One of Margaret Atwood’s (born November 18, 1939) central themes is storytelling itself, and most of her fiction relates to that theme in some way. The short-story collections each focus on key issues. Dancing Girls is primarily concerned with otherness,… Read More ›
Feminism
Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Novels
From the appearance of her first novel in 1915, Virginia Woolf’s work was received with respect—an important point, since she was extremely sensitive to criticism. Descendant of a distinguished literary family, member of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group, herself an experienced… Read More ›
Analysis of Mary Shelley’s Novels
Shelley’s literary reputation rests solely on her first novel, Frankenstein. Her six other novels, which are of uneven quality, are very difficult indeed to find, even in the largest libraries. Nevertheless, Mary Shelley lays claim to a dazzling array of… Read More ›
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s Novels
Doris Lessing (22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) has been one of the most widely read and influential British novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Her works have been translated into many languages and have inspired critical attention… Read More ›
Analysis of Wendy Wasserstein’s Plays
Wendy Wasserstein (October 18, 1950 – January 30, 2006) has been hailed as the foremost theatrical chronicler of the lives of women of her generation. Her plays, steeped in her unique brand of humor, are moving, sometimes wrenching explorations of… Read More ›
Analysis of Ntozake Shange’s Plays
Ntozake Shange’s (October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018) work embodies a rich confusion of genres and all the contradictions inherent in a world in which violence and oppression polarize life and art. These polarizations in Shange’s work both contribute… Read More ›
Analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s Novels
Analysis Simone de Beauvoir’s novels are grounded in her training as a philosopher and in her sociological and feminist concerns. She Came to Stay, The Blood of Others, All Men Are Mortal, and The Mandarins all revolve around the questions… Read More ›
Gay and Lesbian Novels and Novelists
Homosexuality, traditionally regarded as a disease or perversion by church, state, and society, was rigorously denounced and condemned by those same institutions. In the case of the arts and literature, works featuring homoeroticism or gays and lesbians as characters were… Read More ›
Feminist Novels and Novelists
Feminist long fiction features female characters whose quest for self-agency leads to conflict with a traditionally masculinist and patriarchal society. These novels have been harshly criticized and dismissed—and even ridiculed—for their nontraditional female characters. Feminist ideology in the Western world… Read More ›
Queer Theory
Since the late 1980s, theories of Gender and Sexuality have redefined how we think about culture and society. They have raised new questions about the construction of the gendered and sexualized subject and put forward radical new ideas about PERFORMANCE… Read More ›
Girlhood Studies
With the advent of sex‐positive third‐wave feminism in the 1990s, notions of femininity and feminism shift, in reaction to the growth of fields like masculinities and transgender studies, but also in response to the activism of women in the previous… Read More ›
Gay/Lesbian Studies
Gay/lesbian studies looks at the kinds of social structures and social constructs which define our ideas about sexuality as act and sexuality as identity. As an academic field, gay/lesbian studies looks at how notions of homosexuality have historically been defined… Read More ›
Postfeminism and Its Entanglement with the Fourth Wave
The concept of postfeminism as associated with a time after, or even reaction against, feminism, can in part be attributed to Susan Faludi’s book, Backlash (1992). Faludi’s analysis of discussions of feminism in the media suggested that the term ‘postfeminism’… Read More ›
Feminist Science Studies
Feminist Science Studies emerged in the mid-1980s as a response to the masculinist paradigms of participation and epistemology in the natural sciences. A survey of initial efforts in the area reveals a schism between the women-in-science movement and feminist critiques… Read More ›
Trinh T. Minh-ha and Film Criticism
Born Vietnam in 1953, Trinh T. Minh-ha came to the United States, studied music and comparative literature at the University of Illinois, and she studied ethnomusicology in France. Her later experience as a researcher in Senegal led directly to her… Read More ›
Analysis of Alice Walker’s Novels
The story of Alice Walker’s childhood scar provides the most basic metaphor of her novels: the idea that radical change is possible even under the worst conditions. Although she was never able to regain the sight in one eye, Walker’s… Read More ›
Fatema Mernissi and Islamic Feminism
Islamic feminism has been a widely discussed phenomenon since the emergence of the term in 1990s, oftentimes subject to a heated debate. On one hand, this debate is due to the ways in which it is embedded in the wider… Read More ›
Analysis of Ellen Glasgow’s Novels
Turning away from a romanticized view of her own Virginia, Ellen Glasgow (April 22, 1873 – November 21, 1945) became a part of the revolt against the elegiac tradition of southern letters. Although she rejected romance, she did not turn… Read More ›
Analysis of Edna Ferber’s Novels
Ferber was a feminist, a conservationist, a crusader for minorities and immigrants, and a staunch believer in the work ethic and American culture. Strong women characters rising above the limitations of birth and gender dominate her novels; most men in… Read More ›
Postmodernism and Feminism
[Feminism] should persist in seeing itself as a component or offshoot of Enlightenment modernism, rather than as one more ‘exciting’ feature (or cluster of features) in a postmodern social landscape. (Sabina Lovibond, in T. Docherty, ed., Postmodemism: A Reader (1993).)… Read More ›
Key Theories of Judith Butler
Judith Butler (b.1956) received a PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1984, with a thesis on Hegelian influences in France. She is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at… Read More ›
Marxist Feminism
From a Marxist perspective, history is dominated by a struggle between social classes that will only end when a truly classless society has been achieved. Given the fact that throughout history women have been collectively denied important rights, it was… Read More ›
Translation and Gender
The interest of cultural studies in translation inevitably took translation studies away from purely linguistic analysis and brought it into contact with other disciplines. Yet this ‘process of disciplinary hybridization’ (Simon 1996: ix) has not always been straightforward. Sherry Simon,… Read More ›
Corporeal Feminism
During the 1990s, a group of Australian feminists (e.g., Grosz 1994; Grosz and Probyn 1995; Gatens 1996; Kirby 1997) developed a branch of sexual difference theory known as ‘corporeal feminism.’ Drawing on Irigaray, this group has argued that feminist researchers… Read More ›
Literary Criticism and Theory in the Twentieth Century
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
Black Feminisms
The term ‘Black’ is radically unstable and is applied to various, related political positions. An attempt to trace the meanings that surround and inform this term involves an engagement with its geographical, cultural and political indeterminacies, with its reliance on… Read More ›
Literary Criticism of Christine de Pisan
Christine de Pisan (ca. 1365–1429) was perhaps the most articulate and prolific female voice of the European Middle Ages. Being widowed at the age of 25 without an inheritance and with three children, she was obliged to earn her living… Read More ›
Literary Criticism of Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was a pioneer in many respects. Because of her family circumstances and her husband’s early death, she was obliged to support herself as a writer – the first woman to do so. She is one of the… Read More ›
Female Characters in Eugene O’Neill’s Plays
Like many other male writers, Eugene O’Neill created a world populated primarily by men. From the sea plays at the beginning of his career to such late works as The Iceman Cometh and Hughie, men dominate his theatrical space. A… Read More ›
Gender Stereotype
The concept of a stereotype was introduced into social science in 1922, when Walter Lippman used it to describe the ‘typical picture’ that comes to mind when thinking about a particular social group (Macrae et al. 1996). A stereotype can… Read More ›
Heterosexism
The word ‘heterosexism’ derives directly from the feminist creation of the term ‘sexism’ during the late 1960s. The first usage of the term heterosexism is given as 1979 by the Oxford English Dictionary and it is defined as ‘prejudice and… Read More ›
Gender Order
The gender order is a patterned system of ideological and material practices, performed by individuals in a society, through which power relations between women and men are made, and remade, as meaningful. It is through the gender order of a… Read More ›
Third Wave Feminism
Third wave feminism has numerous definitions, but perhaps is best described in the most general terms as the feminism of a younger generation of women who acknowledge the legacy of second wave feminism, but also identify what they see as… Read More ›
Second Wave Feminism
Second wave feminism is a term used to describe a new period of feminist collective political activism and militancy which emerged in the late 1960s. The concept of ‘waves’ of feminism was itself only applied in the late 1960s and… Read More ›
First Wave Feminism
The historical development of feminism (especially in Britain and the USA) is commonly divided into several key periods, some characterised by a relative absence of feminist thought and mobilisation, and others by the sustained growth both of feminist criticism and… Read More ›
Identity Politics/ the Politics of Identity
The utopian vision of ‘sisterhood’ – the collecting together of all women under the same political banner – was in part responsible for the burgeoning interest in feminism and the emergent Women’s Liberation Movement. It was inevitably going to come… Read More ›
Post-Feminism: An Essay
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… Read More ›
Lesbian Continuum: A Brief Note
The ‘lesbian continuum’ was a phrase coined by Adrienne Rich in her pathfinding essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980, reprinted in Rich 1986). Rich’s notion of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ here extends the definition of lesbian beyond that of sexual identity… Read More ›
Ecofeminism
Ecofeminism has become an increasingly important field in both contemporary feminist and environmental studies. Although, as Diamond and Orenstein note, ecofeminism is really ‘a new term for an ancient wisdom’ (Mies and Shiva 1993: 13), it first came to prominence… Read More ›
Lesbian Film Theory and Criticism
Theoretical approaches to the cinematic representation of lesbianism represent a particularly complex and fruitful area of feminist film study, as well as one filled with substantial debate. Issues arise, for instance, concerning the exact definition of a lesbian film as… Read More ›
Laura Mulvey, Male Gaze and the Feminist Film Theory
Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Citizen Kane (1992) and Death 24x a Second (2006). She… Read More ›
Pauline Johnson and Radical Humanism
Pauline Johnson has sought to re-situate feminism within the humanist tradition. Arguing against the anti-humanism of contemporary feminism, Johnson’s Feminism as Radical Humanism (1994) argues that feminism must see itself as “the interpreter of the cultural ideals of modern humanism.”… Read More ›
Michele Barrett and Marxist Feminism
Writing under the influence of Marx and cultural materialism, Michele Barrett in Women ‘s Oppression Today (1988) argues that a feminist analysis of “culture” is imperative today. Barrett’s engagements with aesthetics and subjectivity have proved to be the cutting edge… Read More ›
Helene Cixous and Poststructuralist Feminist Theory
Helene Cixous‘ work has been influenced by Derridean deconstruction. Essays such as The Laugh of the Medusa, Sorties, Coming to Writing and Other Essays (1991), Readings and The Newly Born Woman (with Catherine Clement, translation in 1986) are her attempts to discover… Read More ›
Luce Irigaray and Psychoanalytic Feminism
In her works like Speculum of the Other Woman (translated 1985) and This Sex Which is Not One (1987), Luce Irigaray has argued that the woman has been constructed as the specular Other of man in all Western discourses. Combining Psychoanalysis,… Read More ›
The Political Theory of Carole Pateman
Carole Pateman‘s work has been in the realm of political theory. Pateman argues that for political theory to become more democratic it must develop a truly general theory of the political. This must necessarily avoid the trap of disqualifying certain… Read More ›
Key Concepts of Michele Le Doeuff
A philosopher by profession and training Michele Le Doeuff‘s The Philosophical Imaginary (1989) argued that philosophy has a specific imaginary level intrinsic to itself. This imaginary level sets the conditions of what can be constructed as rationality within it. For Le… Read More ›
Key Ideas of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Like Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar have analysed the nineteenth century for the position of the woman novelist in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the 2-volume No Man’s Land (1987-89) and their edition of The Norton Anthology of Literature by… Read More ›
Ellen Moers: An Introduction
Ellen Moers‘ Literary Women (1976) was, along with Gilbert and Gubar’s , one of the early attempts to uncover the female literary tradition. Reading a range of authors like George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Moers… Read More ›
Juliet Mitchell and Psychoanalytic Feminism
Writing in the sixties and seventies, Juliet Mitchell’s work in Woman’s Estate (1971), Mitchell argued that woman’s oppression was linked to FOUR essential social structures: production, reroduction, sexuality and socialization. Mitchell sought to combine a critique of socialist thought and… Read More ›
Nancy Chodorow and Feminist Psychoanalysis
Nancy Chodorow is studied under both Psychoanalysis and Feminism. In two important works The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) and Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989), Chodorow combines the object relations theories of Melanie Klein with contemporary gender concerns. (1) Chodorow argues… Read More ›
Radical and Lesbian Feminism
Contemporary lesbian feminism and action owes greatly to the thoughts of Adrienne Rich who argued that “compulsory heterosexuality” ensured a woman’s continuous subjugation by continually privileging man’s needs. She points out that such an ideology forces the girl/daughter to turn… Read More ›
Feminism and Environmental Studies
Ecofeminist thought emerges from the assumption that patriarchal society’s values and beliefs have resulted in the oppression of both women and nature. These feminists suggest that the “natural” qualities of women and the “feminine” qualities of nature are both attributed… Read More ›
Judith Butler’s Concept of Performativity
Claiming that “Identity is performatively constituted”, Judith Butler in her path breaking Gender Trouble (1990) formulated a postmodernist notion of gender, in line with the deconstructive ethos and contradictory to the traditional notion’ , that genders are fixed categories. Butler… Read More ›
Elaine Showalter as a Feminist Critic
Elaine Showalter is an influential American critic famous for her conceptualization of gynocriticism, which is a woman-centric approach to literary analysis, Her A Literature of their Own discusses the -female literary tradition which she analyses as an evolution through three… Read More ›
Anglo-American and French Feminisms
The Feminist movement in America received great stimulus from the 1960s’ civil rights movement, and in Britain it has had a political orientation, insisting on situating both feminist concerns and literary texts within a material and ideological context. Thus Anglo-American… Read More ›
Ecriture Feminine
Introduced by Helene Cixous in her essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, ecriture feminine refers to a uniquely feminine style of writing characterised by disruptions in the text, such as gaps, silences, puns, new images and so on. It is… Read More ›
The Influence of Poststructuralism on Feminism
With the arrival of Poststructuralism on the critical scene, Feminism emerged as more eclectic and expanded its horizons to merge into the realms of other contemporary theories, thus giving rise to a plethora of rampant and dynamically developing areas such… Read More ›
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics
Kate Millett was the first notable feminist after Simone de Beauvoir to address the construction of woman within male writing. According to Millett, the man-woman relationship is deeply embedded in power structures with political implications – thus she derived the… Read More ›
The Feminist Dictum “the Personal is the Political”
A frequently heard feminist rallying cry, especially during the late 1960s and 1970s, and a central doctrine of the second-wave feminists, who used its underlying meaning in their writings, speeches, consciousness-rising, and other other activities, the concept “the personal is… Read More ›
Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Second Sex (1949) can be said to have inaugurated the second wave of feminism, with its central argument that throughout history, across cultures, woman has always occupied a secondary position in relation to man, being relegated… Read More ›
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
In her highly influential critical A Room of Ones Own (1929), Virginial Woolf studied the cultural, economical and educational disabilities within the patriarchal system that prevent women from realising their creative potential. With her imaginary character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister),… Read More ›
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contribution to Feminism
The 18th century British writer Mary Wollstonecraft‘s advocacy of women’s equality and critiques of conventional feminity have been significant in the development of feminism. Influenced by European Enlightenment, Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)… Read More ›
Feminism: An Essay
Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman… Read More ›
Feminist Critique of Freud
Freud had been widely discredited by early second wave feminists including Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. Millett, in particular, had persuasively argued that Freudian theory worked to perpetuate sexual difference and reinforce the belief that inferiority was… Read More ›