Feminist Criticism

Question 1

Feminist Criticism focus

Answer 1

Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women.

Question 2

Patriarchy

Answer 2

Any culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles.

Question 3

Traditional gender roles

Answer 3

Cast men as rational, strong, protective, and decisive; they cast women as emotional (irrational), weak, nurturing, and submissive.

Question 4

Sexist

Answer 4

The promotion of the belief that women are innately inferior to men.

Question 5

Biological Essentialism

Answer 5

Biological differences between the sexes that are considered part of our unchanging essence as men and women.

Question 6

Sex

Answer 6

refers to our biological constitution as female or male

Question 7

gender

Answer 7

which refers to our cultural programming as feminine or masculine

Question 8

Patriarchal ideology suggests that there are only two identities a woman

Answer 8

If she accepts her traditional gender role and obeys the patriarchal rules, she’s a “good girl”; if she doesn’t, she’s a “bad girl.” These two roles—also referred to as “Madonna” and “whore” or “angel” and “bitch”—view women only in terms of how they relate to the patriarchal order.

Question 9

This is one reason why I believe that feminist theory will never become stale

Answer 9

it constantly incorporates new ideas from other fields and finds new ways to use old ideas

Question 10

Subjectivity

Answer 10

The way one views oneself and others, which develops from one’s own individual experiences.

Question 11

French Feminism

Answer 11

believes in the importance of social and political activism in order to ensure equal opportunity and equal access to justice for women.

Question 12

Materialist feminism

Answer 12

Is interested in the social and economic oppression of women.

Question 13

French materialist feminism

Answer 13

examines the patriarchal traditions and institutions that control the material (physical) and economic conditions by which society oppresses women.

Question 14

Most important autor of french materialist feminism

Answer 14

Simone de Beauvoir

Question 15

What did Simone de Beauvoir said?

Answer 15

She said that men are considered essential subjects (independent selves with free will), while women are considered contingent beings (dependent beings controlled by circumstances). Men can act upon the world, change it, give it meaning, while women have meaning only in relation to men. Thus, women are defined not just in terms of their difference from men, but in terms of their inadequacy in comparison to men. The word woman, therefore, has the same implications as the word other.

Question 16

What did Christine Delphy said?

Answer 16

offers a feminist critique of patriarchy based on Marxist principles. She focuses her analysis on the family as economic unit. Just as the lower classes are oppressed by the upper classes in society as a whole, she explains, women are the subordinates within families. As such, women constitute a separate oppressed class, based on their oppression as women, regardless of the socioeconomic class to which they belong. For Delphy, marriage is a labor contract that ties women to unpaid domestic labor. Patriarchy defines women in their domestic roles as nonworkers. Delphy argues, that all relationships between men and women are based on power: patriarchal men want to keep all of it; nonpatriarchal women want power to be equally distributed.

Question 17

Colette Guillaumin said this

Answer 17

observes that men are defined primarily and referred to primarily in terms of what they do. Women are defined primarily and referred to primarily in terms of their sex.

Question 18

Direct physical appropiation

Answer 18

the reduction of women to the state of material objects

Question 19

Sexage

Answer 19

Occurs, in four main forms: (1) the appropriation of women’s time, (2) the appropriation of the products of women’s bodies, (3) women’s sexual obligation, and (4) women’s obligation to care for whichever members of the family can’t care for themselves as well as for healthy male family members.

Question 20

Psychoanalytic feminism

Answer 20

Concentrate’s on women psychological experience. Its focus is on the individual psyche

Question 21

the site at which most of the psychological subjugation occurs

Answer 21

Language

Question 22

Two great findings of Helen Cixous

Answer 22

Patriarchal Binary thought

Question 23

patriarchal binary thought

Answer 23

seeing the world in terms of polar opposites, one of which is considered superior to the other.

Question 24

écriture féminine (feminine writing)

Answer 24

feminine language that undermines or eliminates the patriarchal binary thinking that oppresses and silences women

Question 25

Observations of Irigaray

Answer 25

men have defined femininity in terms of their own needs, fears, and desires. Irigaray posits, women have only two choices: (1) to keep quiet or (2) to imitate patriarchy’s representation of herself as it wants to see her. The way to get beyond patriarchy is by means of the same vehicle that programmed us within patriarchy: language, what she calls womenspeak.

Question 26

Male Gaze

Answer 26

The man looks, the woman is looked at. And it is the one who looks who is in control

Question 27

Observation of Kristeva

Answer 27

the feminine can’t be defined because there are as many definitions of the feminine as there are women. We can, however, know this about femininity, Kristeva asserts: it is marginalized, oppressed, just as the working class is marginalized and oppressed.

Question 28

Two dimensions of the language for Kristeva:

Answer 28

Symbolic and semiotic

Question 29

Symbolic language

Answer 29

the domain in which words operate and meanings are attributed to them.

Question 30

Semiotic language

Answer 30

That part of language that, in contrast, consists of such elements as intonation, rhythm, and the body language that occurs as we speak, which reveals our feelings and bodily drives.

Question 31

Sisterhood

Answer 31

psychological and political bonding among women based on the recognition of common experiences and goals

Question 32

ethnic cultural feminism

Answer 32

concerned more with the particular female cultural values of their own ethnic group rather than with those of women in general

Question 33

Topics of gender studies

Answer 33

1) patriarchal assumptions about gender and gender roles that continue to oppress women, (2) alternatives to the current way we conceptualize gender as either feminine or masculine, (3) the relationship between sex and gender, and (4) the relationship between sexuality and gender.

Question 34

The American gender system

Answer 34

A binary sistem

Question 35

The way Native North American societies tended to define gender

Answer 35

(1) women; (2) female variants, or variant gender roles adopted by biological females; (3) men; and (4) male variants, or variant gender roles adopted by biological males.

Question 36

Intersexed

Answer 36

have some combination of male and female reproductive organs, genitals, chromosomal and/or hormonal makeup. 1.7% of all children born in a year are intersexual.

Question 37

Transgender activists say that there are really five sexes that occur naturally

Answer 37

(1) female, (2) female intersexed, (3) true intersexed, (4) male intersexed, and (5) male

Question 38

Gender Identity

Answer 38

implies that one’s gender may not match one’s biological sex.

Question 39

Androgyny

Answer 39

tells us that, regardless of one’s sex, one’s gender identity may consist of some combination of feminine and masculine behaviors.

Question 40

Questioning

Answer 40

opens the door both for people who feel unsure of their sexual orientation and for people whose “sex and gender identification . . . may not [have] an existing label”.

Question 41

Cross-dresser

Answer 41

one who adopts the attire of the opposite sex but who behaves in a manner associated with one’s biological sex.

Question 42

Gay Transvestite

Answer 42

One who adopts both the attire and the behavior of the opposite sex, usually in an exaggerated manner.

Question 43

Misogyny

Answer 43

Hatred of women

Question 44

Gynophobia

Answer 44

Fear and loathing of woman as sexual and reproductive beings.

Question 45

New Woman

Answer 45

Women of the 20s that broke the perception of conservatives and gain the right of voting in the U. S.

Question 46

Hegemony

Answer 46

Is a dominant power imposed by consent and not by force.

Question 47

Patriarchal Bargain

Answer 47

A decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power one can wrest from the system. It is an individual strategy designed to manipulate the system to one’s best advantage, but one that leaves the system itself intact.

Question 48

Patriarchy

Answer 48

Gender construction of masculinity and femininity.

Question 49

Femininity

Answer 49

Dependence leads to indulgent and reverence while independence leads to dislike and rejection.

Question 50

phallocentric

Answer 50

denotes the (false) assumption that maleness is the natural, and in fact only, source of authority and power.

Question 51

The name of the father (Nom du pere):

Answer 51

the massive configuration of authority that works through language. It recognizes the patriarchal character of our social arrangements.

Question 52

Marxist feminism and the concept of interpellation (Althusser)

Answer 52

Ideology addresses us in a certain role and draws us into a conspiracy that is ultimately aimed at ourselves.

Question 53

“the solidarity of logocentrism and phallocentrism”, by Cixous

Answer 53

never-ending privileging of the masculine that damages us all, females and males alike, because it curbs the imagination and is therefore oppressive in general.