Feminisms and Gender Studies: Major
Feminist Schools
Provider:
Kate Liu / 劉紀雯
#
French Feminisms
#
Postmodern Feminism
# Lesbian/Gender Studies
French
Feminisms
issues: 1. What is phallocentrism?
And phallogocentrism?
- What is Women's Writing? Is it
writing signed by women, writing for women, or feminine writing (ecriture
feminine)?
- Why does Cixous, Irigaray, or Kristeva, refuse to define 'feminine writing'?
- What problems are there in equating the
semiotic and non-rational discourse with the feminine?
Background:
1. J. Derrida's critique of phallocentrism
and binarism
- "[D's] idea of writing as the
endless replacement of meaning which both govern language
and places it for ever beyond the reach of a stable, self authenticating
knowledge" (Christopher Norris)
2. Lacan's "the Symbolic Order" and the
Imaginary (the Pre-Oedipal; the plenitude);
3. jouissance (Barthes—that
which is indeterminate, mobile, blank, the explosion of language,
when language no longer has meaning; Lacan--female sexual pleasure;
Cixous & Irigaray--characteristic of feminine writing)
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Cixous: "The Laugh of
Medusa"
- Why don't you write? (317)
- women's writing --
1) individually (writing from the body 320)
- seizing the occasion to speak (321)
- from woman and for women --"first music
from the first voice of love"; writing in white ink (322);
- the Realm of the Gift vs. the Realm of
the Proper (property-- appropriate--the fear of castration)
- writing (323-24) -- 'work on the
difference'
- the other bisexuality--multiple, variable
and ever changing, consisting as it does of the 'non-exclusion either
of the difference or of one sex'.
- flying (325)
- "heterogeneous" and erogenous
- Irigaray:
autoeroticism;
plural sexuality; ("Irigaray
describes the ways women speak to each other--shared confidences, unfinished
sentences, exclamations, what Irigaray calls babble--in order to define
feminine language as outside the order of the symbolic...She develops
an alternate discourse that is multiple, fluid, and heterogeneous, basing
her theory on the anatomy of female genitalia, whose shape,..., is that
of two constantly touching and retouching lips." Showalter)
feminine style: 1) mimicry; 2) "self-touching" and "self-affection"
--
- an alternate discourse
that is multiple, fluid, and heterogeneous,
- basing her theory on
the anatomy of female genitalia
-
Kristeva:
- the feminine as the silence
of the unconscious that precedes discourse
- its utterance is a flow or
rhythm instead of an ordered statement;
- expression is fluid like the
free-floating sea of a womb or the milk of the breast.
- the semiotic chora (from the
Greek word for enclosed space, womb);
- the mirror phase as the first step
that 'opens the way for the constitution of all objects which
from now on will be detached from the semiotic chora' (Revolution
44).
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Postmodern Feminism
Issues:
-
Conflicts between postmodernism
and feminism: Postmodern critique of
-
epistemology: meta-narrative,
or narrative of legitimation, vs. the need for cognitive map
-
selfhood: depth-psychology
vs. politics of identity
-
representation
and politics (--play of difference or undermining system of representation)
-
connections of postmodernism
and feminism
-
against master/masculine
narratives
-
strategies of double
coding (irony, intertextuality, parody, etc.)
Feminism/Postmodernism "Introduction"
Nicholson, Linda, ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge,
1990: 1-18.
similarities
(p. 5)
1) [both have] uncovered the political power of the academy and of knowledge
claims. In general, they have argued against the supposed neutrality
and objectivity of the academy, asserting that claims put
forth as universally applicable have invariably been valid only
for men of a particular culture, class, and race.
2) [Postmodernists have
alleged that] ideals which have given backing to these claims, such
as "objectivity" and "reason," have reflected the values of
masculinity at a particular point of history. Feminists have criticized
other enlightenment ideals, such as the autonomous and self-legislating
self, as reflective of masculinity in the modern West.
3) pm offers feminism some
useful ideas about method, particularly a wariness
toward generalizations which transcend the boundaries of culture and
region.
differences
(pp. 5-6)
1) pm's criticism of f's essentialism and traditional
notions of history (e.g. the ways they locate the cause of women's
oppression
e.g. biological determinants; a cross-cultural domestic/public separation;
the assumption of monocausality
(pp. 6-7
2) feminists' critique of postmodernism's
-
decentered
self -- e.g. Christine Di Stefano " . . . for women
to take on such a position is to weaken what is not yet strong."
-
critique
of epistemology -- e.g. Sandra Harding "To this critique
she counterposes two alternative feminist theories of scientific
knowledge: feminist empiricism, . . . and feminist standpoint
theory. . . . she claims that both theories have incorporated postmodernist
elements to deal with [their problems in not supporting the
norm of 'value-free' research and in elaborating linkages with the
standpoints of oppressed groups other than women.];
e.g. Seyla benhabib against postmodern relativism
(p. 8-
-
feminist concern with
the loss of the categories of gender and body; the loss of
particularity.
postmodern feminis -- principle
(p. 35)
1) forswear master narrative;
theory would be explicitly historical
2) non-universalist
3) dispense with the idea
of a subject of history. It would replace unitary notions of woman
and feminine gender identity with plural and complexly constructed
conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand
among others.
4) pragmatic and fallibilistic
Different Kinds of Postmodern Feminisms:
1. Donna Haraway:
A Cyborg -- "contradictory,
partial and strategic" (197), "a kind of disassembled and reassembled,
postmodern collective self"?(205), breaking the dichotomies between "mind
and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private,
nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized…"
(Question: Does this involve erasure of the body?
Susan Bordo
"What sort of body
is it that is free to change its shape and location at will, that can
become anyone and travel everywhere? If the body is the metaphor for our
locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception
and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all." (8)
2. Judith Butler Gender Trouble
p. 136 If the
inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy
instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that
genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the
truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.
p. 139 Consider
gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an "act," as it were,
which is both intentional and performative, where "performative" suggests
a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.
3. Postmodern Feminist Artists:
Barbara Kruger,
Cindy Sherman,
Madonna (See "Hollywood images vs. feminist artists--
Cindy Sherman and Madonna ")
"The Discourse of Others: Feminists
and Postmodernism", an outline by Lisa Li
"THEORIZING
-- FEMINISM AND POSTMODERNITY: A CONVERSATION WITH LINDA HUTCHEON",1997.
(remote)
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Lesbian/Gender
Studies
Issues:
-
What is "lesbian"?
lesbian writing? Is there a lesbian aesthetic? --Consider style,
sexual orientation (heterosexuality, bisexuality, pornography, butch
and femme) , political position
Different
Kinds of Lesbian writings:
-
in the closet: gay and
lesbian relations in traditional literature—e.g. Shakespeare's sonnet,
Iliad, A Room with a View
-
"It is writing which exhibits,
within the confines of the text itself, something which makes it
distinctively about, or for, or out of lesbian experience.
That element may lie in the plot, in the subject, in the theory, in
the cold or the genre, but it has to be there in the writing. The
writer herself may never have kissed another woman. Even if she has,
she may not call herself a lesbian" (Margaret Reynolds 1993: xxxii)
-
周華山 pp. 184-86:
Lesbian writings defined by the author's sexual orientation?
e.g. Woolf? Jane Austin?; By content e.g. Sula ?
lesbian
style: "tortured lesbian"; "romantic lesbian" ; "lesbian allegory/science
fiction"
What is lesbian experience?
(sexual relations; woman-centered experience; experience subversive of
the patriarchy)
queer reading and the lesbian/gay texts in the
closet
Lesbianism & Lesbian movement: Three
stages; three definitions of the "lesbian" (Cf. 周華山;
矛峰)
- 70's--political
lesbian: desexualized p. 110; e.g. Women Against Sex 組織
Rich: Compulsory heterosexuality "Lesbian continuum"
114;
Wittig: Lesbians
are not Women 115
critique: 117-
e.g. 122 Lesbian as a pre-discursive subject
- 80's--sexual
liberation
Think through the
body ; arguments
about porn. 134-37
arguments about
butch and femme 140-45
Black (Third World)
feminism: e.g. Lorde's argument about sex and "erotic" 149
- 90's--politics
of difference
postmodern feminism—in
relation to 1. logocentrism; 2. theories of Sexual equality,
and Sexual difference, (e.g. vaginal orgasm)
Foucault and Derrida
Judith Butler –gender
identity as corporeal styles, as a lack (non-identity); masquerade
and Diana Fuss—identity established through erasing/suppressing
difference
What is "Lesbian"
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Three Stages of homosexuality: (Cf. 矛峰)
- biological stage
-- homosexuality as a primitive instinct
- cultural stage
-- endowed with cultural or religious significance; in myth
or folk religion
- (political stage--)
aesthetic stage -- p. 424-25
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(external)
Literary
Criticism: Feminism
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