DOING FEMINIST RESEARCH: A LITERARY PERSPECTIVE

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DOING FEMINIST RESEARCH A LITERARY PERSPECTIVE

• shakila abdul manan

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Preamble

• There is no such thing as an innocent reading of
  a text (see Charles Bressler, 1996).
• Our responses to texts have theoretical bases.
• Not all readers interpret texts in the same way.
• There is a plurality of critiques,
  interpretations and ways of reading.
• Our response to any text is largely a conditioned
  or socially constructed one.

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Preamble

• We develop a mindset or framework concerning the
  nature of reality to read texts.
• The reader is genderedshe has a sexual identity
  and socialization in which gender plays an
  important part (see Mary Eagleton, 1996).
• It is simplistic to say that men and women read
  with fixed group identities and that the way
  women read is utterly distinct from the way men
  read

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Preamble

• The reader plays a crucial and active role in the
  production of meaning she is not merely a
  passive recipient of ideas and imaginative
  projections created by the author.
• Gender is important in both the construction of
  the reader and the process of reading.
• When texts use generics (he) in a
  gender-specific way, there is a clear signal to
  readers that the position which the text is
  offering them is male (see Sara Mills, 1992

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Preamble

• Although writers use a number of textual
  strategies which lead readers to be positioned as
  male, not all women are inclined to read in the
  same way.
• Women are not a coherent group and are subject to
  other affiliations such as class and race.
• One major distinction within women readers which
  should be made are those who are male-affiliated
  (reading as a male) and those who are
  female-affiliated (resist reading as a male)
  (see Sandra Gilbert Susan Gubar, 1988).

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What is FR (feminist reading/criticism)

• Entails the adoption of a female-affiliated
  position in reading texts.
• Examines the operation of patriarchy and binary
  oppositions in texts (women as irrational vs men
  as rational).
• Examines the construction of gender identity
  (unstable, fluid, in a state of flux,
  performative see Judith Butler).

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What is FR (feminist reading/criticism)

• Examines the body politic (how womens bodies
  become the site of material oppression and
  violation see Lynn Pearce, 2004).
• Examines womens feeling of fragmentation and
  obliteration in patriarchal culture.
• Explores womens silences and inarticulateness in
  texts (see Gayathri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Julia
  Kristeva, Luce Irigary, Lacan, Bakhtin, Foucault
  etc).

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What is FR (feminist reading/criticism)

• Rediscovers female authors and unearths womens
  voices (by locating womens personal writings,
  autobiography, letters, travel journals).
• Foregrounds womens voices and experiences
  (female sexuality, female anguish, childbirth,
  mothering, rape female themes and use of female
  tropes see Elaine Showalter).

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What is FR (feminist reading/criticism)

• Demonstrates how women are not a homogenous group
  and that they are differentiated by culture,
  race, religion and class.
• Critiques the idea of sisterhood by celebrating
  the idea of difference, diversity and
  otherness (black African women writing).

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What is FR (feminist reading/criticism)

• Which subject position is offered to you by the
  following texts? (male-affiliated or female
  affiliated).
• Text A
• Now that Ive got you right where I want you,
  are you going to marry me? Youd better say yes,
  woman, because I warn you right now, nothing else
  is acceptable.
• Her eyes dancing, she reached up to tangle her
  fingers in his hair. Oh, its not, is it? Then I
  guess Id better say yes
• She was still whispering yeses when his mouth
  covered hersA soft, dreamy smile playing about
  her kiss-bruised mouth, she hugged him close and
  floated back to earth. (The Love of Dugan
  Magee, 1994)

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What is FR (feminist reading/criticism)

• Text B
• She did not hear the story as many women have
  heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to
  accept its significance. She wept at once, with
  sudden wild abandonment, in her sisters arms.
  When the storm of grief had spent itself she went
  away to her room alone. She would have no one
  follow her.
• There stood, facing an open window, a
  comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank,
  pressed down by a physical exhaustion that
  haunted her body and seemed to reach into her
  soul.

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What is FR (feminist reading/criticism)

• She could see in the open square before her
  house the tops of the trees that were all
  acquiver with the new spring life. The delicious
  breath of rain was in the air. In the street
  below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes
  of a distant song which some one was singing
  reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were
  twittering in the eaves.
• She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose
  lines bespoke repression and even a certain
  strength. But now there was a dull stare in her
  eyes.When she abandoned herself a little
  whispered word escaped her slightly parted lip.
  She said it over and over under her breath
  free, free, free! The vacant stare and the look
  of terror that had followed it went from her
  eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Free!, Body
  and soul free! she kep whispering. (The
  Story of an Hour, 1894)

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Context and Rationale for FR

• Exclusion of writing by women from publication
  and academic study.
• Feminist movement put socio-historical
  circumstances as a determining factor in the
  production of literature. Kate Millets
  trailblazing Sexual Politics (1970) devotes long
  chapters on attitudes towards women in writings
  by prominent writers such as DH Lawrence and
  Henry Miller.
• Millet distribution of power over the male and
  female partners mirrors that of society. Private
  and public are completely linked. Thus, the
  personal and political cannot be separated.

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Context and Rationale for FR

• Feminist research seeks to change the power
  relations between men and women that prevail
  under patriarchy.
• Feminist research encourages women to re-examine
  the established literary canon, validate what it
  means to be a woman, and involve themselves in
  literary theory and its multiple approaches to a
  text in order to legitimize their responses to
  texts written by both male and female.

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Feminist Methods of Enquiry

• Second wave de Beauvoir, Millet, Freidan, Greer
• Myth criticism
• Marxist/socialist-feminist criticism
• French feminist criticism
• Psychoanalytic criticism
• Poststructuralism/deconstruction/postmodernism
• Black feminism the African diaspora
• Lesbian feminist criticism
• Third world feminist criticism

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