The Feminist Movement
Categorically speaking, one can roughly place the movement in four basic categories...1. Bourgeois feminism of Virginia Wolf: Wolf asserts that women have not been able to write because of the prevalent social conditions that acted as a barrier between them and writing. Their financial dependence on man and the absence of independent financial stability prevent women from writing. She believes that if women are given the financial sources and freedom available to men, they will be as productive.
2. Social feminism as advocated by Simone de Bouvoir: Bouvoir believes that social equality between the sexes would result in empowering women and enabling them to produce literature of their own. As a socialist feminist she attacks the traditional stereotyping of women in male narratives.
3. French Feminism: This includes a group of feminists who believe that women writing should be radical in its nature. They should reinvent language and writing so that they depart drastically from the present masculine mode of expression. They entrenched behind a Lacanian scholarship. They argue that the present masculine discourses stem from the so-called “symbolic order” where men have to mask their real desires for fear of castration. Since the female has no symbolic organ to lose, she could write from the so-called “imaginary order.” By doing so, feminists can subvert all patriarchal logo
4. American Feminism: This movement includes another group of mainly women intellectuals who suspect the French feminist movement; and they, instead of reinventing the language, advocate a literary reading of textology against the grain of traditional male narratives, against the canon and the high culture.
Practical tips If you want to read a text from a generalist feminist perspective, you need to: 1. Scan the text for:Traditional female stereotyping. See if the woman in the text you read is described as an angel, mad, temptress and witch, false and cheat, etc. General accusations about women. Try to find if the text accuses women of sentimentality, irrationality, conspiracy, passivity, etc. Abuses and derision. See if the text belittles women’s achievement, pokes fun on them and hurls abuses.
Deliberate omission of women altogether from a narrative where they should be. 2. Once you fall upon the requested stereotypes:Generalizations or omissions inserted implicitly or explicitly in the narrative, you have next to read them against the grain of a masculine dominated culture that determines both reading and writing. This is to say, if you are a male reader, you should read against yourself and against your impulses. If you are a female reader, you should be able to see the male biases in the narrative so that you can expose their falsity. 3. Look for the language used in the text: Observe whether the text uses traditional and conventional language patterns associated with the male order, or whether language is used unconventionally, and thus associated with the female order. Marks of unconventionality include loss or multiplicity of voices in a narrative, parody, fluidity of expression, bricolage, repetition, exaggeration, whimsy, multiple viewpoint and jouissances 4. While reading bear in mind the two Lacanian orders: the symbolic and the imaginary. The symbolic implies the detachment of the narrative and the narrator from the mother’s body under the fear of symbolic castration by the patriarch. The imaginary order suggests a narrative or a narrator completely fused with the body of the mother, with no exhibition of any signs of fear from the patriarch.
