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Feminisms and Gender Studies Concepts & Examples Major Feminist Schools Practice Texts Issues & Discussion Relevant Links Bibliographies Under Construction Untitled, 1982. Photogaph by Barbara Kruger

Main Issues:
    1. women's positions in patriarchal society and discourses: ( Patriarchy and the History of Feminist Writings)

• history of subordination and marginalization of women (women as the second/weaker sex);
• women's absence from mainstream discourse;
• objectification of women: "angel and whore/femme fatale" polarity in literature; male voyeurism in paintings, Hollywood film and music video

• French Feminisms

    3. women's discourse (part of male discourse or against it and its binarisms) & gender difference: the female and the feminine; sex and gender(

issues: 1. What is phallocentrism? And phallogocentrism?

1. What is Women's Writing?  Is it writing signed by women, writing for women, or feminine writing (ecriture feminine)?
2. Why does Cixous, Irigaray, or Kristeva, refuse to define 'feminine writing'?
3. What problems are there in equating the semiotic and non-rational discourse with the feminine?

Cixous: "The Laugh of Medusa"

• Why don't you write? (317)
• women's writing --

2. seizing the occasion to speak (321)
3. from woman and for women --"first music from the first voice of love"; writing in white ink (322);
4. the Realm of the Gift vs. the Realm of the Proper (property-- appropriate--the fear of castration)
1. writing (323-24) -- 'work on the difference'
2. the other bisexuality--multiple, variable and ever changing, consisting as it does of the 'non-exclusion either of the difference or of one sex'.
3. flying (325)
4. "heterogeneous" and erogenous

• Irigaray: autoeroticism; plural sexuality; ("Irigaray describes the ways women speak to each other--shared confidences, unfinished sentences, exclamations, what Irigaray calls babble--in order to define feminine language as outside the order of the symbolic...She develops an alternate discourse that is multiple, fluid, and heterogeneous, basing her theory on the anatomy of female genitalia, whose shape,..., is that of two constantly touching and retouching lips." Showalter)

feminine style: 1) mimicry; 2) "self-touching" and "self-affection" --
• an alternate discourse that is multiple, fluid, and heterogeneous,
• basing her theory on the anatomy of female genitalia
• Kristeva:
• the feminine as the silence of the unconscious that precedes discourse
• its utterance is a flow or rhythm instead of an ordered statement;
• expression is fluid like the free-floating sea of a womb or the milk of the breast.
• the semiotic chora (from the Greek word for enclosed space, womb);
• the mirror phase as the first step that 'opens the way for the constitution of all objects which from now on will be detached from the semiotic chora' (Revolution 44).




• Julia Kristeva: Major Concepts, etc.
• Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa" Site  (remote)
• Judith Butler: Gender Trouble
• Luce Irigaray

issues: Conflicts between postmodernism and feminism: Postmodern critique of epistemology: meta-narrative, or narrative of legitimation, vs. the need for cognitive map selfhood: depth-psychology vs. politics of identity representation and politics (--play of difference or undermining system of representation) connections of postmodernism and feminism against master/masculine narratives strategies of double coding (irony, intertextuality, parody, etc.) Feminism/Postmodernism "Introduction"  Nicholson, Linda, ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1990:  1-18. similarities (p. 5)   1) [both have] uncovered the political power of the academy and of knowledge claims.  In general, they have argued against the supposed neutrality and objectivity of the academy, asserting that claims put forth as universally applicable have invariably been valid only for men of a particular culture, class, and race. 2) [Postmodernists have alleged that] ideals which have given backing to these claims, such as "objectivity" and "reason,"  have reflected the values of masculinity at a particular point of history. Feminists have criticized other enlightenment ideals, such as the autonomous and self-legislating self,  as reflective of masculinity in the modern West. 3) pm offers feminism some useful ideas about method, particularly a wariness toward generalizations which transcend the boundaries of culture and region.   differences (pp. 5-6) 1) pm's criticism of f's essentialism and traditional notions of history (e.g. the ways they locate the cause of women's oppression e.g. biological determinants; a cross-cultural domestic/public separation; the assumption of monocausality (pp. 6-7 2) feminists' critique of postmodernism's decentered self -- e.g. Christine Di Stefano  " . . . for women to take on such a position is to weaken what is not yet strong." critique of epistemology -- e.g. Sandra Harding  "To this critique she counterposes two alternative feminist theories of scientific knowledge: feminist empiricism, .  . . and feminist standpoint theory. . . . she claims that both theories have incorporated postmodernist elements to deal with [their problems in not supporting the norm of 'value-free' research and in elaborating linkages with the standpoints of oppressed groups other than women.]; e.g. Seyla benhabib against postmodern relativism (p. 8- feminist concern with the loss of the categories of gender and body;  the loss of particularity.      postmodern feminis -- principle (p. 35) 1) forswear master narrative; theory would be explicitly historical 2) non-universalist 3) dispense with the idea of a subject of history. It would replace unitary notions of woman and feminine gender identity with plural and complexly constructed conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand among others. 4) pragmatic and fallibilistic Different Kinds of Postmodern Feminisms: 1. Donna Haraway: A Cyborg -- "contradictory, partial and strategic" (197), "a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective self"?(205), breaking the dichotomies between "mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized…" (Question: Does this involve erasure of the body? Susan Bordo "What sort of body is it that is free to change its shape and location at will, that can become anyone and travel everywhere? If the body is the metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all." (8) 2. Judith Butler Gender Trouble p. 136 If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity. p. 139  Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an "act," as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where "performative" suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning. 3. Postmodern Feminist Artists: Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Madonna (See "Hollywood images vs. feminist artists-- Cindy Sherman and Madonna ") "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism", an outline by Lisa Li "THEORIZING -- FEMINISM AND POSTMODERNITY: A CONVERSATION WITH LINDA HUTCHEON(1997 Remote)"

issues:

1. What is "lesbian"?  lesbian writing?  Is there a lesbian aesthetic? --Consider style, sexual orientation (heterosexuality, bisexuality, pornography, butch and femme) , political position

1. in the closet: gay and lesbian relations in traditional literature—e.g. Shakespeare's sonnet, Iliad, A Room with a View
2. "It is writing which exhibits, within the confines of the text itself, something which makes it distinctively about, or for, or out of lesbian experience. That element may lie in the plot, in the subject, in the theory, in the cold or the genre, but it has to be there in the writing. The writer herself may never have kissed another woman. Even if she has, she may not call herself a lesbian" (Margaret Reynolds 1993: xxxii)

 
3. 周華山  pp. 184-86: Lesbian writings defined by the author's sexual orientation? e.g. Woolf? Jane Austin?; By content e.g. Sula ?

  What is lesbian experience? (sexual relations; woman-centered experience; experience subversive of the patriarchy)

queer reading and the lesbian/gay texts in the closet

Lesbianism & Lesbian movement: Three stages; three definitions of the "lesbian" (Cf. 周華山; 矛峰)

 

70's--political lesbian: desexualized p. 110; e.g. Women Against Sex 組織  Rich: Compulsory heterosexuality "Lesbian continuum" 114; Wittig: Lesbians are not Women 115 critique: 117- e.g. 122 Lesbian as a pre-discursive subject 80's--sexual liberation Think through the body ; arguments about porn. 134-37 arguments about butch and femme 140-45 Black (Third World) feminism: e.g. Lorde's argument about sex and "erotic" 149 90's--politics of difference postmodern feminism—in relation to 1. logocentrism; 2. theories of Sexual equality, and Sexual difference, (e.g. vaginal orgasm) Foucault and Derrida Judith Butler –gender identity as corporeal styles, as a lack (non-identity); masquerade and Diana Fuss—identity established through erasing/suppressing difference What is "Lesbian"

Three Stages of homosexuality: (Cf. 矛峰) biological stage -- homosexuality as a primitive instinct cultural stage -- endowed with cultural or religious significance; in myth or folk religion (political stage--) aesthetic stage -- p. 424-25

• Queer Theory (remote)

    1. representation of women with a focus on rape and spectatorship;e.g.

1. literature: "Araby"; "I'm Running for my Life"; "Rape Fantasies" "Rape"(Adrienne Rich);
2. paintings: excerpt from Ways of  Seeing;
3. popular culture--music video: Dream World;
4. popular culture--films: "Rear Window";
5.  popular culture--ads: Contemporary Images of Women on the Ads

 **Choose a Chinese or English text (literary or non-literary) and study its construction of women in relation to men. Are the women in the chosen text subordinated to men, objectified (used as a symbol or an object of desire) or stereotyped (angel or whore)? Is their development constrained in the patriarchal society? Is the text critical of,or complicit with, this sexual inequality?

**Choose a text written by a woman and study its attitudes toward patriarchal values and/or its construction of  gender. Remember, a woman is not necessarily a feminist; some woman writers may be complicit withpatriarchal society.

Artists on Women's Images: Madonna, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Chinese Americans
and Female Artists and Femininist Issues: Taiwanese and Western feminist painters
 

**Choose a text and study its construction of gender. Are gender differences in the text absolute or relative?    What constitutes the "female," the "male," or even the third sex (biology, language, psyche or culture)?

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