Feminist and Queer Literary Criticism
Feminist and queer literary criticism analyze how literature represents, constructs, and contests gender and sexuality, and recover marginalized voices and traditions.
Definition
A grouping of literary-critical approaches that examine gender and sexuality in literature, both critiquing dominant representations and recovering or theorizing women's, lesbian, gay, and queer writing.
Scope
This area covers feminist literary criticism, in both its critique of patriarchal representation and its study of women's writing (gynocriticism), and queer theory's analysis of sexuality, the closet, and the performativity of gender and identity in literature. It treats key concepts such as the female literary tradition, the homosocial and homosexual, and gender performativity, distinguishing these literary-critical projects within the broader study of gender and sexuality.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How does literature represent and shape ideas of gender and sexuality?
- Is there a distinct tradition of women's writing, and how should it be studied?
- How do texts encode the dynamics of the closet and same-sex desire?
- Are gender and sexual identity natural givens or culturally constructed and performed?
Key theories
- The woman writer and the anxiety of authorship
- Gilbert and Gubar's analysis of how nineteenth-century women writers contended with a male-dominated tradition, encoding rebellion through figures such as the 'madwoman'.
- Epistemology of the closet
- Sedgwick's argument that the homo/heterosexual definition is central to modern Western culture, so that the structure of the closet shapes a wide range of literary and cultural meanings.
- Gender performativity
- Butler's theory that gender is not an inner essence but a performative effect of repeated acts, a claim widely taken up in queer readings of literary identity and the body.
History
Feminist literary criticism developed from the late 1960s, moving from critique of male-authored images of women to the recovery of women's writing (Showalter's 'gynocriticism') and to French-influenced theories of ecriture feminine. Queer theory emerged around 1990 with Sedgwick and Butler, extending and contesting both feminism and gay and lesbian studies through poststructuralist accounts of sexuality and identity.
Debates
- Essentialism versus constructionism
- Whether 'woman', gender, and sexual identity name stable essences grounding a tradition and a politics, or culturally constructed and performative categories, a tension running through feminist and queer criticism.
Key figures
- Elaine Showalter
- Sandra Gilbert
- Susan Gubar
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
- Judith Butler
Related topics
Seminal works
- gilbertgubar1979
- sedgwick1990
- butler1990
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between feminist criticism and queer theory?
- Feminist criticism centres on gender and the situation of women in and around literature, while queer theory focuses on sexuality and the instability of sexual and gender categories; they overlap but have distinct emphases and histories.
- Is queer theory only about LGBT authors or characters?
- No; while it attends to same-sex desire and non-normative identities, queer theory more broadly questions the binary and normative structures of sexuality and gender across all kinds of texts.