Marxism – Visual Review

1. Marxism – Visual Review • The Rainbow Fish • With a partner, draw a picture that represents your understanding of the Marxist Lens. • Be Creative and Symbolic! • Capture Key Components! • Proletariat vs. Bourgeoisie • Interpellation • Oppression, Opportunity, Power….

2. Charting Activity • Create a table or chart labeled along with top with: Masculine, Feminine, Both, Neither. • Do not look on as we do this. Where you place the following words should be based on your FIRST instinct. Do not second-guess yourself. • Use a new row for each word. • Each word should only show up once. • Example, if you place “woman” in the feminine column, it should not show up any where else in that row.

3. Charting Activity Place each of the following words in your chart. Again, do not second guess yourself. Fashion, football, breadwinner, pilot, strength, flower, ambitious, perseverance, compassionate, bossy, helpless, thoughtful, soft, brassy, dangerous, perpetrator, victim, attractive, opinionated, hostile, emotional

4. Feminist Criticism • The feminist critical approach holds that most of our literature presents a masculine-patriarchal (phalocentric) view in which the role of women is negated or at best minimized.

5. Feminist Criticism • As an addition to the feminist movement in politics, the feminist critique of literature seeks to raise the consciousness about the importance and unique nature of women in literature, and to point out how language has been used to marginalize women.

6. Feminist Criticism Specifically, the feminist view attempts to: • Show that writers of traditional literature have ignored women and have presented misguided and prejudiced views of them • Stimulate the creation of a critical landscape that reflects a balanced view of the nature and value of women

7. Feminist Criticism 3. Expand the literary canon by recovering works of women of the past and publication of contemporary female writers 4. Urge transformation in the language to eliminate inequities and inequalities that result from linguistic distortions such as mankind (rather than humanity).

8. Feminist Critical Questions • To what extent does the representation of women (and men) in the work reflect the time and place in which the work was written? • How are the relationships between men and women presented in the work? • Does the author present the work from within a predominantly male or female perspective?

9. Feminist Critical Questions 4.How do the facts of the author’s life relate to the presentation of men and women in the work? 5. How do other works by the author correspond to this one in their depiction of the power relationships between men and women?

10. A Feminist critic could analyze Juno. These pictures depict her as: confident, powerful, equal, firm, at peace, dauntless, self-sufficient, co-owning, secure, judged but able to withstand, even bolder than her “man”

11. A Feminist critic could analyze Twilight. These pictures depict her as: insecure, submissive, dependent, reliant, protected, main but lesser, sustained by, accessory, strong because of, empowered by, obedient, even slavish

12. Feminist / Gender Critical Lens Positive Connotation Negative Connotation Degraded language system created by male-dominated power structure:

13. Describe, Analyze, Conclude

14. Describe, Analyze, Conclude

15. Think about this… • Do girls like Barbies naturally or because we buy Barbies for them and tell them to like the dolls? • Do boys like footballs naturally? • Are boys more competitive naturally, having been “hard-wired” to compete for centuries—for women, food, respect, status, rank? • 2: 1ratio in Senior English (boys/girls) • 2:3in Senior IB/AP Lit • 9:1 ratio in Detention; what about prisons?