Le féminisme (document en anglais)

FEMINISM and GENDER

Feminism: the belief that women, just because they are women, are treated inequitably within a society, which is organised to prioritise male viewpoints and concerns. Feminism seeks to change this situation.

Literary feminism: deals with the ways in which women are represented and are self-represented in literary works and in the literary canon. -> literature is always already politics (i.e. the way in which w. are represented in literature has strong connections with the way in which they are represented in politics)

Gender studies: focuses upon the historical, social, and psychological systems within which sexual identity becomes meaningful. Challenges the “heterosexual matrix” Premise: there is a difference to be made between sex (male/female) as something biologically given, gender (masculine/feminine) as a social construct, and sexuality (heterosexual/homosexual), as a variable sexual behaviour and orientation. Questions the naturalization of a patriarchal system, which defines male heterosexuality as the norm.

->ideology critique (!): what has been taken as natural and neutral (i.e “obvious”) is shown to be cultural, historical and strongly biased; as sth. that helps to maintain existing (historically developed and culturally constructed) power relations.

e.g. Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality (1976-84)

anti-repressive hypothesis: Victorian discourse on sexuality did no repress sexuality, but created it as an object of investigation -> emergence of the concept of the homosexual in the 19th c.

Discourse, discoursive formations: they do not “describe things”, but both constitute their objects and generate knowledge about their objects – Knowledge = normative knowledge -> regulation -> Power

methods of producing “Knowledge”: observation –> examination -> normalising judgment: sane-mad, heterosexual-homosexual, normality-perversion.

“This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. … The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”

->F. shows that what we percieve as “natural” (such as the existence of the “homosexual” as a concept) is in fact culturally and historically constructed by the discourse of psychiatry (psychiatry became a “discipline” in the 19th c.).

-> biopolitics: Western society moves from a regimen where the ruler controls the right over life and death to one where life itself becomes a subject to control. Biopolitics governs in burocratic, scientific, rule-based ways, ostensibly (!) to improve the health and well-being of citizens. (See more later on Foucault!!!)

FEMINISM

Situation of women in the 18th c.

“the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended, or at least it is

incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection and

cover she performs everything” (William Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England, 1765)

Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792):

(<-Thomas Paine: Rights of Man, 1792 – in support of the French Revolution: “all men are equal before the law”, need for representative democracy, and not one based on inheritance) Wollstonecraft argues for women’s right to education, which would pave the way for their economic independence.

Situation of women in the Victorian period:

married woman: cannot inherit, cannot keep personal property – all belongs to the husband (including, for instance the copyright laws of the woman’s work).

divorce: a husband can sue his wife for divorce on grounds of adultery, but a

wife has to prove incest or bigamy in addition to adultery + after the divorce: the husband gets all the property, and becomes the natural guardian of children.

1849, 1853: foundation of Bedford College and Queen’s College, in London. –> women gain access to university education.

John Stuart Mill: “The Subjection of Women” (1869)

Women should not only be treated as potential mothers. Soc. treats and trades women as slaves. -> argues against the “legal subordination of one sex to the other”, based solely on physical stregth. -> argues for the equality of rights. Mill is the first MP to propose giving women a vote in 1867.

1882: Married Woman Property Act: husband and wife are two separate legal entities, wife also has a right to sue the husband, and can dispose of, sell or buy her separate property.

After WWI:

Sufragette movement-> vote: in 1918 (for women over 30), in 1928 (men + women over 21).

Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own (1929)

“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”

Shakespeare’s sister with Shakespeare’s genius would not have had the opportunity to become a playwright <-resricted education, no opportunities: women enclosed in the domestic sphere, they have to stay at home

[domestic/private sphere: women <-> public/political sphere: men]

It is not enough to grant a place to the greatest women writers in literary history, minor figures (Mrs Aphra Behn, Dorothy Osborne) are also important: “Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare

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