarship.

Postfeminist: Excerpt from “Amherst’s Madame de Sade” in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia (1990)

Consciousness in Dickinson takes the form of a body tormented in every limb. Her sadomasochistic metaphors are Blake’s Universal Man hammering on himself, like the auctioneering Jesus. Her suffering personae make up the gorged superself of Romanticism. I argued that modern sadomasochism is a limitation of the will and that for a Romantic like the mastectomy-obsessed Kleist it represents a reduction of self. A conventional feminist critique of Emily Dickinson’s life would see her hemmed in on all sides by respectability and paternalism, impediments to her genius. But a study of Romanticism shows that post-Enlightenment poets are struggling with the absence of limits, with the gross inflation of solipsistic imagination. Hence Dickinson’s most uncontrolled encounter is with the serpent of her antisocial self, who breaks out like the Aeolian winds let out of their bag. Dickinson does wage guerrilla warfare with society. Her fractures, cripplings, impalements, and amputations are Dionysian disorderings of the stable structures of the Apollonian lawgivers. God, or the idea of God, is the “One,” without whom the “Many” of nature fly apart. Hence God’s death condemns the world to Decadent disintegration. Dickinson’s Late Romantic love of the apocalyptic parallels Decadent European taste for salon paintings of the fall of Babylon or Rome. Her Dionysian cataclysms demolish Victorian proprieties. Like Blake, she couples the miniature and grandiose, great disjunctions of scale whose yawing swings release tremendous poetic energy. The least palatable principle of the Dionysian, I have stressed, is not sex but violence, which Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Emerson exclude from their view of nature. Dickinson, like Sade, draws the reader into ascending degrees of complicity, from eroticism to rape, mutilation, and murder. With Emily Brontë, she uncovers the aggression repressed by humanism. Hence Dickinson is the creator of Sadean poems but also the creator of sadists, the readers whom she smears with her lamb’s blood. Like the Passover angel, she stains the lintels of the bourgeois home with her bloody vision. “There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House,” she announces with a satisfaction completely overlooked by the Wordsworthian reader (389). But merely because poet and modern society are in conflict does not mean art necessarily gains by “freedom.” It is a sentimental error to think Emily Dickinson the victim of male obstructionism. Without her struggle with God and father, there would have been no poetry. There are two reasons for this. First, Romanticism’s overexpanded self requires artificial restraints. Dickinson finds these limitations in sadomasochistic nature and reproduces them in her dual style. Without such a discipline, the Romantic poet cannot take a single step, for the sterile vastness of modern freedom is like gravity-free outer space, in which one cannot walk or run. Second, women do not rise to supreme achievement unless they are under powerful internal compulsion. Dickinson was a woman of abnormal will. Her poetry profits from the enormous disparity between that will and the feminine social persona to which she fell heir at birth. But her sadism is not anger, the a posteriori response to social injustice. It is hostility, an a priori Achillean intolerance for the existence of others, the female version of Romantic solipsism. Excerpt from Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia is licensed All Rights Reserved and is used here under Fair Use exception.

It’s important to note that these critical approaches can be applied to works from any time period, as the title of Paglia’s book makes clear. In this sense, post-feminist scholarship is similar to deconstruction and borrows many of its methods. After reading this passage, do you feel the same way about Emily Dickinson’s poetry? How does Paglia’s postfeminist approach differ from Simone de Beauvoir’s approach to feminism?

Our final reading is from Judith Butler , who is considered both a feminist scholar and a foundational queer theorist. Their 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is considered an essential queer theory text. Expanding on the ideas about gender and performativity, Bodies that Matter (2011) deconstructs the binary sex/gender distinctions that we see in the works of earlier feminist scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir.

Queer Theory: Excerpt from “Introduction,”  Bodies that Matter  by Judith Butler (2011)

Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? -Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs If one really thinks about the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it. -Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In a Word,” interview with Ellen Rooney There is no nature, only the effects of nature: denaturalization or naturalization. -Jacques Derrida, Donner le Temps Is there a way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender? And how does the category of “sex” figure within such a relationship? Consider first that sexual difference is often invoked as an issue of material differences. Sexual difference, however, is never simply a function of material differences that are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices. Further, to claim that sexual differences are indissociable from discursive demarcations is not the same as claiming that discourse causes sexual difference. The category “sex” is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a “regulatory ideal.” In this sense, then, “sex” not only functions as a norm but also is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce-demarcate, circulate, differentiate-the bodies it controls. Thus, “sex” is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words, “sex” is an ideal construct that is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize “sex” and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled. Indeed, it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerialization, opened up by this process that mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law. But how, then, does the notion of gender performativity relate to this conception of materialization? In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names. What will, I hope, become clear in what follows is that the regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive effect. And there will be no way to understand “gender” as a cultural construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as “the body” or its given sex. Rather, once “sex” itself is understood in its normativity, the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materializatiqn of that regulatory norm. “Sex” is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the “one” becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility. At stake in such a reformulation of the materiality of bodies will be the following: (1) the recasting of the matter of bodies as the effect of a dynamic of power, such that the matter of bodies will be indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization and the signification of those material effects; (2) the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of dis.course to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains; (3) the construal of “sex” no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies; (4) a rethinking of the process by which a bodily norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on as not, strictly speaking, undergone by a subject, but rather that the subject, the speaking “I,” is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex; and (5) a linking of this process of “assuming” a sex with the question of identification, and with the discursive means by which the heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/ or disavows other identifications. This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of so cial life, which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreadful identification against which-and by virtue of which-the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation. The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of”sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation that produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge. This is a repudiation that creates the valence of “abjection” and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre. Further, the materialization of a given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identificatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed. And yet, this disavowed abjection will threaten to expose the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed subject, grounded as that subject is in repudiation whose consequences it cannot fully control. The task will be to consider this threat and disruption not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility. Lastly, the mobilization of the categories of sex within political discourse will be haunted in some ways by the very instabilities that the categories effectively produce and foreclose. Although the political discourses that mobilize identity categories tend to cultivate identifications in the service of a political goal, it may be that the persistence of disidentification is equally crucial to the rearticulation of democratic contestation. Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminists and queer politics are mobilized. Such collective disidentifications can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern. Excerpt from Bodies that Matter by Judith Butler is licensed All Rights Reserved and is used here under Fair Use exception.

You can see in Butler’s work how deconstruction plays a role in queer theory approaches to texts. What do you think of her approach to sexuality and gender? Which bodies matter? Why is this question important for literary scholars, and how can we use literary texts to answer the question?

In our next section, we’ll look at some ways that these theories can be used to analyze literary texts.

Using Feminist, Postfeminist, and Queer Theory as a Critical Approach

As you can see from the introduction and the examples of scholarship that we read, there’s some overlap in the concepts of these three critical approaches. One of the first choices you have to make when working with a text is deciding which theory to use. Below I’ve outlined some ideas that you might explore.

• Character Analysis: Examine the portrayal of characters, paying attention to how gender roles and stereotypes shape their identities. Consider the agency, autonomy, and representation of both male and female characters, and analyze how their interactions contribute to or challenge traditional gender norms.
• Theme Exploration: Investigate themes related to gender, power dynamics, and patriarchy within the text. Explore how the narrative addresses issues such as sexism, women’s rights, and the construction of femininity and masculinity. Consider how the themes may reflect or critique societal attitudes towards gender.
• Language and Symbolism: Analyze the language used in the text, including the representation of gender through linguistic choices. Examine symbols and metaphors related to gender and sexuality. Identify instances of language that may reinforce or subvert traditional gender roles, and explore how these linguistic elements contribute to the overall meaning of the work.
• Authorial Intent and Context: Investigate the author’s background, motivations, and societal context. Consider how the author’s personal experiences and the cultural milieu may have influenced their portrayal of gender. Analyze the author’s stance on feminist issues and whether the text aligns with or challenges feminist principles.
• Intersectionality: Take an intersectional approach by considering how factors such as race, class, sexuality, and other identity markers intersect with gender in the text. Explore how different forms of oppression and privilege intersect, shaping the experiences of characters and influencing the overall thematic landscape of the literary work.

Postfeminist

• Interrogating Postfeminist Tropes: Examine the text for elements that align with or challenge postfeminist tropes, such as the notion of individual empowerment, choice feminism, or the idea that traditional gender roles are no longer relevant. Analyze how the narrative engages with or subverts these postfeminist ideals.
• Exploring Ambiguities and Contradictions: Investigate contradictions and ambiguities within the text regarding gender and sexuality. Postfeminist criticism often acknowledges the complexities of contemporary gender dynamics, so analyze instances where the text may present conflicting perspectives on issues like agency, equality, and empowerment.
• Media and Pop Culture Influences: Consider the influence of media and popular culture on the text. Postfeminist criticism often examines how cultural narratives and media representations of gender impact literature. Analyze how the text responds to or reflects contemporary media portrayals of gender roles and expectations.
• Global and Cultural Perspectives: Take a global and cultural perspective by exploring how the text addresses postfeminist ideas in different cultural contexts. Analyze how the narrative engages with issues of globalization, intersectionality, and diverse cultural perspectives on gender and feminism.
• Temporal Considerations: Examine how the temporal setting of the text influences its engagement with postfeminist ideas. Consider whether the narrative reflects a specific historical moment or if it transcends temporal boundaries. Analyze how societal shifts over time may be reflected in the text’s treatment of gender issues.
• Deconstructing Norms and Binaries: Utilize Queer Theory to deconstruct traditional norms and binaries related to gender and sexuality within the text. Explore how the narrative challenges or reinforces heteronormative assumptions, and analyze characters or relationships that subvert or resist conventional categories.
• Examining Queer Identities: Focus on the exploration and representation of queer identities within the text. Consider how characters navigate and express their sexualities and gender identities. Analyze the nuances of queer experiences and the ways in which the text contributes to a more expansive understanding of LGBTQ+ identities.
• Language and Subversion: Analyze the language used in the text with a Queer Theory lens. Examine linguistic choices that challenge or reinforce societal norms related to gender and sexuality. Explore how the text employs language to subvert or resist heteronormative structures.
• Queer Time and Space: Consider how the concept of queer time and space is represented in the text. Queer Theory often explores non-linear or non-normative temporalities and spatialities. Analyze how the narrative disrupts conventional timelines or spatial arrangements to create alternative queer realities.
• Intersectionality within Queer Narratives: Take an intersectional approach within the framework of Queer Theory. Analyze how factors such as race, class, and ethnicity intersect with queer identities in the text. Explore the intersections of different marginalized identities to understand the complexities of lived experiences.

Applying Gender Criticisms to Literary Texts

As with our other critical approaches, we will start with  a close reading of the poem below (we’ll do this together in class or as part of the recorded lecture for this chapter). In your close reading, you’ll focus on gender, stereotypes, the patriarchy, heteronormative writing, etc.  With feminist, postfeminist, and queer theory criticism, you might look to outside sources, especially if you are considering the author’s gender identity or sexuality, or you might bring your own knowledge and lived experience to the text.

The poem below was written by Mary Robinson, an early Romantic English poet. Though her works were quite popular when she was alive, you may not have heard of her. However, you’re probably familiar with her male contemporaries William Blake, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Keep in mind that reading this poem is thus itself a feminist act. When we choose to include historical voices of woman that were previously excluded, we are doing feminist criticism.

“January, 1795”

BY  MARY ROBINSON

Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing, Lords in ermine, beggars freezing; Titled gluttons dainties carving, Genius in a garret starving.

Lofty mansions, warm and spacious; Courtiers cringing and voracious; Misers scarce the wretched heeding; Gallant soldiers fighting, bleeding.

Wives who laugh at passive spouses; Theatres, and meeting-houses; Balls, where simp’ring misses languish; Hospitals, and groans of anguish.

Arts and sciences bewailing; Commerce drooping, credit failing; Placemen mocking subjects loyal; Separations, weddings royal.

Authors who can’t earn a dinner; Many a subtle rogue a winner; Fugitives for shelter seeking; Misers hoarding, tradesmen breaking.

Taste and talents quite deserted; All the laws of truth perverted; Arrogance o’er merit soaring; Merit silently deploring.

Ladies gambling night and morning; Fools the works of genius scorning; Ancient dames for girls mistaken, Youthful damsels quite forsaken.

Some in luxury delighting; More in talking than in fighting; Lovers old, and beaux decrepid; Lordlings empty and insipid.

Poets, painters, and musicians; Lawyers, doctors, politicians: Pamphlets, newspapers, and odes, Seeking fame by diff’rent roads.

Gallant souls with empty purses; Gen’rals only fit for nurses; School-boys, smit with martial spirit, Taking place of vet’ran merit.

Honest men who can’t get places, Knaves who shew unblushing faces; Ruin hasten’d, peace retarded; Candor spurn’d, and art rewarded.

“January, 1795” by Mary Robinson is in the Public Domain.

Questions (Feminist and Postfeminist Criticism)

• What evidence of gender stereotypes can you find in the text?
• What evidence of patriarchy and power structure do you see? How is this evidence supported by historical context? Consider, for example, the 1794 contemporary poem “London” by William Blake. These two poems have similar themes. How does the male poet Blake’s treatment of this theme compare with the female poet Mary Robinson’s work? How have these two works and authors differed in their critical reception?
• Who is the likely contemporary audience for Mary Robinson’s poetry? Who is the audience today? What about the audience during the 1940s and 50s, when New Criticism was popular? How would these three audiences view feminism, patriarchy, and gender roles differently?
• Do a search for Mary Robinson’s work in JSTOR. Then do a search for William Blake. How do the two authors compare in terms of scholarship produced on their work? Do you see anything significant about the dates of the scholarship? The authors? The critical lenses that are applied?
• Do you see any contradictions and ambiguities within the text regarding gender and sexuality? What about evidence for subversion of traditional gender roles?

Example of a feminist thesis statement: While William Blake’s “London” and Mary Robinson’s “January, 1795” share similar themes with similar levels of artistry, Robinson’s work and critical reception demonstrates the effects of 18th-century patriarchal power structures that kept even the most brilliant women in their place.

Example of a postfeminist thesis statement: Mary Robinson’s “January, 1975” slyly subverts gender norms and expectations with a brilliance that transcends the confines of traditional eighteenth century gender roles.

To practice queer theory, let’s turn to a more contemporary text. “The Eyepatch” by transgender author and scholar Cassandra Arc follows a gender-neutral protagonist as they navigate an ambiguous space. This short story questions who sees and who is seen in heteronormative spaces, as well as exploring what it means to see yourself as queer.

“The Eyepatch”

The lightning didn’t kill me, though it should’ve. The bolt pierced my eyes, gifted curse from Zeus or Typhon or God. I remember waking up in that hospital, everything was black. I felt bandages, pain, fire. I tried to sit up, but a hand gently pushed me back into the bed. I heard the shuffling of feet and the sound of scrubs rubbing against each other. I smelled the pungent disinfectant in the air.  I heard the slow methodical beep of a heart rate monitor. That incessant blip-blip-blip was my heart rate. I heard the thunder of my heart beating to the same methodical rhythm. A metronome to a wordless melody of ignorance, an elegy to blindness.

I wasn’t awake long. They put me back to sleep. To salvage my face. My burned face, my charred face. I should’ve died. The next time I woke the bandages were gone. I could see the doctors, but I couldn’t see me. They wouldn’t let me see me, told me they would fix my face, make it look good again. I didn’t trust them. The doctors thought their faces were pretty. They weren’t. I asked to see my face. They wouldn’t let me. I’m lucky to be alive, that’s what they said. I’m lucky I can see.

But some things I can’t see. They left the eyepatch on my left eye. Told me the left eye would never work again. My right eye can’t see everything. It sees the doctors, their heads swathed in sterile caps, their wrinkled noses, their empty eyes. It sees the nurses, their exhaustion, their bitterness. It sees the bleak beige walls and the tiny tinny television hanging in the corner by the laminated wood door. It sees the plastic bag of fluid hanging from the metal rack on wheels, the plastic instruments and the fluorescent light panel above my head. But it can’t see my mom, it can’t see my sister. It can’t see myself. They never believe me.

My mom comes to visit me on the third day I’m awake. I hear her enter, smell her usual perfume, lilac with a hint of dirt and rain. I feel her hand hold mine, warmth and comfort and kindness. My right eye can’t see her. She came from the garden to see me, to make sure I’m okay. My right eye can’t see my mom. The doctors don’t believe me. My mom believes me.

The doctors pull her away from me. They say they need to fix my face. She can see me tomorrow. I smell the anesthesia and hear the spurt of the needle as they test to make sure no air bubbles formed in the syringe. I hear my mom crying. She assures me she’ll come back tomorrow. I can’t see her tears. They put me back to sleep.

In my dreams I can see them, my mother and sister. There is no eyepatch on my left eye; it can see them, and it can see me, reflected in the water. We swim across the pond to the island with the tree in the center. The reeds grow tall along the banks. The water smells of fish shit and moss. the reflection is murky except for the shallow blue eyes.

The reflection is broken by a ripple. My sister swims to me, wraps her arms around me, then splashes water directly into my face. Some droplets stick to my forehead and nose, like beads of cold sweat. She giggles, a grin emerges on her freckled face. Her wet blonde hair has strands of moss hanging from it. I smile back and with a quick flick of my wrist she too is drenched.  I feel peace from the water. My mother calls us to shore. Storm clouds, she says. The lightning might kill you. That’s what she said then. I didn’t believe her. Thunder echoes like the heartbeat of the sky.

The doctors wake me up. They have thunder too. I cannot see them, can’t see anything. Bandages surround my face. My face is fixed. That’s what they claim. I didn’t see anything wrong before. They wouldn’t let me see me. It’s a miracle. I’m lucky to be alive. I don’t believe them. They apologize for not being able to fix my eye.

My sister comes with my mom today. I can’t see her. She believes me, reminds me about the lightning. It could’ve killed me. When she learns I can’t see her, she cackles. She says she’ll have fun when I come home. She asks when I’ll come home.

I don’t know when I’ll come home. The doctors don’t know. I should’ve died. They want to keep me. My mother wants to take me. They shout at each other. My sister holds my left hand. I can’t see her hand, or mine.

The doctors remove the bandages. They show me a mirror. I see behind me, but I don’t see me . I see the eyepatch float. When I try to remove it the doctors stop me. My eye is too damaged. They tell me to never remove the eyepatch. They hold up a vase. My mom brought me flowers.  I can’t see the flowers. They don’t believe me. Their voices are angry. Stop being childish, they say. I lie and say I see the flowers.

Once one of the nurses I can’t see, he brought me food from outside. I saw the bag float in the room. I heard his footsteps. He handed me the brown paper bag and told me to enjoy. He sounded old. I felt a band of metal on his left-hand ring finger when I took the bag. The smell of chicken nuggets and French fries pierced the stale aroma of bleach and disinfectant. I heard the edge of the bed creak, the cushion indented slightly. The invisible nurse told wild tales of dragons and monsters while I ate. He didn’t know when I’ll be home. He watered invisible flowers before leaving. I fell back asleep.

In my dreams I’m still swimming. The sun is blocked by clouds. Drops of rain hit my hair. Mother calls from the cabin on the shore. My sister runs out of the water, her leg kicks water into my eyes. I’m blinded for a moment. I don’t leave. I stay in the water, dropping my eyes level with the water. They both hear the thunder. I don’t hear the thunder. They both see the lightning.

All I feel is heat. I’m blind. The lightning should’ve killed me. The lightning in my eyes, lucky to be alive.  My sister screams for help. Smell the ozone. Pungent and sweet. I don’t scream, I can’t scream. I’m dead. I’m alive. The lightning killed me. I can’t see my mom. I can’t see my sister. I can’t see the flowers. The lightning saved me. I can see the doctors, I can see the nurses, I can see the hospital.

The lightning killed me, that’s what they said. They brought me back with lightning, pads of metal, artificial energy. My eye is broken, the one the lightning struck. Three minutes. That’s what they told me. Three minutes of death. My face was burned. I can’t see it. They fixed it.

The doctors worried my body was broken too. The lightning still might kill me. They say I need to move, I need to walk. Lightning causes paralysis, or weakness. They bring in a special doctor. I can’t see this doctor. The other doctors leave. The invisible doctor takes me to a room for walking practice. I think I walk just fine. They hold me anyway. Crutches line the walls, pairs of metal handrails take up the center, and exercise equipment sits off to the right side. The invisible doctor lets go and I fall. My hands are too slow to catch me. My face hits one of the many black foam squares that make up the floor. I turn my head left and see the eyepatch almost fall off in the mirror on the wall. For a second, I think I see me, but I can’t see me. The invisible doctor fixes it and helps me to my feet. They tell me to be like a tree, that I’ll be okay. That I’ll be able to walk again soon. They tell me when I can walk I will go home. I place my hands on the rails. The metal is cold. The doctor yelps in shock and withdraws their hand; it was just static. My arms are weak but they hold me. My legs move slowly, but I can’t walk without the rails.

The invisible doctor takes me back after a while. They tell me I did good work. It’s a miracle I can still move. They tell me lightning takes people’s movement. The lightning should’ve killed me. That’s what they say. They tell me strength should come back to me. Lightning steals that too. Lightning can’t keep strength like it keeps movement.

My mom comes back again. She brings me the manatee, Juno. I can see Juno. Soft gray fabric, small black plastic eyes. I hold her tightly in my arms. Mom wants me home. The doctors still won’t let her take me. Juno will keep me safe, that’s what she said. She brings me homework too, and videos of teachers explaining how the world works. I can see them. I can’t see my mom.

I miss the smell of earth when my mom leaves. I want to smell her garden again. To swim in the pond and feel the moss brush against my skin. I want to feel the peace of the water and hear the crickets sing their lullaby. The invisible doctor tells me I will. They tell me I need to steal my strength from the lightning. They take me back to that room for walking. I only need one hand to guide me now. They tell me I’ll go home soon. They tell me I’m stronger than lightning. I still can’t see them.

Back in my room I learn about lightning. It’s hotter than the sun. I remember the heat I felt and wonder if that’s how it feels to touch the surface of a star. The video says that direct strikes are usually fatal. I’m lucky to be alive. I hold Juno tightly.

It takes a month to steal my strength back from the lightning. I walk without holding the rails. The invisible doctor applauds me and tells me I’m ready to go home. They call my mom. I still can’t see my mom.

I can’t see the trees with my right eye, my good eye. I know where they should be by the shaded patches of dirt in the ground. I can see the grass, the road, the dirt covered green Volvo Station wagon, Mom’s car. My sister shouts for joy and runs toward me. I fall to the ground. Her arms squeeze Juno into my chest. I can’t see my sister.

Mom drives me to the cabin. I can see the towering buildings of the city. In the reflection of the tinted glass, I see the station wagon. The eyepatch floats in the window right above Juno’s head. Mom tells me about what she’ll make for dinner. She killed one of the chickens and plucked carrots and celery from the ground. Soup gives strength. That’s what she said. She reminds me that I’m lucky to be alive.

I can’t see the reeds. Mom stops the car in front of the cabin. I can’t see the cabin, nor the rustic wood threshold. Mom helps me across it. The hand-carved wooden table is invisible, but I can see the small electric stove. I smell the soup, hear the water boil, guide my hand along the wood of the narrow hallway to help me walk. I can’t see my bedroom, nor the bed alcove carved into the wall. My mattress floats in the air as if by magic. I can see the plastic desk my mom bought me for school, and the lightbulb in the ceiling. I see wires in invisible walls.

My sister wants to play. She tugs on my arm. I set Juno into the bed alcove and feel my way back to the main room. Mom reminds me to be careful. She tells my sister to be gentle. She reminds us both that I can’t take off my eyepatch. We both take off our shoes.

My sister guides me to the shore. I enjoy the sensation of dirt beneath my feet and the occasional pain of a rock. We move slowly, some of my strength still belongs to the lightning. She runs in. I can’t see the pond. I can’t see the moss in the pond. I can’t see my sister. My sister asks about the eyepatch. She wants to know why I can’t take it off. I don’t know. She asks about my eye. The dark one. The one filled with abyss. The right eye. She asks why it’s dark. I don’t know. I put my foot in the invisible water. My sister jumps out. Something shocked her. She thinks I shocked her. She gets back in.

I stay close to the shore I can’t see. I don’t want to drown. I don’t want my eyes near the water. There are no storm clouds today. I fiddle with moss between my toes. Mom calls us in for dinner. My sister runs ahead. I try walking on my own. I trip over a tree root that I couldn’t see. I fall and hit my chin on the ground. The eyepatch slides up a bit. I quickly push it back down before it can come off. I can’t take off my eyepatch.

My mom hears the thud and comes running. She helps me to my feet, guides me back to the cabin, and sits me at the table. She brings me a bowl of soup, tells me I need to be careful. She wants me to stay alive. I sip the soup and listen to her sing while she cleans the soup pot. I can’t see my mom.

When I sleep, I dream of before. Before the lightning stole my left eye. Before it stole my strength. I dream of the pond. I dream of the old willow tree on the island. Its dark drooping branches blossoming every spring. The leaves fall on the pond. Nature’s Navy of little boats. The tree is stronger than lightning. I am the tree. I want to see the tree again.

My sister tells me she’ll guide me to the island. I refuse. I can’t see the tree, or the water. My eyes would have to be close to it. The eyepatch might come off. I spend the day holding Juno. My mom brings me a sandwich and sits with me a while. I only know she’s there from the sound of her bouncing leg. She’s nervous. She doesn’t smell of the garden yet. She won’t smell of the garden today. I want to smell of the garden, but I can’t see the garden.

In the evening I sit outside the cabin and listen to the crickets. I’m lucky to be alive. The lightning didn’t kill me. I scratch at an itch under the eyepatch. I feel a shock in my hand and pull it back. I smell the ozone on my fingertip.  In my mind I’m in the water again. I remember the heat, the pain. My mom comes running when I scream. She puts Juno in my arms. I feel safe again. I am stronger than the lightning. The lightning didn’t kill me.

While I sleep I am the tree, standing tall, guarding my island. The lightning wants to take it. It strikes at the water around me, burning my Navy of leaves. Once it struck me, but the rain extinguished its flames. I grew back stronger. My Navy rebuilt. The lightning always comes back. I am always stronger.

My sister and I play in the lake. I go out deeper today. My legs can tell how deep I am. We go to the tree. The lightning couldn’t steal the ability to swim. I follow the sound of my sister’s splashing. We push through invisible reeds, I feel the plants surround me. My sister holds my hand and guides me through the canopy of branches. I feel the incomplete ships of Nature’s Navy brush against my face. She puts my hand against the tree. I guide my hand along it until I find the once charred wood where lightning burned it. The lightning should’ve killed us.

My sister and I sit under the tree for a while. I feel the bugs occasionally crawl across my hands. She rests her shoulder on mine. I’m lucky to be alive. The lightning didn’t kill us.

We walk back to the shore. I feel the water, and one of Nature’s boats brush against my foot and look down. I still can’t see the water. I can’t see myself. I can see the Navy. The floating leaves atop the tranquil pond. The tears begin to fall. My sister asks why the tears from beneath the eyepatch are white as ash. I wish I knew.

The crickets sing again that evening. Tonight, they sing the ballad of the tree. Loud and harmonic. I whisper my thanks into the wind. The crickets whistle back. They believe me.

In the morning I wake up before anyone else. I shuffle through the halls and out to the porch to listen to the morning bird song. I let my head weave side to side in tune with their melody. I dance across invisible dirt. A laugh escapes my lips. I jump into invisible water. I sail with Nature’s Navy to the tree.

My soul sits atop resilient roots. Hands find the burned wood, where the lightning almost killed it. I bring the left hand to the eyepatch, where the lightning almost killed me. The wind blows through the leaves. Splashes echo from the opposite shore, sounds of someone swimming. Thunder echoes from my stomach, I rise to return home. Gallivanting down the invisible slope back towards my invisible home.

I trip across a root near the water. The eyepatch sinks beneath the surface of the lake. I yank my head back. The eyepatch slips off. My left hand covers my eye. A shock forces me to pull it away. The eyelid flutters opened. I see the lightning. Nature’s Navy set ablaze by my gaze. My eye touches the sun again as the lightning leaves. The tree set ablaze by my gaze. The crickets echo a lament. The birds resound a harmonizing elegy. The drooping branches fall lower, as if bowing. I bow in return.  The splashing water calms.

My left eye sees the water, sees the earth, sees myself. Authentic and whole. It observes my leaves of joy, fingers stretched in shallows. My left eye witnesses my roots of kindness, feet planted on solid shores. It beholds the resilience of my trunk, a beautiful body. The eyepatch floats in the water. I perceive my eyes again, the dark one and the white. my black and white tears drift across the surface of water. Someone shuffles the dirt behind me. I turn with a smile on my face.

Cassandra Arc is an autistic trans woman living in Portland, Oregon. In her writing she likes to focus on themes of healing, gender identity issues, and nature as a means of understanding authenticity. This story was originally published in the Talking River Review and is reprinted here by permission of the author (All Rights Reserved). 

• Who is the narrator of this story? What do we know about their gender? How do we know this? What does the lightning signify?
• What does the eyepatch represent? When the narrator says, “I see behind me, but I don’t see me,”  what does this mean? What ideas about social constructs are present in this narrative, and how does the story subvert those social constructs?
• How do characters navigate and express their gender identities in the text? Does the story expand your understanding of the queer experience? In what ways? What do you think about the way some things can’t be seen and some things can in the story? How might this experience relate to being queer?
• How are time and space treated in this story?
• How does the story subvert or resist conventional categories?

Example of a queer theory thesis statement: In “The Eyepatch” by Cassandra Arc, the binary oppositions of light, darkness, sight, and blindness are used to subvert heteronormative structures, deconstructing artificially constructed binaries to capture the experience of being in the closet and the explosive nature of coming out.

Limitations of Gender Criticisms

While these approaches offer interesting and important insights into the ways that gender and sexuality exist in texts, they also have some limitations. Here are some potential drawbacks:

• Essentialism: Feminist theory may sometimes be criticized for essentializing gender experiences, assuming a universal women’s experience that overlooks the diversity of women’s lives.
• Neglect of Other Identities: The focus on gender in feminist theory may overshadow other intersecting identities such as race, class, and sexuality, limiting the analysis of how these factors contribute to oppression or privilege.
• Overlooking Male Perspectives: In some instances, feminist theory may be perceived as neglecting the examination of male characters or perspectives, potentially reinforcing gender binaries rather than deconstructing them.
• Historical and Cultural Context: Feminist theory, while valuable, may not always adequately address the historical and cultural contexts of literary works, potentially overlooking shifts in societal attitudes towards gender over time.
• Oversimplification of Feminist Goals: Post-feminist criticism may be criticized for oversimplifying or prematurely declaring the achievement of feminist goals, potentially obscuring persistent gender inequalities.
• Individualism and Choice Feminism: The emphasis on individual empowerment in post-feminist criticism, often associated with choice feminism, may overlook systemic issues and structural inequalities that continue to affect women’s lives.
• Lack of Intersectionality: Post-feminist approaches may sometimes neglect intersectionality, overlooking the interconnectedness of gender with race, class, and other identity factors, which can limit a comprehensive understanding of oppression.
• Commodification of Feminism: Critics argue that post-feminism can lead to the commodification of feminist ideals, with feminist imagery and language used for commercial purposes, potentially diluting the transformative goals of feminism.
• Complexity and Jargon: Queer Theory can be complex and may use specialized language, making it challenging for some readers to engage with and understand, potentially creating barriers to entry for students and scholars.
• Overemphasis on Textual Deconstruction: Critics argue that Queer Theory may sometimes prioritize textual deconstruction over concrete political action, leading to concerns about the practical impact of this theoretical approach on real-world LGBTQ+ issues.
• Challenges in Application: Queer Theory’s emphasis on fluidity and resistance to fixed categories can make it challenging to apply consistently, as it may resist clear definitions and frameworks, making it more subjective in its interpretation.
• Limited Representation: While Queer Theory aims to deconstruct norms, some critics argue that it may still primarily focus on certain aspects of queer experiences, potentially neglecting the diversity within the LGBTQ+ spectrum and reinforcing certain stereotypes.

Some Important Gender Scholars

• Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986): A French existentialist philosopher and writer, de Beauvoir is best known for her groundbreaking work “The Second Sex,” which explored the oppression of women and laid the groundwork for feminist literary theory.
• Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): A celebrated English writer, Woolf is known for her novels such as “Mrs. Dalloway” and “Orlando.” Her works often engaged with feminist themes and issues of gender identity.
• bell hooks (1952-2021): An American author, feminist, and social activist, hooks wrote extensively on issues of race, class, and gender. Her works, such as “Ain’t I a Woman” and “The Feminist Theory from Margin to Center,” are essential in feminist scholarship.
• Adrienne Rich (1929-2012): An American poet and essayist, Rich’s poetry and prose explored themes of feminism, identity, and social justice. Her collection of essays, “Of Woman Born,” is a notable work in feminist literary criticism.
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: An Indian-American literary theorist and philosopher, Spivak is known for her work in postcolonialism and deconstruction. Her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a key text in postcolonial and feminist studies.
• Susan Faludi: An American journalist and author, Faludi’s work often explores issues related to gender and feminism. Her book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” critically examines the societal responses to feminism.
• Camille Paglia: An American cultural critic and author, Paglia is known for her provocative views on gender and sexuality. Her work, including “Sexual Personae,” challenges conventional feminist perspectives.
• Rosalind Gill: A British cultural and media studies scholar, Gill has written extensively on gender, media, and postfeminism. Her work explores the intersection of popular culture and contemporary feminist thought.
• Laura Kipnis: An American cultural critic and essayist, Kipnis has written on topics related to gender, sexuality, and contemporary culture. Her book “Against Love: A Polemic” challenges conventional ideas about love and relationships.
• Judith Butler: A foundational figure in both feminist and queer theory, Judith Butler has made profound contributions to the understanding of gender and sexuality. Their work Gender Trouble  has been influential in shaping queer theoretical discourse.
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: An influential scholar in queer studies, Sedgwick’s works, such as Epistemology of the Closet , have contributed to the understanding of queer identities and the impact of societal norms on the construction of sexuality.
• Michel Foucault: Although not exclusively a queer theorist, Foucault’s ideas on power, knowledge, and sexuality laid the groundwork for many aspects of queer theory. His works, including The History of Sexuality,  are foundational in queer studies.
• Teresa de Lauretis: An Italian-American scholar, de Lauretis has contributed significantly to feminist and queer theory. Her work Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities  explores the complexities of sexuality and identity.
• Jack Halberstam: A gender and queer studies scholar, Halberstam’s works, including Female Masculinity and In a Queer Time and Place,  engage with issues of gender nonconformity and the temporalities of queer experience.
• Annamarie Jagose: A New Zealand-born scholar, Jagose has written extensively on queer theory. Her book Queer Theory: An Introduction  provides a comprehensive overview of key concepts within the field.
• Leo Bersani: An American literary theorist, Bersani’s work often intersects with queer theory. His explorations of intimacy, desire, and the complexities of same-sex relationships have been influential in queer studies.

Further Reading

• Aravind, Athulya. Transformations of Sappho: Late 18th Century to 1900. Senior Thesis written for Department of English, Northeastern University. https://www.sfu.ca/~decaste/OISE/page2/files/deBeauvoirIntro.pdf  This is a wonderful example of a student-written feminist approach to English Romantic poetry.
• Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Rosalind Gill, and Catherine Rottenberg. “Postfeminism, Popular Feminism and Neoliberal Feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in Conversation.” Feminist Theory  21.1 (2020): 3-24.
• Butler, Judith.  Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex . Taylor & Francis, 2011.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble . Routledge, 2002.
• de Beauvoir, Simone.  The Second Sex.  Trans. H.M. Parshley. 1956.
• De Lauretis, Teresa. “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness.” Feminist Studies  16.1 (1990): 115-150.
• Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies  10.2 (2007): 147-166.
• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction.  Trans. Robert Hurley. Vintage, 1990.
• Foucault, Michel.  The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure . Vintage, 2012.
• Halberstam, Jack.  Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability . Vol. 3. Univ of California Press, 2017.
• hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center . Pluto Press, 2000.
• hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Women, Knowledge, and Reality . Routledge, 2015. 48-55.
• Jagose, Annamarie.  Queer Theory: An Introduction . NYU Press, 1996.
• Miller, Jennifer. “Thirty Years of Queer Theory.” In Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Pressbooks. https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/introlgbtqstudies/chapter/thirty-years-of-queer-theory/   
• Paglia, Camille.  Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson . Yale University Press, 1990.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.  Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity . Duke University Press, 2003.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.  Epistemology of the Closet . Univ of California Press, 2008.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty.  The Spivak Reader: Selected works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak . Psychology Press, 1996.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Blog – Posted on Monday, Oct 12

50 best feminist books to dismantle the patriarchy.

Throughout its turbulent history, feminist books have stood at the cutting-edge of feminism. Contemporary readers of landmark texts, such as The Feminine Mystique or Sister Outsider , found themselves swept up in a revolution, pioneered by radical female writers wielding a pen. Decades later, and joined by a legion of diverse new feminist voices, these fearless and passionate texts still feel like a call-to-arms — a rallying cry to all women trying to find their place or fight for liberation. 

Whether you’re a fan of fiction or nonfiction books , memoirs, poetry, essays, or novels, the feminist books on this list will guide you along the winding path of the feminism — as experienced by women from all walks of life, of all races, ages, and identities — and into the 21st century. 

1. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

A gold-standard of feminist fiction and now a critically acclaimed TV series, The Handmaid’s Tale follows Offred, a member of the fertile, female servant class that is treated as breeding stock by an oppressive, near-future society — all in the name of replenishing the diminished population. At a time when the reproductive rights of women are still politically contentious, this dystopian novel is a disturbing reminder of what society often considers a woman’s worth.

2. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

When Alcott told the story of Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy in 1868, she may not have intended to write a feminist book; nevertheless, Little Women has danced its way into the hearts of feminists for generations. Certainly, in the 2019 film adaptation it’s given new feminist fire, as Greta Gerwig shows how Alcott’s bold, loving, unconventional sisters can teach us there are many ways to be a woman. Read the book. Watch the film. Do both — in any order. Just make sure you consume Little Women .

3. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Plath’s seminal novel tells the story of Esther Greenwood’s descent into mental illness in astute and haunting prose. An aspiring writer whose dreams are stifled by her misogynistic society, Esther’s story encapsulates the desire and disillusionment of being a young woman — which is why it has become a quintessential novel for young feminists. The Guardian has called The Bell Jar a ‘tormented footnote to Plath’s tormented poetry’; but it is also a work of undoubted literary brilliance that stands alone as a classic feminist book.

4. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s debut novel immerses us in the tragic, torn life of Pecola Breedlove — a poor, young black girl living in 1940s Ohio. Internalizing the ugliness put on her by society, Pecola longs for blue eyes; and it’s this impossible desire that drives her to the point of breakdown. The Bluest Eye forces us to confront how damaging racialized notions of beauty can be and makes race (and youth) central to the discussion of gender disparity. Of course, it’s couched in what became the signature poetic prose of this Nobel Prize-winning author.

5. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Restless, twentysomething Edna is summering at a resort on the steamy coast of Louisiana when she catches the eye of the resort owner’s son — it’s the perfect backdrop for a romantic comedy, except this story of personal discovery and sexual intrigue has a dangerous undercurrent. Edna is a Victorian mother and wife, who had resigned herself to a languid life before the summer of her awakening. Now, she vibrates with the desire to have a room of her own, to smash a vase, to break the rules. Although The Awakening was published on the turn of the 20th century, this feminist book still hits its mark. A desire to smash the patriarchy? Relatable.

6. Wayward Girls & Wicked Women by Angela Carter

This marvelous collection of short stories was edited by titan of feminist books Angela Carter, and reflects her deliciously anarchic taste. From authors including Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Mansfield, and Ama Ata Aidoo, every one of these subversive tales extols the female virtues of discontent, disruptiveness, and general bad-manners, and restores wayward girls and wicked women to their rightful position as role models. Because who wants to be ‘nice’ when you can be clever, cunning, and interesting?

7. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Another early feminist classic with enduring appeal, Gilman’s 6,000 word masterpiece tells the story of a young woman whose husband confines her to a nursery as treatment for postnatal depression. With a strict ban on reading, painting, and, if it can be managed, thinking (her secret diary being her only outlet), the narrator’s ravenous imagination is at the mercy of unnamed terrors. 

Frighteningly, The Yellow Wallpaper was based on the author’s own experiences, and in 1890 its story caused feminist fireworks among women forced to be docile. But today, it takes on a new urgency, speaking to the current discussion of gaslighting and coercive control.

8. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Set in segregated Georgia, The Color Purple follows Celie, a young black woman born into poverty. As mother, sister, and wife, Celie suffers from unimaginable hardship, until she meets singer and magic-maker Shug Avery, who teaches her to harness the power of her own spirit and take control of her destiny. In this haunting and lyrical novel, Walker, who calls herself a ‘womanist’, portrays the oppression and triumphs of black women, the horrors of physical and sexual abuse, and the ongoing struggle to overcome the double jeopardy of racism and sexism.

9. Circe by Madeline Miller

An ancient Greek myth gets a fresh coat of feminist paint in this thoroughly modern retelling of Circe’s story. A player in the lives of both heroes and gods, Circe is a figure apart, a character steeped in magic and mystery, a source of fascination — and yet, one of the ancient world’s most deeply misunderstood deities. Until now. Madeline Miller, bestselling author of The Song of Achilles, returns to breathe new life into Circe, giving her the power to command her own story, and translating yet another male-centred myth into something startlingly feminine.

10. The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler

Keeping with the theme of the untraditional, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play that gathers the stories of real women — from different ages, races, identities, and experiences — to explore female sexuality in all its complexity. Delving into topics as deeply essential as sexual consent, body image, sex work, and reproduction, Ensler’s work has become a major feminist touchpoint since its debut in 1996. Come for the incredible title, and stay to hear the eloquent and hilarious voice of womankind.

11. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

From ancient myths to fairytales, a feminist take on a ‘tale as old as time’ will always be welcome on our shelves; and Angela Carter’s 1979 collection of darkly erotic stories contains some of the most fiercely imaginative examples of the style. In The Bloody Chamber you’ll find all the bedtime stories of your childhood newly configured as gothic tales of sex and violence. Their heroines — a murderous Red Riding Hood, a beastly Belle, a vampiric Sleeping Beauty — struggle out of the straitjackets of history and ideology, and turn the tables on tradition.

12. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Though Lessing insisted The Golden Notebook was never intended to be a “weapon in the sex war”, her epic of the female experience spoke to the women’s movement of the 1960s with a visionary fire, and has since been hailed as a landmark feminist book. 

Living in 1950s London, Anna Wulf is a divorced single mother, and a novelist struggling with writer’s block . Fearing chaos, formlessness, and mental collapse, she separates her life into four notebooks; but it is the fifth, the golden notebook, that will pull the wayward strands of her life together and open the door to freedom.

13. The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One by Amanda Lovelace

Amanda Lovelace calls all women to arms in her fiery poetry collection encouraging strength and resilience among women, and empowering them to reclaim their minds, their bodies, and their stories. In a world where women are still marginalized and oppressed, The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One provides a much needed rebellious spark. So give it a read; then tell all your friends to give it a read. This is the self-love potion we didn’t know we needed, but absolutely do.

14. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Though exciting new voices like Amanda Lovelace are exploding onto the poetry scene, the poems of Emily Dickinson are as refreshing and relevant today as they were in 1840. Still one of the most daring voices ever to craft a couplet, Dickinson used her poetry to rebel against the dreariness of everyday life, and to rupture the boundaries between male and female writing styles. In doing so, she inspired generations of young women and laid the groundwork for a host of contemporary women writers . If you don’t want to read all of Emily Dickinson’s poems (though we can think of worse ways to spend our time), we’d recommend My Life had stood- a Loaded Gun .

15. The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

Ask who was at the shops in the run up to Christmas and you might hear “Oh, the world and his wife”. But poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy challenges this patriarchal language picture with three simple words, the title of her 1999 collection, The World’s Wife . The cheeky, exuberant, subversive poems in this anthology hand over to the women behind the scenes, behind the throne, behind history. From the adoring Queen Kong to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the angry and ignored to the sure-footed and sexy, Duffy’s irresistible collection proves that behind every famous man there is in fact a great woman.

16. Dialectic of the Flesh by Roz Kaveney

Dialectic of the Flesh is a beautiful and intimate exploration of queer and trans existence through verse. Though Roz Gaveney’s collection is pocket-sized (31 poems in all), her poems run the gamut of emotions: elegies of abandonment and loss traverse pathways dark and guttural, while celebrations of love and sex are witty, exuberant, and wistful. Gaveney also showcases her versatility by dancing between carefully-constructed sonnet variations and villanelles, and free verse narratives. A collection not to be missed!

Young Adult Fiction

17. asking for it by louise o'neill.

Asking For It is the kind of book you devour, but not the kind you enjoy. Not because it isn’t well written — Louise O’Neill is fearless and moving — but because it tells a devastating story about rape culture and victim blaming that is uncomfortable and heart-breaking to read (while still incredibly important). Its discomfort is in part due to the fact that O’Neill doesn’t write about a sweet girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. Asking For It is about Emma O’ Donovan, a nasty, shallow girl, a bully, liar, and cheat, and even the reader can’t help but wonder, if only for a terrible, fleeting moment, whether she was at fault on the night she was assaulted.

18. Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls

Nicholls breathes new life into the story of the Suffragette and Suffragists movements in her historical YA novel, Things a Bright Girl Can Do . She sees the rallies and marches, the freezing prison cells, the East End slums, and the stifling drawing rooms of Edwardian Britain through the eyes of three courageous young women who join the fight for the vote. Though they come from different walks of life, they all dream of a world where women are considered equal. Nicholls imbues this exhilarating era of change with gripping drama that brings the past fiercely to life.

19. Furious Thing by Jenny Downham

If Before I Die did not cement Downham’s reputation as an influential voice in young adult fiction , then this explosive novel certainly will. Furious Thing follows Lexi, a girl who is angry for reasons she cannot understand. Though she tries to swallow her temper, it simmers below the surface just waiting to erupt. What will happen if Lexi decides to take up space and make herself heard? 

A sensitive and thought-provoking narrative about modern issues, including anger-management and gaslighting, Furious Thing roars with anger at an unfair world that is constantly letting girls down.

20. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

In recent years, the call for intersectional feminism has been louder than ever, with an increasingly diverse range of voices contributing to the ongoing conversation. A lot of that is down to the work of writers like Audre Lorde, whose iconic collection of essays and speeches is considered a cornerstone of intersectional feminism. Sister Outsider reflects on sexism, racism, class, and homophobia; it also discusses the use of anger, the problems inherent in white feminism, and her own experience as a Black lesbian; but ultimately, Lorde’s message is one of hope.

21. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Millions of women have fallen in love with this story, whether because of Julia Roberts’ winning smile, or Gilbert’s writing, which propounds a kind of literary incarnation of a best friend. An intimate memoir of breakdown and recovery, Eat Pray Love follows Gilbert on a voyage to find her true self: from her bathroom floor and the end of a perfect marriage, to Italy, India, and Indonesia, three beautiful backdrops against which she explores aspects of herself that have been missing. Pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and balance in Indonesia — a powerful trinity for the 21st century woman.

22. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s transgressive and mischievous essay is now a landmark work of feminist literary critique, but it started life as a series of lectures given to Cambridge’s female colleges. Woolf takes on the established thought of the time — that women are inherently lesser writers — by asserting women’s creative originality and pointing to the systemic education and economic failures that stifled them. Her analysis is light, glancing, and even funny, despite its urgency and passion. At a juncture in her argument she offers the key to female creative liberation: A Room of One’s Own.

23. Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

If you’ve ever used the term “mansplaining” to describe the condescending efforts of a man to explain something to a woman, then you’ve got Rebecca Solnit to thank. Her collection of hilarious, rage-inducing essays, Men Explain Things to Me , not only coined this iconic term, but has also come to be considered as one of the best feminist books. 

Solnit delves into some of the biggest themes of the modern feminist experience, including marriage equality, the erasure of women from history, and the titular topic of having your expertise explained to you, often in patronizing terms. According to Solnit, it’s due to a combination of “overconfidence and cluelessness”. I think we all know a guy.

24. The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir

Published in 1949, The Second Sex began as an autobiographical essay in which author and philosopher Simone De Beauvoir explored why she had always thought of herself as a woman before anything else. As she combined personal observation with critical theory, it grew into a groundbreaking study of the unequal treatment of women throughout history, and “the problem of woman,” which, as De Beauvoir put it, “has always been the problem of men.” The Second Sex is an essential feminist book.

25. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan confessed in 1973 that until she started writing The Feminine Mystique , she wasn’t even conscious of “the woman problem”: “I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor,” she said. In fact, many American women felt the same, and just as writing this book opened Friedan’s eyes, the women who read it were swept up in a new wave of feminism. The Feminine Mystique captured the frustration of middle-class American housewives afraid to ask themselves the question “Is this all?”, and exhorted them to make change happen for themselves.

26. Women, Culture, and Politics by Angela Y. Davis

A scholar and an activist, Angela Davis earned herself a place among the most important feminist voices of our era with her brilliant, biting prose, and Women, Culture and Politcs is perhaps her best feminist book. A collection of speeches and essays penned in 1989, it addresses the political and social shifts of the late 20th century, and the ways in which they changed conversations around the struggle for racial, sexual and economic equality.

27. This Bridge Called My Back

This Bridge Called My Back is a collection of personal essays, criticisms, poetry, and visual art from radical women of colour, including influential feminist writers such as Naomi Littlebear Morena, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith. Together they explore the intersections between gender, race, sexism, and class, and how these intersections influence the way they understand the world, as well as how the world understands them. This anthology is considered one of the landmark texts of Third Wave feminism, and continues to shape today’s feminist landscape.

28. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

When Greer’s landmark feminist book, The Female Eunuch, hit the shelves in 1970, it immediately made waves with its shocking conclusion: that the traditional nuclear family is a tool of female oppression, and that the key to female liberation is sexual liberation. Erudite, outrageous, and sensible, Greer’s unflinching polemic transformed women’s lives. Sure, her call for women to taste their own menstrual blood might not have caught on, but if you’re asking whether The Female Eunuch still speaks to the modern feminist — the answer is yes.

29. Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

One of America’s most recognizable trans activists, Janet Mock relays her experiences growing up as a multiracial, poor, trans woman in her brave and moving autobiography, Redefining Realness. Though this is undoubtedly an account of one woman’s experience of womanhood, and her own quest to a sense of self, Mock manages to break ground for anyone and everyone who is marginalized and misunderstood, and is fighting to define themselves on their own terms.

30. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein

In a society that insists we be either ‘man’ or ‘woman’, Kate Bornstein describes herself as a “nonbinary transfeminine diesel femme dyke”. On the surface, Gender Outlaw is the story of her transformation from being viewed as a heterosexual male to realizing she was a lesbian female; but below the surface, Bornstein never stops questioning our rigid expectations of a gender binary, and gently pushing us towards the furthest borders of the gender frontier. Though Gender Outlaw is a provocative and radical investigation into the notions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, it is also funny, fearless, and wonderfully scenic.

31. The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert

Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic is a classic feminist book of literary criticism that looks at the portrayal of female characters by Victorian women writers. By applying a feminist lens to these 19th century novels, the authors not only change the way we think about the books themselves and their female characters, but also force us to look again at the grandes dames of English literature, whom, they suggest, have distinctly feminine imaginations. Originally published in 1979, The Madwoman in the Attic continues to tread the path for scholars some four decades later.

32. Colonize This!

It has been decades since women of color first turned feminism on its head, calling out the movement of the 70s for being white and exclusive. Colonize This! offers a much-needed refresh in its gripping and intimate portraits of American life, as seen through the eyes of young women of color. Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman have gathered a brilliant and diverse  group of young feminist voices who speak to the concerns of a 21st century feminism — one that fosters freedom and agency for women of all races.

33. On Intersectionality by Kimberlé Crenshaw

As well as looking forward to the feminism of the future, sometimes it is just as important to look back at key turning points in its history. In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality — a hugely influential approach to understanding discrimination in a society whose members experience bias in any combination of ways, as a result of race, gender or sexuality. In this collection of Crenshaw’s writing, readers will find essays and articles that provide a comprehensive and accessible introduction to a brilliant theorist and her critical work.

34. Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy

Egyptian-American journalist and activist Mona Eltahawy is a fearless fighter for women’s rights. After making headlines in 2011 when she was arrested, beaten and sexually assaulted during the Egyptian revolution, she wrote a brave and impassioned article titled “Why Do They Hate Us?” — where “they” is Muslim men and “us” is women. Headscarves and Hymens is a book-length expansion of this article, in which she takes aim both at religious misogyny in the Middle East and at western liberals who mistake this misogyny for cultural difference. This fearless roar-to-arms sets her own experiences alongside those of dozens of other women, giving a laceratingly honest account of what it’s like to be a woman in the Muslim world.

35. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne

What is misogyny? Who deserves to be called a misogynist? How does misogyny differ from sexism? Kate Manne explores all these questions in her forensic analysis of the logic of misogyny; but her guiding question, more straightforward and more troubling, is “Why is misogyny still a thing?” 

Manne argues that we should put individual men to one side, that we should stop treating hostility towards women as a psychological characteristic, and that we should put the focus on how women who challenge male dominance are policed by society. Down Girl is an essential feminist book for the #MeToo era.

36. Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik

When it comes to modern feminist icons, few spring to mind more readily than Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Even those of us who were born long after her appointments to the Supreme Court have fallen in love in recent years with her tenacious spirit, drive for equality, and sharp humor. In Notorious RBG , Carmon and Knizhnik bring what was once a playful Tumblr blog into a fully realized portrait of this fiercely inspiring woman. Through a fascinating combination of narrative, photographs, interviews, and even Justice Ginsburg’s own dissents, this book shows you a beloved icon in a new light — one that paints her as, somehow, even more remarkable than we already knew she was.

37. I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

These days, it’s hard to imagine that one person has the power to change the world, but reading I am Malala may just leave you feeling hopeful. This personal and deeply inspiring tale recounts Malala’s fight for a proper education — a fight she never should have had to enter into, but one that she braved with such fierce determination that her name is spoken with reverence in all corners of the globe. Through her own words, Malala recalls the now infamous shooting, her recovery, and the unparalleled journey of advocacy and feminist championing that followed.

38. Bossypants by Tina Fey

Endlessly talented and wickedly funny, Tina Fey has been entertaining and inspiring women for years. From her often-too-relatable portrayal of Liz Lemon to her years mixing it up on SNL, it seems there’s no comedy role that’s beyond her. Now, in Bossypants , we get a glimpse behind the many faces she’s worn over the years and discover, to our delight, that she’s every bit as amazing as we were always hoping she would be. Full of behind-the-scenes insight into all our favorite Fey moments, Bossypants will delight from first page to last.

39. Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates

Perhaps one of the most frustrating things to explain about sexism is that it doesn’t always come in the overt, chauvinist-pig wrapper that society likes to wrap it in. In fact, it normally hits us in quiet, everyday sort of ways that are almost impossible to explain, but that every woman knows. Started as a website in 2012, Everyday Sexism is one woman’s attempt to gather what it really looks like, through shared anecdotes of women from all walks of life, who’ve been told in subtle and pervasive ways that they’re “less than.” Both eye-opening and all too familiar, this book is not to be ignored.

40. This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins

We all know that living with a marginalized identity is hard. But try combining those identities — in Jerkins’ case, being both Black and a woman — and suddenly the ante is raised even higher. With aggressions coming at you from all sides, the simple act of living your life becomes political. In this interconnected series of essays, Jerkins takes you through the raw reality of her life, exposing the double standards, hypocrisy, and demonization Black women face every day. This Will Be My Undoing is a vital piece of writing, and one that feminists, especially white feminists, should be sure to pick up and take to heart as they strive to build a better world for all women.

41. Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Judith Butler is synonymous with the feminist movement: since the 1970s, the trailblazing philosopher has written over 20 influential books that challenge traditional gender conventions and defy gender performativity. Though each is a must-read, we recommend that you start with Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . A foundational work in feminist and queer theory, Gender Trouble disrupts the gender binary, arguing that “gender” itself is a performative construct. Written in 1990, its groundbreaking arguments are as important — and relevant — to understand now as they were then.

42. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

Called the “most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch ” by Germaine Greer, The Beauty Myth tackles the perennial question of beauty, which was complicated further in the 1990s by the rise of mass media. Though it’s slightly dated by now, this is nevertheless a classic and masterful deconstruction of the myth of beauty in the context of the patriarchy: an important read for anyone who wants to understand the increasingly complex intersection between female identity, beauty, and society.

43. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

In an essay for The Guardian , Gay writes: “I am failing as a woman. I am failing as a feminist. To freely accept the feminist label would not be fair to good feminists. If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one.” In this modern day and age, what makes a “good enough” feminist? Bad Feminist is Gay’s critically acclaimed, witty, and powerful exploration of this very question. Covering a broad range of topics from politics to race and entertainment, this is a future classic that’s instrumental in the complicated and evolving conversation regarding what it means to be a feminist.

44. Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks

As the modern feminist movement rose in profile in the 21st-century, it also gained its fair share of detractors, who decried its supposed “anti-male” stance. It is this crowd that hooks aims to address in Feminism Is For Everybody , published in 2000. With steady candor and precision, she dispels the myths most commonly associated with feminism and compellingly argues why feminism is for everyone — yes, for you, too.

45. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

For those who want to start at the very beginning of the movement, start with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman . Written by the brilliant author-activist Mary Wollstonecraft — now acknowledged as one of the founding feminist philosophers — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one of the earliest works of feminist theory. A commanding manifesto that birthed the tenets of modern feminist thought, it defied the prevailing notion at the time that women were naturally inferior to men, arguing instead that education for women (or the absence thereof) was a key inhibitor to equality. Today, it reminds us of the distance we’ve traveled since 1792 — and the work that is still to be done.

46. Fat Is A Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach

Originally published 40 years ago, Fat is a Feminist Issue is one of the first revolutionary anti-diet books to address body image and body variance. Less a critique and more a step-by-step guide on overcoming emotional eating, it was ahead of its time when it was published. And much of it is still relevant today, in a society that is only becoming more obsessed with the “ideal” body.

47. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In December 2012, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered an explosive TEDx talk entitled “We Should All Be Feminists” that generated 6 million views and ignited a worldwide conversation. This personal essay, which covers similar ground, is as much a must-read as the TEDx talk is a must-watch. With characteristic poise and wit (Adidchie is also a bestselling novelist and the recipient of the 2008 MacArthur Genius Grant), she distills the definition of modern feminism in clear prose, and delivers perhaps one of the most convincing arguments for why it would do all people good to rally around the movement.

48. The Future is Feminist

The Future is Feminist presents a stunningly empowering collection of essays that tackle feminism from all angles (including an entire essay on resting bitch face). As provocative, smart, and funny as its star-studded cast of diverse authors, this book is easily one of the most accessible introductions to feminism out there. Perhaps most importantly, it will offer inspiration and fire moving forward, as its authors from the past and the present — including Salma Hayek, Mindy Kaling, Sojourner Truth, and Mary Wollstonecraft — give us a glimpse of a more equal future.

49. Marxism and the Oppression of Women by Lise Vogel

If you stand at the cross-section of Marxism and feminism, Marxism and the Oppression of Women is essential reading. Whether you’re a Marxist wanting to venture into feminist thought or a feminist wanting to venture into Marxist theory, Vogel offers a concise overview on the topic that breaks down key Marxist concepts in clear, digestible prose. But she remains focused on the main critique at the core of the book: an analysis of the material basis of women’s oppression within a Marxist framework, and why Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx failed in that regard to account for it in their foundational Marxist texts.

50. Moving Beyond Words by Gloria Steinem

One of America’s greatest feminist icons, Gloria Steinem delivers yet another defiant and powerful essay collection. Building on Steinem’s past experience spearheading the American feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, these six essays move fluidly between the personal and the critique, all the while challenging societal notions of femininity and gender norms. If you’re short on time, you might want to skip to the “What if Freud were Phyllis?” essay: a brilliant take-down of sexist Freudian philosophies that re-imagines Freud as a woman.

Hungry for more? Check out this list of inspirational books for women .

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The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism

Preface - Acknowledgements - Introduction: The Story So Far C.Belsey & J.Moore - Women and Literary History D.Spender - The True Story of How I Became My Own Person R.Coward - Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks T.Morrison - Queer Desire in The Well of Loneliness L.Pouchard - The Difference of View M.Jacobus - Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past G.Beer - Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays H.Cixous - Feminist, Female, Feminine T.Moi - Women and Madness: the Critical Phallacy S.Felman - Promises: the Fictional Philosophy in Mary Wollstonecraft&#39;s Vindication of the Rights of Woman J.Moore - Three Women&#39;s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism C.Spivak - Cross-dressing, Gender and Representation: Elvis Presley M.Garber - Feminism and the Postmodern: Theory&#39;s Romance D.Elam - Women&#39;s Time J.Kristeva - The Looking Glass, from the Other Side L.Irigaray - Summaries and Notes - Glossary - Suggestions for Further Reading - Notes on Contributors - Index

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A type of literary criticism that became a dominant force in Western Literary studies in the late 1970 ‟ s, feminist theory more broadly conceived was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the early 1980 ‟ s, feminist literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is now characterized by a global perspectives. It is nonetheless important to understand differences among the interests and assumptions of French, British and North America,(United States and Canada), feminist critics writing during the 1970 „ s, and early 1980 „ s, given the context to which their works shaped the evolution of contemporary feminist critical discourse.

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Feminism has transformed the academic study of literature, fundamentally altering the canon of what is taught and setting new agendas for literary analysis. In this authoritative history of feminist literary criticism, leading scholars chart the development of the practice from the Middle Ages to the present. The first section of the book explores protofeminist thought from the Middle Ages onwards, and analyses the work of pioneers such as Wollstonecraft and Woolf. The second section examines the rise of second-wave feminism and maps its interventions across the twentieth century. A final section examines the impact of postmodernism on feminist thought and practice. This book offers a comprehensive guide to the history and development of feminist literary criticism and a lively reassessment of the main issues and authors in the field. It is essential reading for all students and scholars of feminist writing and literary criticism.

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According to the well-known study on Wollstonecrafts reception in the early 20th century, some feminists embraced her unusual life experience as a personal model for their own experiments with, and literary reflections on, love, sex, and marriage. She frequently used the first-person plural to refer to herself as a part of the greater community of women who endure patriarchal oppression in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. There is evidence that many intellectuals regarded Wollstonecrafts contributions to modern women largely from a biographical and literary standpoint. Examples include Virginia Woolf, Ruth Benedict, and Emma Goldman. Numerous important biographical studies of Wollstonecrafts life and literary critiques of her writing have been produced since the 1970s. The second wave of feminist researchers, however, were undoubtedly most influenced by this symbolic interpretation of Wollstonecraft as a personal figure. In this research paper, we aim to investigate the feminis...

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Both men and women constitute the species of human beings but men have dominated over women since time immemorial and have neglected and seem to have denied their rights altogether in many situations. Women very often have been deprived of human rights and society seems to have played with them as if they were cards or puppets to serve the purpose their superior 'others' have liked. This reductionist position of women has been reflected in literature, firstly, by male writers and then by female writers. Unfortunately the portrayal of women in the hands of many male writers appears to have been either more reductionist than what it is/was in reality or more exaggerated while most of the female writers appear emotional and over sentimental in their portrayal of women characters. This paper attempts to briefly study the condition of women as reflected in literature in relation to the actual condition of women of different times. Women did not have much scope for institutional education and very few had the opportunity of reading at home because of conservative society in the past. The male dominated conservative society did not think that women were human beings and they needed education. Society understood by human beings only men who would earn and dominate the others serving them. As women were kept confined to homes and hearths and did not earn, they had the status like that of servants. To make and keep women subordinate and subservient to men, men had concocted different texts and associated them with religion. The uneducated women, brought up under the shade of religion, believed those texts without questioning their authenticity and the more they believed the more they became subservient. Any deviation on the part of a woman was treated with physical cruelty, and women tolerated in silence even being bitten by their

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Feminist literary criticism - Free Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Feminist literary criticism is an approach to literature that seeks to explore and challenge the representation of gender and gendered relations in literary works. Essays on feminist literary criticism might delve into analyses of gender representation in specific texts, the history and evolution of feminist literary theory, or the impact of feminist criticism on literary studies and wider cultural discourses. They might also explore intersectional approaches within feminist literary criticism that consider race, class, sexuality, and other axes of identity. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Feminist Literary Criticism you can find in Papersowl database. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Feminist Criticism on Chopin’s the Story of an Hour

  Kate Chopin was a daring woman, who took her writing to a new level. Breaking many conventional social behaviors, she wrote openly about women’s emotions towards their relationships with men, children and sexuality. Kate has written several different pieces expressing her opinion. However, in one of her narratives, The Story of An Hour, she projects her feminist beliefs on marriage and the emotions it entails through the main character, Mrs. Mallard. In the beginning of the story, Mrs. Mallard […]

How Alice Walker Created Womanism

The Color Purple is a novel that traces the suffering of black women from gender, racial domination in patriarchy society. This novel demonstrates the universally prevalent multiple injustices towards women: sexual violence and violation, sexism, political, economic and social domination. Male keeps women oppressed denying equal power. So, females have been prevented from enjoying their basic rights and are totally excluded from the social, political and economic life. The present study attempts to investigate how the color purple of Alice […]

Memory and Past – the Giver

"Lois Lowry’s novel entitled The Giver, takes place against the background of very different times in which it alters from past, present, and future. Nonetheless, it speaks to the concern: the vital need of people to be aware of their interdependence, not only with each other but with the world and its environment where everything is the same – there is no music, no color, no pain. In the eye of a Marxist, The Giver explains the essential and true […]

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Feminism in the Scarlet Letter and Goblin Market: Exploring Female Sexuality

Contextual Background of Desire in 19th-Century Literature Both The Scarlett Letter (1850), a gothic romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Goblin Market (1862), a narrative poem by Christina Rossetti, explore the ideas of female desire and sexuality, which would have been a very controversial topic in the mid-19th century due to the religious nature of society at the time. Similarly, both texts feature the dangers of unbridled sexuality and desire through the temptation and consequence the female protagonists face in the […]

Feminist Rewritings: Challenging Male-Centric Narratives in Literature

Literature has long been dominated by male perspectives, with female characters often relegated to secondary roles or portrayed through a narrow lens. However, in recent years, feminist writers have been reclaiming narratives, subverting traditional tropes, and offering fresh perspectives that challenge the patriarchal status quo. Through the lens of feminist theory, these writers interrogate and deconstruct male-centric narratives, highlighting the complexities of gender, power, and agency. One of the key strategies employed by feminist writers is the practice of rewriting […]

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Language serves as more than just a medium of communication; it embodies power dynamics, cultural norms, and social hierarchies. Within feminist discourse, language is a central battleground where the struggle for gender equality is waged. Feminist approaches to textual analysis delve deep into the politics of language, aiming to uncover the subtle ways in which language shapes and perpetuates gender inequalities. At the heart of feminist textual analysis lies the recognition that language is not neutral. Rather, it is laden […]

Feminist Mythology: Deconstructing and Reimagining Classic Myths through a Gendered Lens.

In the rich tapestry of human storytelling, myths have long woven the fabric of cultural narratives. However, beneath the surface of these timeless tales lies a pervasive undercurrent of gender bias, often relegating female characters to stereotypical roles. This essay embarks on an exploration of feminist mythology, an intriguing lens through which we deconstruct and reimagine classic myths, fostering a deeper understanding of the dynamics between myth and gender. Classic myths, ranging from Greek and Roman to Norse and beyond, […]

Feminist Insights into Classic Literature: a Provocative Exploration

Within the realm of literary analysis lies a transformative lens that has the power to illuminate the shadows of classic texts: feminism. This critical perspective, ever dynamic and potent, challenges traditional readings by unearthing the buried narratives of female characters and questioning the power structures entrenched within the pages of revered works. Feminist literary criticism dismantles the notion of women as passive ornaments within narratives, urging readers to perceive them as agents of change and defiance against patriarchal norms. Consider […]

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How to Write an Essay About Feminist Literary Criticism

Understanding feminist literary criticism.

Before writing an essay about feminist literary criticism, it's essential to understand what this critical approach entails. Feminist literary criticism analyzes literature and literary criticism based on the feminist theory, focusing on how literature reflects or distorts the experiences, status, and roles of women. This approach also explores how literary works contribute to or challenge gender inequalities. Begin your essay by defining feminist literary criticism and its historical development. Discuss the variety of forms it has taken over time, from exploring women's writing as a separate literary tradition to examining gender politics and representation in literature. Understanding the key theorists in the field, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Elaine Showalter, can provide a solid foundation for your analysis.

Developing a Thesis Statement

A strong essay on feminist literary criticism should be centered around a clear, concise thesis statement. This statement should present a specific viewpoint or argument about feminist literary criticism. For instance, you might examine the role of feminist literary criticism in reshaping the literary canon, analyze how it has changed the interpretation of a particular text, or argue for its relevance in contemporary literary studies. Your thesis will guide the direction of your essay and provide a structured approach to your analysis.

Gathering Textual Evidence

To support your thesis, gather evidence from a range of sources, including feminist literary texts, critical essays, and theoretical works. This might include specific examples of feminist critiques of literary works, discussions of the portrayal of female characters in literature, or analyses of gender dynamics in different literary genres. Use this evidence to support your thesis and build a persuasive argument. Be sure to consider different feminist perspectives and methodologies in your analysis.

Analyzing Key Themes in Feminist Literary Criticism

Dedicate a section of your essay to analyzing key themes and concepts in feminist literary criticism. Discuss issues such as the representation of women in literature, the intersection of gender with other identities like race and class, and the role of language in perpetuating gender stereotypes. Explore how feminist critics have challenged traditional literary criticism and offered new insights and interpretations of texts.

Concluding the Essay

Conclude your essay by summarizing the main points of your discussion and restating your thesis in light of the evidence provided. Your conclusion should tie together your analysis and emphasize the significance of feminist literary criticism in understanding literature and its social implications. You might also want to suggest areas for future research or discuss the potential impact of feminist literary criticism on literary studies and broader cultural discourses.

Reviewing and Refining Your Essay

After completing your essay, review and refine it for clarity and coherence. Ensure that your arguments are well-structured and supported by evidence. Check for grammatical accuracy and ensure that your essay flows logically from one point to the next. Consider seeking feedback from peers, educators, or experts in feminist literary criticism to further improve your essay. A well-written essay on feminist literary criticism will not only demonstrate your understanding of the approach but also your ability to engage critically with literary theory and analysis.

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Feminist Film Theory: An Introductory Reading List

Evolving from the analysis of representations of women in film, feminist film theory asks questions about identity, sexuality, and the politics of spectatorship.

Not unlike the emergence of feminist theory and criticism in the domains of art and literature, the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s sparked a focused interrogation of images of women in film and of women’s participation in film production.  The 1970s witnessed the authorship of massively influential texts by writers such as Claire Johnston, Molly Haskell, and Laura Mulvey in the United Kingdom and the United States, and psychoanalysis was a reigning method of inquiry, though Marxism and semiotics also informed the field.

Feminist film theory has provoked debates about the representations of female bodies, sexuality, and femininity on screen while posing questions concerning identity, desire, and the politics of spectatorship, among other topics. Crucially, an increasing amount of attention has been paid by theorists to intersectionality, as scholars investigate the presence and absence of marginalized and oppressed film subjects and producers. This reading list surveys a dozen articles, presented chronologically, as a starting point for readers interested in the lines of inquiry that have fueled the field over the last fifty years.

Laura Mulvey, “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

To put it most simply, Mulvey’s 1975 essay is nothing short of iconic. A cornerstone of psychoanalytic feminist film theory, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” describes the ways in which women are displayed on screen for the pleasure of the male spectator. Many of the essays listed below engage explicitly with Mulvey’s essay and the notion of the male gaze, illustrating what Corrin Columpar (2002, see below) describes as a “near compulsive return” to this pioneering work. But even Mulvey herself would later push back on some of her most provocative claims , including her positioning of the spectator as male, as well as her omission of female protagonists.

“ Feminism and Film: Critical Approaches ,” Camera Obscura 1, no. 1 (1976): 3–10.

Established in 1976, Camera Obscura was (and remains) a groundbreaking venue for feminist film studies. This introductory essay to the first issue contextualizes the necessity of such a journal in a scholarly and cultural environment in which there is a true “need” for the feminist study of film. Camera Obscura was, in part, an American response to the wave of British contributions to the field, often published in the journal Screen (the home of Mulvey’s essay). The editors spend much of this essay unpacking the camera obscura, an image projection device, as a metaphor for feminist film theory, as it functions as a symbol of contradiction that “emphasizes the points of convergence of ideology and representation, of ideology as representation.”

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Michelle Criton, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, B. Ruby Rich, and Anna Marie Taylor, “ Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics ,” New German Critique no. 13 (1978): 83–107.

What makes film an enticing object of study for feminists in the first place? As Criton et al. attest, the answers lie in the social rather than individual or private dimensions of film as well as in its accessibility and synthesis of “art, life, politics, sex, etc.” The conversation featured here provides a glimpse into contemporary conversations about the work of Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey and psychoanalysis as a shaping force of early feminist film theory. Additionally, they consider how a feminist filmmaking aesthetic can reveal and critique the ideologies that underpin the oppression of women.

Judith Mayne, “ Feminist Film Theory and Criticism ,” Signs 11, no. 1 (1985): 81–100.

Acknowledging the profound impact of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mayne surveys the development of feminist film theory, including both its historical contexts and its fixations upon psychoanalysis and the notions of spectacle and the gaze. Mayne outlines how contradiction—variously construed—is “ the central issue in feminist film theory and criticism” (emphasis added). Additionally, the author calls into question the historiography of women’s cinema, noting the “risk of romanticizing women’s exclusion from the actual production of films.” She urges scholars to, certainly, continue the necessary exploration of forgotten and understudied female filmmakers but to also open up the conception of women’s cinema to include not just the work of female directors but also their peripheral roles as critics and audience members.

Jane Gaines, “ White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory ,” Cultural Critique , no. 4 (1986): 59–79.

What, Gaines asks, are the limitations of feminist theory’s early fixation on gender at the expense of nuanced understandings of race, class, and sexuality? While feminist theory may, in its earliest years, have opened up possibilities for interrogating the gendered politics of spectatorship, it was largely exclusionary of diverse perspectives, including, as Gaines notes, lesbians and women of color. In doing so, “feminist theory has helped to reinforce white middle-class [normative] values, and to the extent that it works to keep women from seeing other structures of oppression, it functions ideologically.” Through an analysis of the 1975 film Mahogany and informed by black feminist theorists and writers such as bell hooks, Mayne argues that psychoanalysis ultimately results in erroneous readings of films about race.

Noël Carroll, “ The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm ,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 349–60.

Carroll theorizes why psychoanalysis was so attractive to feminists in the 1970s and 1980s: by providing a theoretical framework, he argues, psychoanalysis was a means to “incorporate” and “organize” the “scattered insights of the image of women in film approach.” Taking issue with Mulvey’s perspective on voyeurism, Carroll positions the image approach, or the study of the image of women in film—in this case with an emphasis on theories of emotion— as a “rival research program” to psychoanalysis. He argues that paradigm scenarios, or cases in which emotions are learned behavioral responses, influence spectatorship and how audiences respond emotionally to women on screen.

Karen Hollinger, “ Theorizing Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular Lesbian Film ,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (1998): 3–17.

Hollinger surveys theoretical responses to lesbian subjectivity and the female spectatorship of popular lesbian film narratives. She articulates the subversive power of the lesbian look as a challenge to Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze, asserting its potential to empower female spectators as agents of desire.

Corinn Columpar, “ The Gaze As Theoretical Touchstone: The Intersection of Film Studies, Feminist Theory, and Postcolonial Theory ,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 25–44.

The male gaze is not, as Columpar articulates, the sole tool “in the contemporary feminist film critic’s box”: so are the ethnographic and colonial gazes, brought to film theory from postcolonial studies. Columpar reiterates that the early fixation upon gender and the male gaze “failed to account for other key determinants of social power and position.” Interdisciplinary perspectives, such as those informed by postcolonial theory, are better equipped to unpack “issues of racial and national difference and acknowledge the role that race and ethnicity play in looking relations.”

Janell Hobson, “ Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film ,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 45–59.

Hobson illuminates the absence and/or disembodied presence of Black female bodies in Hollywood cinema. She argues that the invisibility of Black women’s bodies on screen was a defense mechanism against the disruption of “whites as beautiful, as the norm.” By turning away from the gaze and toward the sound of Black women’s disembodied voices in speech and song, viewers are better equipped to recognize how their voices are “used in mainstream cinema by way of supporting and defining the normalized (white) male body,” therefore “ensur[ing] the identity of white masculinity.”

E. Ann Kaplan, “ Global Feminisms and the State of Feminist Film Theory ,” Signs 30, no. 1 (2004): 1236–48.

Kaplan reflects on her trajectory as a pioneering feminist film theorist, illuminating her shift from cinema’s depictions of the “oppressions of white Western women” to the study of trauma in global and indigenous cinema. Importantly, she notes that in her earlier research, she failed to “confront the really tough questions of my own positionality.” In doing so, she invites readers to consider the ethics of witnessing and white, Western feminist participation in the development of multicultural approaches.

Jane M. Gaines, “ Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory ,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004): 113–19.

It may come as a surprise to many that, internationally speaking, women were indeed undertaking various forms of creative labor in the world of film production during the silent era, including screenwriting, producing, directing, etc. The question, then, is not just “why these women were forgotten” but also “why we forgot them.” Gaines considers the “historical turn” in feminist film studies, arguing that scholars must be mindful of how they narrativize and rewrite the rediscovered facts of women’s work in cinema.

Sangita Gopal, “ Feminism and the Big Picture: Conversations ,” Cinema Journal 57, no. 2 (2018): 131–36.

In this fascinating article, Gopal synthesizes responses to a series of questions posed to film scholars regarding feminist theory, praxis, and pedagogy, as well as feminism as “an unfinished project” and feminist media studies as a “boundless” field. Where theory is concerned, Gopal usefully highlights Lingzhen Wang’s and Priya Jaikumar’s suggestions for more explicitly linking and situating feminist media studies within “the big picture.” Notably, Jaikumar ponders the possibilities of feminism creating a framework such that “it is not possible to ask a question if it is absent of a politics.”

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Extended Deadline: Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

2025 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

The University of Chicago Press and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society are pleased to announce the competition for the 2025 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship. Named in honor of the founding editor of Signs, the Catharine Stimpson Prize is designed to recognize excellence and innovation in the work of emerging feminist scholars.

Camping Shakespeare Edited Collection

Camping Shakespeare Edited Collection CFP Eds: Louise Geddes and Sam Kolodezh Abstract due: August 1, 2024

Paper due: April 1, 2025

Black Futurisms and Other Imaginative Subversions

This is a call for cproposal for a panel for the 121st Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference being held Thursday, November 7, through Sunday, November 10, 2024 at the Margaritaville Resort in Palm Springs, California.

Islam and Muslimness in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Special Session PAMLA 2024)

The panel invites papers discussing texts that shape the perception and representation of Muslimness and/or Islam in contemporary literature. Global, transnational, and comparative perspectives are welcome.

Description:

Historical Fictions Research Conference, Manchester, 13th & 14th February 2025