Feminist Criticism (Literary)
Feminist literary criticism analyzes how literature represents women and gender, critiquing patriarchal assumptions and revaluing women's contributions to literary culture.
Definition
The branch of feminist literary theory that critically examines the representation of gender and the workings of patriarchy in literature and in the institutions of literary value.
Scope
This topic covers the critical strand of feminist literary study: the 'feminist critique' of images of women and sexual politics in male-authored texts, the Anglo-American and French traditions of feminist theory, the concept of ecriture feminine, and the major debates about essentialism and the relation of feminism to other theories. It complements gynocriticism's focus on women as writers by foregrounding feminist critique as a reading practice.
Core questions
- How do literary texts construct and naturalize gendered roles and hierarchies?
- How has the literary canon and its evaluation been shaped by patriarchal assumptions?
- What is the relation between writing, the body, and sexual difference?
- How should feminist criticism relate to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism?
Key theories
- Sexual politics
- Millett's analysis of how canonical male authors encode and enforce patriarchal power in their representations of sexuality, an inaugural model of feminist critique.
- Anglo-American versus French feminism
- Moi's influential mapping of feminist literary theory, contrasting the Anglo-American emphasis on women's experience and writing with French theory's poststructuralist attention to language and difference.
- Ecriture feminine
- Cixous's call for a 'feminine writing' that inscribes the body and disrupts the masculine symbolic order, a key text of French feminist theory.
History
Modern feminist literary criticism began around 1970 with works such as Millett's Sexual Politics, focusing first on the critique of patriarchal images of women. It diversified into the recovery of women's writing, French theories of ecriture feminine (Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva), and, as Moi mapped in 1985, a productive tension between Anglo-American and French approaches, later intersecting with race, class, and queer theory.
Debates
- Experience versus textuality
- Whether feminist criticism should ground itself in women's lived experience and authorship or in poststructuralist analysis of how 'woman' is constructed in language, as debated between Anglo-American and French feminisms.
Key figures
- Kate Millett
- Elaine Showalter
- Helene Cixous
- Toril Moi
Related topics
Seminal works
- millett1970
- moi1985
- cixous1976
Frequently asked questions
- What is ecriture feminine?
- Ecriture feminine, or 'feminine writing', is a concept from French feminist theory, especially Cixous, describing a mode of writing that expresses and inscribes the female body and disrupts conventional, masculine-coded language.
- How does feminist critique differ from gynocriticism?
- Feminist critique reads (often male-authored) texts to expose patriarchal assumptions, whereas gynocriticism, Showalter's term, focuses on women as writers and on the history and characteristics of women's literature.