Hello readers,
Today I am disscus about feminist criticism. So Feminist criticism, or gender studies, focuses on the role of women (or gender) in a literary text. According to feminist criticism, patriarchy, in its masculine-focused structure, socially dictates the norms for both men and women. Feminist criticism is useful for analyzing how gender itself is socially constructed for both men and women. Gender studies also considers how literature upholds or challenges those constructions, offering a unique way to approach literature.
So what is feminism :-
According to Merriam-Webster, it’s “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.
Feminism incorporates the position that societies prioritize the male point of view, and that women are treated unjustly within those societies. Efforts to change that include fighting against gender stereotypes and establishing educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women that are equal to those for men
Reel and the Real; Portrayal of Gay Men in Bollywood Films by Himadri Roy
Bollywood films have played a significant role in widening the discourse around gay rights in India
Hindustan Times | By Chintan Girish Modi
Smooch: Contrary to popular belief, this kiss is not the first ever expression of sexual intimacy between two gay men in a Hindi film.(Ayushmann Khurrana and Jitendra Kumar in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan)
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Key Concerns of Feminism(M.H.Abrams)
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.
Seminal Writers and their works
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792),
John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869),
Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949)
Mary Ellmann’s Thinking about Women (1968),
Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader
Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female Imagination (1975)
Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976),
Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own:
British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977); and
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979;rev. 2000).
Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (1978); and Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009).
Example :-
Stree (Hindi) | Dir. Amar Kaushik :
One of the most striking features of Stree is its comedic inversion of the fear of occupying public space, as men avoid going out at night for fear of a malevolent spirit that stalks and attacks unsuspecting male victims. They are also advised not to go out under the guise of safety and protection during the night, post 10PM. Starring Rajkumar Rao as Vicky in this horror- comedy, the film overtly tries to shift the feeling of claustrophobia, hostility and fear that comes from occupying space which is all too familiar to women, onto men, and this is a result of a spirit who seeks revenge for being disrespected.
The genre works well to convey its message of misogyny and gender based violence in an accessible, satirical manner and makes for a fitting addition to this list for its unapologetic inversion of everyday realities to expose the reality of living in a patriarchal society as a woman.
Queer theory -
Queer theory is often used to designate the combined area of gay and lesbian studies, together with the theoretical and critical writings about all modes of variance—such as cross-dressing, bisexuality, and transsexuality— from society’s normative model of sexual identity, orientation, and activities.
So you can say the, Queer theory is a term that emerged in the late 1980s for a body of criticism on issues of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity that came out of gay and lesbian scholarship in such fields as literary criticism, politics, sociology, and history. Queer theory rejects essentialism in favor of social construction; it breaks down binary oppositions such as “gay” or “straight”; while it follows those postmodernists who declared the death of the self, it simultaneously attempts to rehabilitate a subjectivity that allows for sexual and political agency. Some of the most significant authors associated with queer theory include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Warner, and Wayne Koestenbaum."
- From the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, in Credo Reference
Seminal Writers and their works :-
Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), described the categories of gender and of sexuality as performative, in the sense that the features which a cultural discourse institutes as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual, the discourse also makes happen, by establishing an identity that the socialized individual assimilates and the patterns of behavior that he or she proceeds to enact.
“Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 1977, reprinted in Within the Circle:
An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell, 1994; and Ann Allen Stickley, “The Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview,” in Conditions: Five Two, 1979.
Example:-
Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga :
Rajkumar Rao and Sonam Kapoor play the lead in this one. As for the story, Rao falls in love with Kapoor who tells him about her sexual orientation and that she's in love with another girl. Rao, a struggling actor, then decides to help her unite with her love as she faces extreme opposition from her family and the society for her choice. The film is a light watch with multiple comic blasts and has an energising cast including Anil Kapoor.
Thank you.
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