Thinking Activity: Marxism, Ecocriticism, Feminism and Queer Theory

Hello friends

I am Nidhi Dave Student of Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University. This blog is response of my thinking Activity given by professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. Here i discuss about this all theory.

Feminism:

Feminist criticism is concerned with "the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women" (Tyson 83). This school of theory looks at how aspects of our culture are inherently patriarchal (male dominated) and aims to expose misogyny in writing about women, which can take explicit and implicit forms. This misogyny, Tyson reminds us, can extend into diverse areas of our culture: "Perhaps the most chilling example...is found in the world of modern medicine, where drugs prescribed for both sexes often have been tested on male subjects only" .

As a distinctive and concerted approach to literature, feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s cultural roles and achievements, and for women’s social and political rights, marked by such books as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). 

Key Concerns of Feminism:

1.The basic view is that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal

2.It is widely held that while one’s sex as a man or woman is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender

3. The further claim is that this patriarchal (or “masculinist,” or “androcentric”) ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature

4.gynocriticism—that is, a criticism which concerns itself with developing a specifically female framework for dealing with works written by women, in all aspects of their production, motivation, analysis, and interpretation, and in all literary forms, including journals and letters.

5.One concern of gynocritics is to identify distinctively feminine subject matters in literature written by women—the world of domesticity, for example, or the special experiences of gestation, giving birth, and nurturing, or mother-daughter and woman-woman relations—in which personal and affectional issues, and not external activism, are the primary interest. 

6.Another concern is to uncover in literary history a female tradition, incorporated in subcommunities of women writers who were aware of, emulated, and found support in earlier women writers, and who in turn provide models and emotional support to their own readers and successors. 

7.A third undertaking is to show that there is a distinctive feminine mode of experience, or “subjectivity,” in thinking, feeling, valuing, and perceiving oneself and the outer world. Related to this is the attempt (thus far, without much agreement about details) to specify the traits of a “woman’s language,” or distinctively feminine style of speech and writing, in sentence structure, types of relations between the elements of a discourse, and characteristic figures of speech and imagery. 

What feminist critics do ?

1. Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women. 

2. Revalue women's experience. 

3. Examine representations of women in literature by men and women. 

4. Challenge representations of women as 'Other', as 'lack', as part of 'nature'. 

5. Examine power relations which are obtained in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy. 

6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social and constructed seem transparent and 'natural'. 

7. Raise the question of whether men and women are 'essentially' different because of biology, or are socially constructed as different. 

8. Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an ecriture feminine, and whether this is also available to men. 

9. 'Re-read' psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male identity. 

10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author, asking whether there are only 'subject positions ... constructed in discourse', or whether, on the contrary, the experience (e.g. of a black or lesbian writer) is central. 

11. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly 'neutral' or 'mainstream' literary interpretations. 

Examples: 

The Color Purple:

Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel materialized on screen in 1985 and became an iconic feminist film that withstands the tests of time. Whoopi Goldberg plays Celie, a Black southern women who has suffered (and survived) years of abuse and finds strength within herself and female friends.

Thappad:

A very interesting movie. The protagonist is Amrita, by profession she was also a housewife by choice. Her husband totally depends on her. Amrita worked like anything for her, She might have thought that her husband respected and cared for her. After months she was slapped by Vikram in front of so many guest and relatives. This one slap broke Amrita. She realizes her own identity. She said, `` Ek Thappad bas itni si baat ? no, women are not about to bear such things. Amrita decided to give divorce to her husband. She started a new life. Women are not suppressed by men. 

It's a very fascinating movie. Generally people might think that women are only for pleasure. If she goes against you, you can beat her, because her slave. So this movie is the best example of that kind of mentality. 

So, this one Thappad changed the whole image of Amrita’s life. That thappad was not on her cheeks but that slap was on her existence, her identity, her own thoughts.

Queer Theory:

Queer theory’s origin is hard to clearly define, since it came from multiple critical and cultural contexts, including feminism, post-structuralist theory, radical movements of people of color, the gay and lesbian movements, AIDS activism, many sexual subcultural practices such as sadomasochism, and postcolonialism.

The term “queer theory” itself came from Teresa de Lauretis’ 1991 work in the feminist cultural studies journal differences titled “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities.” She explains her term to signify that there are at least three interrelated projects at play within this theory: refusing heterosexuality as the benchmark for sexual formations, a challenge to the belief that lesbian and gay studies is one single entity, and a strong focus on the multiple ways that race shapes sexual bias. De Lauretis proposes that queer theory could represent all of these critiques together and make it possible to rethink everything about sexuality.

Some of the important writers and writtings about queer studies:

1.See Teresa de Lauretis, Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, 1991

2.Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction, 1996. 

3. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity 

What lesbian/gay critics do? 

1. Identify and establish a canon of 'classic' lesbian/gay writers whose work constitutes a distinct tradition. These are, in the main, twentieth-century writers, such as (for lesbian writers in Britain) Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Dorothy Richardson, Rosamund Lehmann, and Radclyffe Hall. 

2. Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as such (for example, the relationship between Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre), rather than reading same-sex pairings in non-specific ways, for instance, as symbolising two aspects of the same character (Zimmerman). 

3. Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of 'lesbian/gay' so that it connotes a moment of crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories. All such 'liminal' moments mirror the moment of selfidentification as lesbian or gay, which is necessarily an act of conscious resistance to established norms and boundaries. 

4. Expose the 'homophobia' of mainstream literature and criticism, as seen in ignoring or denigrating the homosexual aspects of the work of major canonical figures, for example, by omitting overtly homosexual love lyrics from selections or discussions of the poetry of W. H. Auden (Mark Lilly). 

5. Foreground homosexual aspects of mainstream literature which have previously been glossed over, for example the strongly homo-erotic tenderness seen in a good deal of First World War poetry. 

6. Foreground literary genres, previously neglected, which significantly influenced ideals of masculinity or femininity, such as the nineteenth-century adventure stories with a British 'Empire' setting (for example those by Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard) discussed by Joseph Bristow in Empire Boys (Routledge, 1991). 

Example of Queer Theory: 

1, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble:

The theorist most commonly identified with studying the prevailing understandings of gender and sex is Judith Butler, who draws much from Foucault’s ideas but with a focus on gender. She argues in her book Gender Trouble that gender, like sexuality, is not an essential truth obtained from one’s body but something that is acted out and portrayed as “reality”. She argues that the strict belief that the there is a “truth” of sex makes heterosexuality as the only proper outcome because of the coherent binary created of “feminine” and “masculine” and thus creating the only logical outcome of either being a “male” or “female.” Butler makes the case that genderperformativity could be a strategy of resistance with examples such as drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual nonrealistic depiction of butch and femme identities that poke fun at the laid out gender norms in society. In her later book, Undoing Gender, Butler makes it clear that performativity is not the same as performance. She explains that gender performativity is a repeated process that ultimately creates the subject as a subject. Butler’s work brings to light the creation of gender contesting the rigidity of the hierarchical binaries that exist and is what makes her work invaluable in queer theory.

2, Eve Kosofsky Sedwick

Rubin laying the groundwork to start discussion about making a distinction between gender and sexuality led the way for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s pioneering book Epistemology of the Closet. In this book, she argues that the homo-hetero difference in the modern sexual definition is vitally disjointed for two reasons: that homosexuality is thought to be part of a minority group, and how homosexuality is gendered to be either masculine or feminine. She points out that the definitions of sexuality depend a lot on the gender of the romantic partner one makes, making the assumption that the gender one has and the gender of the person one is attracted to make up the most important element of sexuality. Sedgwick’s examples of sexual variations that cannot be put into the discrete locations created by the binary set between heterosexuality and homosexuality give room to further analyze the way sex-gender identities are shaped and thought about.

Future of Queer Theory:

As a whole, queer theorists disagree about many things, but the one thing they do not disagree on is that if queer theory is to be understood as a way to test the established and stable categories of identity, then it should not be defined too early (or at all) because of the possibility of it becoming too limited.