feminism in literature essay

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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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'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.

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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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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

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From Text to Liberation: Susan Sontag’s Powerful Feminist Literary Lens

Examine Susan Sontag’s feminist views and contributions in essays, exploring her nuanced portrayal of women in literature.

Susan Sontag, an iconic American writer, filmmaker, and intellectual, left a lasting mark on the literary landscape of the 20th century. Beyond her renowned works on culture, art, and philosophy, Sontag’s writings also bear the imprint of a keen feminist perspective. In this exploration, delve into Sontag’s feminist lens, examining her contributions to feminist thought and her nuanced portrayal of women in literature.

Feminist Themes in Sontag’s Essays

Sontag’s essays, marked by their incisive intellect and cultural critique, often incorporated feminist themes. In works such as Against Interpretation and The Aesthetics of Silence , she scrutinized the traditional patriarchal structures that influenced artistic interpretation. Her observations dissected the gendered expectations imposed on women in the realms of art and culture.

In Against Interpretation , Sontag challenged the prevailing notions that confined women’s creativity within predefined boundaries. She argued for the liberation of artistic expression, urging a move beyond restrictive interpretations that often forced women into predetermined roles.

Contribution to Feminist Thought

Sontag’s contribution to feminist thought lies not only in her explicit discussions of gender but also in her broader exploration of power dynamics and cultural norms. Her essay Notes on “Camp” questioned the conventional standards of beauty and taste, suggesting that camp, with its celebration of the exaggerated and unconventional, could be a form of rebellion against societal norms, including those dictating women’s appearances and behaviors.

Additionally, Sontag’s feminist critique extended beyond the written word. As a filmmaker, she challenged cinematic conventions, offering alternative narratives that subverted gender stereotypes. In her documentary, Promised Lands she examined the lives of Israeli and Palestinian women, shedding light on the complex intersections of gender, politics, and culture.

Portrayal of Women in Literature

Sontag’s approach to portraying women in literature was nuanced and complex. She eschewed simplistic stereotypes, opting instead for multifaceted, independent female characters who defied societal expectations. In her fiction, such as the novel The Volcano Lover , Sontag crafted protagonists who were not confined by conventional gender roles, embodying a sense of agency and autonomy.

In her exploration of the intersection between feminism and literature, Sontag sought to unravel the layers of societal expectations that constrained women. Her writings challenged readers to rethink traditional narratives and encouraged a broader, more inclusive perspective on the role of women in literature and society.

Susan Sontag’s feminist lens offers a rich and thought-provoking perspective on the portrayal of women in literature. Through her essays and works, she not only contributed to feminist thought but also paved the way for a more inclusive and diverse representation of women in the world of art and culture. As we reflect on Sontag’s legacy, her feminist insights continue to inspire readers and writers alike, urging us to question and reshape the narratives that shape our understanding of women in literature.

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An Essay on Feminism in English Literature

Table of Contents

The issue of Feminism in English Literature is not new but due to patriarchal society, it has been suppressed and overlooked. The existence of inequalities between men and women are not natural but social taboo. One may ask

Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the authors who wrote about feminism, advocates in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) that women must be treated equally because they have to play a crucial and vital role in society especially bringing up children.

She attacks male thinker and scholar like Rousseau who argued that women did not need education but she supported education as a means of women’s improvement.

Like her American activist, Margaret Fuller  one of the famous female writers of the 19th century, in her Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845) believed that education is the means of emancipation for women and her keys planks are education, employment and political.

While in the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf,  a modernist and female Victorian author, explored gender relations in her A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) . She vehemently argued that patriarchal education systems and reading practices prevent women readers from reading as women.

It is also remarkable when she remarks ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she to write fiction’ . She advocates for the liberation of women, financially independence and right to reveal feelings and experiences through words.

Whereas Simone De Beauvoir favours that there is ‘no essence’ of the woman and a woman is constructed by men . As she states it in her feminism manifesto The Second Sex (1949): ‘One is not born a woman but become one ’.

The exploitation, discrimination and the crisis of women’s identification faced by women in the society have questioned by female writers, activists, and critics.

In relation to literature, the feminism movement has focused on the role played by literature to bring out gender discrimination, domestic violence, and inequality on the forefront.

Development of Feminism

The concept of Feminism Movement got proper prominence and importance in the 1960s. Earlier, feminism was limited to some female writers only but the increased number of female writers and the representation of women characters in fiction world drew large attention in the literature. The evolution of the feminist movement in the literature as follows:

• First Wave Feminism mainly concerned with the treatment of women in the male-dominated society. The major works which raised the issues of feminism during this phase are Mary Ellman’s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1969) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). Many important works of the male writers have been studied in order to analyze the attitude of male towards women and society.
• Second Wave Feminism is concerned with women writings include Ellen More’s Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1970), Nina Baym’s Women’s Fiction (1978) , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979), and Margaret Homan’s Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980).

Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own published in 1970 . This phase chiefly explores the relationship between female and literature and texts were analyzed to understand the treatment of female characters by the male in the society.

Showalter proposed three stages in the history of women’s writing:

• Feminine phase (1840-80), in which women writers imitated dominant male artistic norms and aesthetic standards;
• Feminist phase (1880-1920), in which radical approach has been maintained; and at last
• Female phase (1920-onwards) which primarily focused on female writing and female experiences.

Feminism questions the long-standing, dominant, male interpretations, phallocentric ideology and patriarchal attitude. It concerned with varied aspects of feminism.

As Showalter sums up, “English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stressed oppression, French feminist criticism, especially psychoanalyst, stresses oppression. However, all have become ‘gynocentric’”.

Feminism criticism also concerned with women’s language and they need to cultivate linguistic and stylistic devices that can spontaneously express feminine sensibility and individuality.

Texts like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway , Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1982) are women-centric and unfolded the new women’s perspectives to analyze in the patriarchal society and distort all kinds of inequality and dependency on male counterparts.

Today women writers write enormously and expressed their sensibilities through their writings to enrich the substance of English literature. Feminism has empowered the confidence of women and provided the individuality identification in the patriarchal society.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Post-Feminism: An Essay

Post-Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 25, 2017 • ( 2 )

It must first be stated that there is no agreement about how postfeminism can be defined and consequently definitions essentially contradict each other in what they say about the term. At its most straightforward, the prefix ‘post’ in this context appears to mean ‘going beyond’ or ‘superseding’: it could therefore be seen as a confident announcement that feminism has achieved its key aims and that there is full equality for all women and a blurring of the boundaries between traditional ascriptions of gender. Given that a brief scrutiny of our current social formation does not support this view, we might, however, imagine that a post-feminist position is one formulated due to dissatisfaction with existing feminist politics and is to be located in an entirely new area or set of propositions altogether. Part of this dissatisfaction might be an awareness that even in its heyday, second wave feminism did not achieve its aim of speaking to the majority of women.

Either of these definitions seems possible and the notion of superseding or going beyond has been widely utilised in popular culture, and to some extent in academic discourse. Given that ‘feminism’ remains within the term post-feminism, albeit problematised by the prefix of ‘post’, this illustrates that ‘feminism is portrayed as a territory over which various women have to fight to gain their ground; it has become so unwieldy as a term that it threatens to implode under the weight of its own contradictions’ ( Whelehan 2000 : 78). The ‘post’ is not the end of feminism : actually feminism is constantly to be picked over only to be rapidly set aside again or dismissed as old hat. For Myra Macdonald , ‘post-feminism takes the sting out of feminism’ ( 1995 : 100); it removes the politics and claims the territory of self-empowerment.

There are some more complex and challenging definitions of the term and according to writers such as Sopia Phoca who co-produced an introductory guide to it, ‘post-feminism is considered as a different manifestation of feminism – not as being anti-feminist’ (quoted in Ashby 1999: 34) and as being associated with the development of post-Lacanian psychoanalysis , French feminism and post-structuralist theory , suggesting perhaps a permanent fracturation between second wave-style personal politics and ‘high’ theory. Ann Brooks (1997), however, would argue that it is not a question of depoliticising feminism, but of marking a conceptual shift between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ – from a model based on equality, to debates around the revivified and theorised concept of difference. For Brooks the term ‘post-feminism’ ‘is now understood as a useful conceptual frame of reference encompassing the intersection of feminism with a number of other anti-foundational movements including postmodernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism’ ( Brooks 1997 : 1).

Other critics would argue that the ‘post’ prefix added to modernism , structuralism or colonialism seems to unproblematically connote the ‘going beyond’ both spatially and chronologically that has occurred in modern theory; yet Brooks asserts that post-feminism used in this theoretical context signifies feminism ’s maturity. She reflects that rather than ‘post’ meaning going beyond or breaking with, in these contexts it means ‘a process of ongoing transformation and change’ (Brooks 1997: 1). Other kinds of ‘rebranding’ for feminism of course include the use of ‘third wave’ feminism where again the prefix is used to imply key shifts in the meaning of ‘feminism’ itself and in this theoretically-informed definition of post-feminism there might be seen to be common ground between third wave and post-feminism, although third wavers would certainly reject any suggestion that feminism is over. Brooks herself acknowledges the way post-feminism is associated with a negative portrayal of feminism in the mass media – particularly in the way the rhetoric of post-feminism is summoned in the backlash against feminism (see also Faludi 1992 ).

One of the reasons it is argued that the move to post-feminism is essential is because of the influence of postmodern thinking which refuses the ‘grand narrative’ of gender difference, so that it becomes increasingly impossible to lay claim to the identity ‘woman’, because of the impact of ‘difference’ theories and the contestation of knowledges about how ‘woman’ is constructed. Ann Brooks ’s version of post-feminism puts ‘woman’ under erasure; of course one could argue that this denies any political agency to a feminist who cannot lay claim to that identity, ‘modernist’ as it is, suggesting as it does a retreat to the self and ultimately the individualist framing of identity so favoured by enlightenment liberalism. The category ‘woman’, no matter how unsatisfactory as a means to summon up the wealth and diversity of women’s experiences and identities, allows at least a space to lay claim to a wealth of shared experiences (gendered pay differentials, the impact of sexual violence, the relationship of nation to gender for instance) which permits a collective oppositional response to injustices against women.

For critics who are still happy to call themselves ‘feminist’ without any prefixes, such a model of feminism does not readily allow for an acknowledgement of some highly productive shifts in feminism since the 1970s. Feminist politics has not remained static, and many of the central issues, so radical in the 1970s, are now accepted as part of mainstream politics. As Sylvia Walby notes, ‘Who would now call someone who believes in equal pay feminist? Yet before 1975 this was not law and was controversial’ ( 1997 : 163). Rene Denfeld , in her critique of second wave feminism, The New Victorians , bears this out when she points out that while the next generation has problems with the epithet ‘feminist’, they have no problem supporting the principles of equal pay and educational opportunities (Denfeld 1995: 4). For Denfeld this change from broad support of feminism to scepticism and alienation is a response to a change in the terms of second wave feminism itself: ‘It has become bogged down in an extremist moral and spiritual crusade that has little to do with women’s lives. It has climbed out on a limb of academic theory that is all but inaccessible to the uninitiated . . . feminism has become as confining as what it pretends to combat’ (Denfeld 1995: 5). Denfeld is pointing to widely aired anxieties that feminism has become just one more arcane theory – stemming from what she perceives to be a majority of cultural feminist writers creating and delivering women’s studies curricula in American universities, containing an alleged anti-male agenda. It is as if she actually doesn’t want to dismiss feminism but rather to take it ‘back’ from whoever she feels has stolen it. The irony is that ‘post-feminism’ from both Phoca and Wright’s and Brooks’s perspective is in many ways just such another ‘inaccessible’ theory for the uninitiated.

Tania Modleski is more concerned that while ‘woman’ is being put under erasure in the debates about difference, conceptual shifts such as the ‘men in feminism’ debate (a debate about whether men should call themselves feminists or be feminist critics independently of women) might make women disappear from feminism altogether. Talking about one particular anthology of ‘male feminist’ criticism she observes that ‘[i]n an unusually strong post-feminist irony, the final essay of this volume which banishes women from its list of contributors is a complaint about the way heterosexual men have become invisible within feminism!’ ( Modleski, 1991: 12). Modleski’s dissection of post-feminism in the critical sphere in many ways anticipates Susan Faludi ’s arguments in Backlash where it is the appropriation of the language of feminism which is seen to be used against itself in popular culture. Modleski’s combination of questioning theory and using examples of popular film, television and news, suggests that this appropriation goes much deeper and, she would argue, drives us straight back to male-centred discourse and critical authority.

There is still the accusation that second wave feminism failed to cede the hegemony of white middle-class heterosexual women to other groups of women, and there is clearly some truth in this claim. But nonetheless it is clear that many feminists (particularly at the level of grassroots politics) did acknowledge the common links between different sites of oppression; and the growth in political and critical perspectives by women of colour, working-class women and lesbians suggests that for them the struggle is not over. One can think of key voices in black American feminism, such as bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins who emphatically lay claim to ‘feminism’ as a term which still has political resonance, and this suggests that not all proponents of feminist discourse are ready yet to cede the ground to post-feminism, but would rather address the gaps, in the belief that there might be some consensus about what feminism can do.

Source: Fifty Key Concepts in Gender Studies Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan Sage Publications, 2004.

FURTHER READING Ann Brooks (1997) gives a fairly comprehensive account of what ‘postfeminism’ means in a theoretical context; for those still struggling with French feminism, post-structuralism and Lacan. Phoca and Wright (1999) offer a crisp and concise account, liberally using illustrations and graphic narrative. Modleski (1991) and Faludi (1992) offer challenges which provide illuminating comparison.

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Tags: Ann Brooks , Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women , Feminism , Feminism without women , Imelda Whelehan , Introducing Postfeminism , Literary Theory , Myra Macdonald , Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism , Patricia Hill Collins , postfeminism , Rene Denfeld , Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media , second wave feminism , Susan Faludi , Sylvia Walby , Tania Modleski , The New Victorians , The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order

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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.

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How Alice Walker Created Womanism

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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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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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Feminism and Literature, Essay Example

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You are free to use it as an inspiration or a source for your own work.

Throughout the early 20th century, women were working hard towards achieving social equality for themselves. Despite the fact that women already had many right throughout this time, they were still given the stereotype that there were inferior to men. Because of this, many contemporary thinkers came about who believed in the women ’ s suffrage movement. This combination of both desire and contemporary thinking led to women attaining more equality than they could have ever asked for years after.

 It is without a doubt that the message that Susan Glaspell was attempting to portray through her most famous work The Outside was the fact that women should not be perceived by the common stereotype of the time. In her famous work, Glaspell is able to prove the fact that women are not as bad as everyone thinks. In addition, it is shown how the reason as to why everyone believes in the common stereotypes that surrounds women is because of the fact that it has become common trend to do so. By portraying characters such as Captain and Bradford, I believe that Glaspell was trying to show represent the general public as a whole. These two characters start off the play with thinking of women as less of them and, of course, following the common misconception about women. However, as the play prolongs and the audience is introduced to the women, they are given very different ideas of what the women would be like. Clearly, the women are not what Captain and Bradford has described. In fact, they are portrayed as quite the opposite. Strategies like these were very common at the time of feminist contemporary thinkers who believed that women deserved a fair place in society just like men had one. Therefore, this brings forth the conclusion that feminist literature was able to prevail in the time of contemporary thinking is because of the fact that is was so effective in its time and because of the manner in which its literature spoke volumes to the audience.

Lechte, J. (n.d.). Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity –  Google Books. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books? hl=en&lr=&id=CE0rBgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP2&dq=contemporary+thinkers+and +feminism&ots=zLjphUgT8u&sig=5dT2TURwRx48jQLC2obQNEHAjak#v=onepage&q=conte mporary%20thinkers%20and%20feminism&f=false

Susan Glaspell Home Page. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://americanliterature.com/author/susan- glaspell/bio-books-stories

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Feminism in literature essay | Importance and Characteristics

Feminism in literature essay: Through literature, feminism has become more than just a movement for women’s rights. Though initially working toward equality of the genders, modern feminism tries to undo patriarchy and gender roles altogether. Its goals range from removing male domination in professional careers to completely ejecting men from home.

On the other hand, neopatriarchy is a term conceived by Susan Brownmiller that describes society’s attitude regarding sex roles since the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Importance of feminism in literature

Like the activism behind politics, feminism is critical in literature because it allows women to speak up for their beliefs. It also gives them a voice that introduces an alternative to traditional society. When reading, students can relate to the viewpoints of authors who are strong proponents of the movement. With this insight into contemporary culture, students are better equipped with how feminist ideology impacts our lives today.

Before any “movement,” women used literary works as an outlet for their anger toward men and desire for liberation. Even before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, many female authors had already voiced concerns about gender inequality in their novels. Although some may claim that specific such authors were more disturbed than empowered, they nevertheless produced some of the most fantastic feminist literature we have today.

Today, sexism and prejudice against women are still prominent in many novels and poems despite what some may consider recent gains for women’s freedom. But no matter how radical their views might be interpreted as being, female authors continue to introduce new ideas into the society that challenge pre-established roles. They represent not only gender relations between men and women but also those of all races and sexual orientations and those who do not conform to social norms, such as careerists or stay-at-home moms. Through literature, feminism has become more than just a movement for women’s rights; it offers insight into the beliefs of strong advocates of equality and can open the eyes of readers to new ways of thinking.

Characteristics of feminist literature

Several common themes characterize feminist literature:

• Feminism and critical theory
• Women’s experiences of love/sex/divorce/motherhood
• The response to male violence against women

The first theme of feminist literature is feminism itself as a way of thought or critique. It views culture through the lens of gender and encourages awareness about sexism. In short, it holds that differences between men and women are not differences in kind but merely differences in degree – men and women share many attributes – which means that we should see all people as equal. The goal then becomes to seek equality for everyone rather than just focusing on one group, such as females, who have traditionally been considered unequal to males.

The second theme of feminist literature is the experiences of women. Examples include love/sex/divorce/motherhood in novels like The Awakening, A Room of One’s Own by Woolf, and Caesura by Ward. These authors often used their own experiences to weave their stories about how females are viewed in society.

The third theme of feminist literature is criticism or response to male violence against women (rape, beatings). This is especially evident in works like Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience And Institution by Rich, Unclean Thing by Morrison, and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Angelou.

Besides these three big themes, there are still smaller ones such as female friendships, taking on male-dominated professions, a woman who does not change her name when she gets married.

Conclusion:

Reading an essay on feminist literature, keep in mind that this is not just about women’s rights, but it is also a form of inquiry into the social status of both sexes. Think about how these authors went against gender roles and stereotypes to give readers a new perspective on what being female means.

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Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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