INTRODUCTION:
Keith Green and Jill LeBihan's Critical theory and Practice (1996) turns out to a useful introductory critical theory text book for the bachelor level students. It is a remarkably user- friendly and coherent teaching text. It zeroes in on the key areas for an understanding of critical theories and offers a progression by its coverage of " Language, Linguistics and Literature," Structures of Literature," Literature and History," "Subjectivity, Psychoanalysis and Criticism," "Reading, Writing and Reception," "Feminism, Literature and Criticism," "Cultural Identity, Literature and Criticism." In each section, there is an outline of the principal ideas through gobbets, to-the point quotes followed up with equally succinct explanations, a glossary of terms, passage for class work practice, and an annotated reading list. At all junctures the writers seek to avoid the use of "-isms" and jargons-a deliberate precaution which goes a long way in making their effort an ideal textbook for the Bachelor level. In this book, the writers have tried to present a far-reaching survey of analysis suffused with an awareness of the cultural-political, theoretical, and ideological well-springs of the analysis. This article analyses the feminism to men's studies in CRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE by KEITH GREEN and JILL LeBIHAN. The present article has been divided into four topics: Introduction, The History of feminism, Feminism to men's studies and Conclusion.
THE HISTORY OF FEMINISM:
The history of feminism involves the story of feminist movements and of feminist thinkers. Depending on time, culture and country, feminists around the world have sometimes had different causes and goals. Most western feminist historians assert that all movements that work to obtain women's rights should be considered feminist movements.
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). This school of theory looks at how aspects of our culture are inherently patriarchal (male dominated) and "...this critique strives to expose the explicit and implicit misogyny in male writing about women" (Richter 1346). 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" (83).
Feminist criticism is also concerned with less obvious forms of marginalization such as the exclusion of women writers from the traditional literary canon: "...unless the critical or historical point of view is feminist, there is a tendency to under-represent the contribution of women writers" (Tyson 82-83).
Feminist criticism has, in many ways, followed what some theorists call the three waves of feminism:
The history of the modern western feminist movements is divided into three "waves". Each is described as dealing with different aspects of the same feminist issues. The first wave refers to the movement of the 19th through early 20th centuries, which dealt mainly with suffrage, working conditions and educational rights for women and girls. The second wave (1960s-1980s) dealt with the inequality of laws, as well as cultural inequalities and the role of women in society. The third wave of feminism (late 1980s-early 2000s (decade)), is seen as both a continuation of the second wave and a response to the perceived failures.
FEMINISM TO MEN'S STUDIES:
In the aftermath of the second wave of feminism in late 1960s, analyses of literature began to be treated as an artifact of socio-cultural relations. Cultural politics registers quite a potent presence in feminist analyses which carry the crisp message that patriarchy has exploited women. Feminist text-analysis in this phase, therefore, recognizes that every reading is a gendered reading because it assumes that all text production is gendered and that verbalization is not value-free. It also presumes that exploitation of women comes not only with the palpable patriarchal patterns but has with the embedded psycho-social formation of gendered subjects. The gendered texts image a women either as "sexually assertive…[and hence] bad" or as "a passive creature who is vulnerable, dependent, and not capable of violence or sexual desire" (Green and LeBihan 234). Unraveling of such stereotypical images due to the overt or covert patriarchal formations and processes of the gendered texts become the burden of this kind of feminist analysis which Green and LeBihan call "images of women criticism" (233).
A further kind of feminist criticism inspired by the second wave feminism is gynocriticism pioneered by Elaine Showalter according to whom the burden of "feminist critics is to find a new language, a new way of reading that can integrate our intelligence and our experience, our reason and our suffering, our skepticism and our vision"("Poetics" 141). Feminist critical practice, in this view, becomes revisionist for the gynocritics who work on women's texts with the purpose of separating and highlighting the differences they find there. It is revisionist in the sense that the thought- process in such a critical practice is exclusively women's. The reason for the spotlight that women-centered thought –process receives in gynocriticism is Showalter's ruling that the language of the sciences is manly and hence her emphasis on "women's access to language, on the available lexical range for which words can be selected, on the ideological and cultural determinants of expression ("Wilderness" 255). Language is, of course, one of the major means of oppression –a means which Showalter rightly calls for an overturning from the perspective of a woman-centered consciousness.
However, Showalter's gynocriticism fails to go very far in so far as the revisionist purpose is concerned. For in the creation of an alternative worldview through a gynocentric lens a female critics or writers still run the risk of being infected by a ruling discourse, thereby considerably weakening the overturning. This problem has been identified in 'ecriture feminine which has been translated as both "feminine writing" and "writing-the-body" (Green and LeBihan 243). Practitioners of this kind of critical practice such as Cixious, Irigaray, and Kristeva harp on the inescapability of feminine subjectivity from the structure of language which is, for them, phallocentric. As a result, in discourse women remain largely absent or, if present, they have a negative attribute about them. Cixous clarifies women's removal from or negative presence in discourse in the following list of binary opposition:
Activity Passivity
Sun Moon
Culture Nature
Day Night
Father Mother
Head Heart
Intelligible Palpable
Logos Pathos
(qtd. In Green & LeBihan 244-45)
Therefore for Cixous, a female practice of writing is a misnomer and hence women "must be represented outside the symbolic, in her own terms, in the terms of her body" (Green & LeBihan 248).
Rejecting the outside position, Irigaray vouches for the subversive edge of feminine discourse by privileging the playful female body over the male body. She uses the counter strategy of the luxury of multiple female sexual organs to decentre the single penis. The subversive edge, which shows the "phallus as restrictive, monolithic, limitedly singular and fixed, "comes from the twin attempts or parodying the masculine rhetoric and plugging the gaps left open in masculine language (247). Kristeva is even more radical than Irigaray in that she introduces the neologism of the semiotic (like the Lacanian symbolic).
Just as 'ecriture feminine posits that women's subjectivity is largely denied, so is the thinking that the lesbian experience is also erased in discourse. The erasure is due to the fear of censorship and censure. However, for a woman's writing to be qualified as lesbian literature, it does not need to have an overt depiction of sexual relationship between women but a "'Lesbian continuum' which, at its broadest, can cover any woman-centered experience" (251). A lesbian poetics ask for a concentration of attention on such formal features as "' the use of the continuous present, unconventional grammar and neologism"' in order to tease out the woman-centered political meanings from the text (Zimmerman qtd. In Green & LeBihan 252). The political overtones thus obtained carry a tinge of resistance of the conventions perpetuated by patriarchal heterosexual system.
Post-feminism refers to the backlash to the success of the adoption of feminism in literary theory and practice. The realization that feminism is now uncalled for (because parity with men has been achieved) has led to the inflection of feminism with other "post-" discourses. Even as post-feminism takes the content and form of women's writing to be distinctive, it "see[s] this as a matter of material circumstance rather than biological essence" (Green and LeBihan 255). It calls for replacing the pessimism inherent in feminism with optimism available in women's magazine and academic feminist cultures together. It also expresses the need for substituting feminism with "Gender Studies" puts men back on the centre stage again; one of its main branches- "Masculinity studies" tries to determine the place of the masculine within/alongside feminism even as it also criticizes the latter. The man that emerges from such a negotiation is what "Rowena Chapman calls the "New Man" who "meets all the often repeated demands of popular feminism" (259). However, in some texts there is a tendency to criticize women and feminism by using feminist strategies.
Conclusion:
Summing up, this article has streamlined the key ideas of feminism in the second last chapter of Green and Lebihan's book on the practice of literary theory. The streamlining has been done for the pedagogic purpose of applying these ideas in reading a literary text or extract.
-Mr. Damber Kumar Tumbapo
