Feminism(s)

1. Feminism(s) Carmen Santiago

2. Key ideas to bear in mind while studying feminism • Women treated as 2nd rate citizens in Western culture. (Social conditions of women) • There was a negative stereotype of women. • Cultural identity construction. (women’s roles: house-angel) • Power was always related to the public sphere and women were only admitted in private sphere. Feminism fights against this idea and states public & private spheres cannot be separated. • Feminism tried to change the power relations between women & men, it was against Patriarchy, term that refer to almost complete domination of men in Western society & beyond. AN EXAMPLE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHW_5cgYew0

3. Contemporary feminist literary criticism- 1960’s-70’s. (Antecedents: V. Woolf: A Room of One’s Own & Bible: Inanna) • Early feminism: women’s experience under patriarchy. (The canon was male) • Movement moved to ethnic and gender boundaries. (African American Feminist scholars) • Lesbian feminism criticism reconstructed a hidden tradition of lesbian wrtiting and explored the experience of radical alterity within a heterosexist world. • Two stages appeared. (Misogynist stereotypes in male lit. & recovery of lost tradition and historical reconstruction) • Mid-1980’s began to impact the French Feminism. (Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous)

4. Liberal & radical Feminism were in disagreement since 1970’s and two perspectives began: - Constructionist: gender is made by culture in history. It took inspiration from the Marxist theory of the social construction of individual subjectivity (Althusser) and from the Post-structuralist idea that language writes rather than reflects identities. - Essentialists: gender reflects a natural difference between men and women that is much psychological, even linguistic, as it is biological. Women are innately capable of offering a different ethics from men. Men must abstract themselves from the material world as they separate from their mothers to enter in the patriarchate, that implies get involve in violence. On the other hand, women are not required to separate from their mother as they acquire a gender identity; they simply identify with the closest person to them, their mother. No cut is required and that makes women more ethical than men with the others.

5. “The Traffic in Women” (1975) • Feminism was trying to find their place among 3 schools: - Freudian psychoanalysis - Structural anthropology - Marxism • Talks about the “Sex/Gender system” as a part of social life. Defined as the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied. • To demonstrate the need of her concept, she discusses the failure of classical Marxism to conceptualize sex oppression. In Marx’s map, women is not seen as very significant, however, the “wife” is among the necessities of a worker. Rubin says that is through this “historical and moral element” the entire domain of sex and sex oppression is subsumed. • Engels saw sex oppression as part of capitalism’s heritage, and integrates sex and sexuality into his theory of society. For human beings, once they have covered the natural world elements (economy) the production is able to be achieved, but, the human being is not fulfilled for the needs of fundamental human requirements, then relations of sexuality appear. Furthermore, a human group has to reproduce itself from generation to generation. Engel’s indicates then the importance of the domain of social, that Rubin calls “sex/gender system.” Gayle Rubin (1949-)

6. Kinship for an anthropologist is a system of categories and statuses which often contradict actual genetic relationships. They vary wildly from one culture to the next. Kinship is organization and organization gives power. But to whom? Women are treated as gifts and men are who have the power. Therefore, the only beneficiate here are men. (“Exchange of women” is a seductive and powerful concept that places the oppression of women within social systems, rather than biology.) • The “exchange of women” is neither a definition of culture nor a system in and of itself. A kinship system is an imposition of social ends upon a part of the natural world. The result is different rights that various people have over other people. • The economic oppression of women is an “economics” of sex and gender, and what we need is a political economy of sexual systems. • The sex/gender system must be reorganized through political action and feminism must dream even more than the elimination of the oppression of women, but the elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex roles. • Rubin recognizes the mutual interdependence of sexuality, economics, and politics without underestimating the full significance of each in human society.

7. Tried to show how important were the limit options female writers had in 19th. “The Madwoman in the Attic” • “Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality.” (1985) • Body language articulates language. • Tries to integrate power, language & meaning by means of examine between sexual difference & symbolic contract. • That examination is not only interesting for the questions of female linguistic destiny, but has also interested to masculinist doubts. Both female & male participate in a tradition of linguistic fantasy that affects them. • Female subject is not alienated from the words she writes and speaks. Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar

8. Women is not just a sign but a generator of signs, therefore, she needs to know the nature and purpose of her own passive signification, her own active signifying. • “(Women) … the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you.” • Women need a feminist language, in E. Showalter’s words: “a revolutionary linguism, an oral break from the dictatorship of patriarchal speech.” • As long as women remain silent or speak in a body language of freely fluent multiple referentiality, they will be outside the historical process. But if they begin to speak and write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated; it is a history that, logically speaking, their speech should disrupt. • This dilemma needs a reshape of language so that it works for, rather than against, women. • Differences appear between French & American feminism. • A virulent battle between men against women appear. • The Freudanian theories falls paradoxically into mother’ supremacy. • “In spite of feminist doubt and masculinist dread, we can affirm that woman has not been sentenced to transcribe male penmanship, she commands sentences which inscribe her own powerful character.”

9. GayatrichakravortySpivak “Three women’s texts & a critique of imperialism.” (1986) Read British 19th literature with imperialism in mind. The signifier as “Third World” or “wordling.” Examines the operation of Third World by means of Jane Eyre. She plots the novel with Wide Sargasso Sea & Frankenstein as an analysis –deconstruction- of a “worlding” such as Jane Eyre. What she is trying to show is the blindness of feminism. Imperialism, the subject not only as individual but as individualist. Represented by 2 registers: 1. Child bearing 2. Soul making To wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the “subject-constitution” of the female individualist. 19th subject-constitution by child bearing & soul making 20th subject-constitution by psychoanalysis, from Narcissus (imaginary) to Oedipus (symbolic)

10. Spivak tried to extend, outside of the European novelistic tradition, the most powerful suggestion in Wide Sargasso Sea: the Jane Eyre can be read as the orchestration & staging of self-immolation of Bertha Mason as “good wife.” And she hoped that an informed critique of imperialism, granted some attention from readers in the First World, will at least expand the frontiers of the politics of reading. • The readings will provoque angriness against the narrativization of history. Spivak does that to put feminist individualism in its historical determination. Spivak effort is to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the “subject-constitution” of the female individualist. • Spivak included the complicity of female writers with imperialism. “It should not be possible to read 19th century British fiction without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English.” • Spivak represents the voice of difference.

11. “A great way to fly”: Nationalism, the State, and the Varieties of Third-World Feminism. (1997) Geraldine Heng. Examines the conflict between traditional gender ideology & the movement for the liberation of women in Third World context. There are different kinds of Third World feminist movements, that’s mainly why they don’t have a global theory. 3 factors in common: 1. Haunted by historical origins (nationalism) 2. Presence & Intervention of State itself 3. Ambivalence of Third world nations to the arrival of modernity

12. There’s a manipulation of 3rd World feminism by nationalism • 3rd World feminism focus on the requirement of an unexceptionable genealogy, history or tradition. • 3rd World states profit from the manipulation of women & feminine identity as an economic resource. • All 3rd World feminists are at risk because the state can take them down in any moment, that’s why there’s a need to write about the feminist groups existence for a survival effect. WHAT IS REMAINING FOR US? • http://cargocollective.com/citypulse#1225738/CITY-OF-WOMEN-/-La-Ciudad-de-las-Mujeres