文艺理论：女性主义(Feminist Theory)原版阅读

Feminist Theory

Modern Feminism began with Mary Wollstonecraft?s Vindication of the

Rights of Women (1792), a work that criticizes stereotypes of women as

emotional and instinctive and argues that women should aspire to the

same rationality prized by men. A product of the Enlightenment, Woll-

stonecraft believed that women should enjoy social, legal, and intellec-

tual equality with men and drew for support from the work of progressive

social philosophers. Liberal intellectuals like John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor, developed this argument, infusing it with the prin-

ciples of individualism that Mill had developed out of the utilitarian

philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. In 1866, Mill introduced a bill in parlia-

ment that called for an extension of the franchise to women and, in 1869,

published The Subjection of Women (1869). In that essay he argued that

women ought to enjoy equality in the social sphere, especially in mar-

riage, and condemned “forced repression” and “unnatural stimulation”

(276): “All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the

belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men;

not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yield-

ing to the control of others” (271). Mill?s views, infl uenced strongly by

Taylor, marked a signif icant advance for women and provided the inspi-

ration for the New Woman movement at the end of the nineteenth- and

the early-twentieth-century suffragette movements committed to social

equality and individual freedom.

The fi rst phase or “wave” of modern Feminism, then, was concerned

primarily with the issue of suffrage (the right to vote). The dominant

fi gures at mid-nineteenth century in the US were Elizabeth Cady Stanton

and Susan B. Anthony, whose political roots were in anti-slavery activ-

ism and, to a lesser degree, temperance movements. Stanton composed

the “Declaration of Sentiments” for the Seneca Falls women?s rights convention in 1848, a watershed moment in US Feminism. Modeled on

the US Constitution, the Declaration asserts “that all men and women

are created equal,” and indicts a patriarchal culture for repressing the

rights of women: “T he history of mankind is a history of repeated inju-

ries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct

object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her” (Sourcebook).

Together with Matilda Joslyn Gage, Stanton wrote the “Decl aration of

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Rights of the Women of the United States” for the Centennial celebration

in Washington in 1876. Though not off icially invited, Anthony read the

address. Anthony and Stanton later founded the National Woman Suf-

frage Association, which in 1890 merged with the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association. These organizations were instrumental in securing suffrage for women – in 1920, with the Susan

B. Anthony Amendment –and served as the foundation for modern Feminism.

Not all feminist movements involved political activism in this early

period. Literary Modernism produced foundational feminist writers, including preeminently Virginia Woolf, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Djuna Barnes. Their work dramatized the potentially damaging effects

of the rationalism that Wollstonecraft and Mill proffered as the birth-

right of women and the social entitlement called for by the New Woman movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth centur y. Woolf ?s Room

of One?s Own (1929) was a landmark work in which representations of

women by male authors are roundly criticized and a new model for

female IDENTITY and AGENCY is proffered. Woolf also insisted that women

be allowed the economic and social freedom to follow their aspirations

and to forego the traditional role of serving as an enlarging mirror for

male identity. “How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives,

making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets,

unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the

size he really is?” (60).

A second wave of Feminism, cresting in the 1960s, focused attention

on civil rights, specif ically social and economic equality. Simone de Beauvoir?s The Second Sex (1949) was a foundational text. Claiming that

“one is not born, one becomes a woman,” de Beauvoir challenged the

idea that a woman?s essence was distinct from a man?s, that she was bor n

with certain inherent potentialities and qualities that defi ned her per- sonal, social, and legal existence. This insight, and the SOCIAL CONSTRUC- TIONIST thesis it entails, was further developed by US feminists in the

1960s. In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer, like de Beauvoir, argues

that there is no “natural” distinction between the sexes. She is critical

of Freud?s inf luence on American culture and rejects his ideas about

femininity as largely irrelevant to understanding modern women. Her

book begins with a number of quotations from middle-class, suburban

housewives she had interviewed, and the picture she paints is of a

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pervasive sense of dissatisfaction: “I have heard so many women try to

deny this dissatisfi ed voice within themselves because it does not f it the

pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them. I think, in fact,

that this is the fi rst clue to the mystery; the problem cannot be under-

stood in the generally accepted terms by which scientists have studied

women, doctors have treated them, counselors have advised them, and

writers have written about them” (27). For Kate Millet, the problem was fundamentally political. Also like de Beauvoir, she argued against the concept of “biologism,” the idea that gender difference is “natural.” But

unlike others in the 1960s, Millet took aim at the “power-structured relationships” of domination (23) characteristic of PA TRIARCHY, relation-

ships that condition gender and cause the oppression of women. She

dismissed the arguments of contemporary science, religion, philosophy,

and law that insisted upon patriarchy as the original and therefore most

natural form of social organization, calling them the “evanescent delights

afforded by the game of origins” (28). Anticipating the work of radical

feminists of the 1980s and 1990s, Millet criticized “cultural program- ming,” especially the infantilizatio n of women perpetuated by social surveillance and the violence directed against them, a “patriarchal force”

that is “particularly sexual in character and realised most completely in

the act of rape” (42–44).

What all of these women have in common is an interest in exposing

patriarchal forms of power as the cause of the unequal and subordinate

status of women in Western societies. However, these early feminist theorists speak from the standpoint of white, middle-class privilege –even as they criticize that very privilege in the form of suburban com-

placency. And while these early critiques are aimed at the patriarchal

authority of Enlightenment politics and science, they nevertheless retain

something of that Enlightenment heritage, particularly the tendency to

think in terms of UNIVERSALS, to presuppose a generalized, abstract idea

of “woman.” Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar were instrumental in developing revisionist literary histories of women?s writing, though they concentrated largely on white women writers in the nineteenth century. Showalter?s A Literature of Their Own examines

innovative work by the Bront? sisters, George Eliot, and writers in the

suffragette movement and compares it to the sensationalist “feminine novel” of the day that did little to combat sexist stereotypes. Gilbert and

Gubar, too, fought against the tendencies of conventional f iction and the

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patriarchal culture that nurtured it. Their landmark work, Madwoman in the Attic, draws on phenomenology and Harold Bloom?s theories of

inf luence to describe new relationships between women writers and their audiences and between these writers and their male predecessors.

In part by deconstructing or re-visioning male discourses and images of

women, in part by exploring the unexplored terrain that sustained women?s writing, Gilbert and Gubar examine “the crucial ways in which

women?s art has been radically qualif ied by their femaleness” (82).

For some critics, Showalter, Gilbert, and Gubar had not gone far enough. Toril Moi, for example, in her widely-read Sexual/Textual Politics (2002), takes “humanist feminism” to tas k for its rejection of theory and

its adoption of New Critical aesthetics. “What …knowledge,? ” Moi asks,

“is ever uninformed by theoretical assumptions?” (76). For Moi, an alternative can be found in the work of Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous,

and Julia Kristeva, French feminists whose critique of PATRIARCHY and the gendered SUBJECT extends the concerns of second-wave Feminism into the realms of philosophy, Psychoanalysis, linguistics, SEMIOTICS, and radical politics. French feminists critiqued the founda-

tional principles of a patriarchal culture that developed the concept of

“rights” as part of a stable, AUTONOMOUS subjectivity. The Centre

d?Etudes Féminines at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes), founded by Cixous in 1974, provided an institutional structure for the

ongoing critique of patriarchal culture, a critique that was to a signif i-

cant degree fashioned by borrowing concepts and methodologies

from poststru cturalist discourse written by men. Irigaray?s critique

of Freud exemplif ies this approach. Borrowing from Derridean Deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Irigaray calls into question the Freudian discourse on femininity, particularly the role played by the Oedipus and castration complexes and their total lack of

relevance for little girls. Her chief point is that women are trapped in a

masculine world of representation, forced to be the reproductive medium

or essence in which men fi nd their ESSENTIAL being, but are themselves debarred from actually possessing essence. “The girl,” she writes, “has

no right to play in any manner whatever with any representation of her

beginning, no specif ic mimicry of origin is available to her: she must

inscribe herself in the masculine, phallic way of relating to origin, that

involves repetition, representation, reproduction. And this is meant to be …the most powerful feminine wish? ” (78). Cixous an d Catherine

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Clément, in Newly Born Woman (1975), critique the Freudian seduction

scene, in which the daughter seduces the father, the “pivotal” point at

which the Symbolic order enters into the young girl?s life. However, the daughter, though pivotal, is relegated to the margins, sexually and socially, and takes the blame for “fantasiz[ing] a reality that, it seems, is

to remain undecipherable” (47). She is thus an unreadable, non-essential

ground for mascul ine sexual identity. As such, the woman?s body becomes available for the type of symbolic exchange between men that

Gayle Rubin analyzes in “The Traff ic in Women” (1975).

Alternatives to PHALLOCENTRIC discourse are offered by Irigaray and

a number of other French feminists. Collectively these practices are known as éCRITURE FEMININE (variously translated as “feminine writing”

and “writing the body”). This view of Feminism, which Diana Fuss and

others have described as a form of strategic essentialism, holds that a

woman?s body determines not only her identity but also a mode of

writing and thinking fundamentally different from and in revolt against

masculine modes. Irigaray called it “hysteria scenario, that privileged dramatization of feminine sexuality” (60). This practice is strongly asso-

ciated with Cixous? literary and theoretical work, especially her inf luen-

tial essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” “It is impossible to defi ne a female

practice o f writing,” Cixous claims, but she goes on to insist that such a

practice “will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocen-

tric system” in part because it lies outside the arena of “philosophico-

theoretical domination” (46). Th e space marked out by this new practice

is a woman?s body, where her own desires, banned from patriarchal dis-

course, can fi nd expression. It is also a space defi ned by the blanks and

gaps in that discourse where a woman?s voice can fi nd its “silent plastic-

ity” (142). The Lacanian concept of JOUISSANCE is often used to defi ne

this inexplicable site of “female writing,” where women?s experience can

be freed from the unforgiving dialectic of Oedipus and the HEGEMONY

of the Symbolic in order to embrace the Imaginary realm of mystical

and pre-Oedipal experiences, the “oceanic” unity with the body of the

mother. (On Lacan, see pp. 158–9, 168–71.) These experiences are linked,

in Kristeva?s “semanalysis,” to the “semiotic chora,” the pre-Oedipal dis-

solution of boundaries. Thus the maternal body becomes the foundation

for both a resistance to patriarchal discourse and for a feminist ethical

practice (“herethics”) that does not derive from it. Like other

French

feminists of her generation, Kristeva struggled to lift prohibitions

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on the maternal body imposed by the Oedipal and castration complexes.

In the Preface to Desire in Language (1980), she confesses that “[i]t was

perhaps also necessary to be a woman to attempt to take up that exorbi-

tant wager of carrying the rational project to the outer borders of the

signifying venture of men” (x). (On Kristeva, see pp. 156–9.)

However, the concerns of many feminists, particularly of lesbians and

women of color, were remote from those of straight, white, middle-class intellectuals working in Western universities. These feminists, who began to emerge in the late 1970s, gaining momentum in the 1980s,

constituted a third wave of feminist critique that took issue with abstract, UNIVERSALIST notions of the idea of woman that either ignored women

of color or relegated them to the status of “third world woman,” yet

another form of abstraction. Adrienne Rich has famously critiqued the “compulsory heterosexuality” at the heart of patriarchal cultures and advocated new forms of community based on lesbian desire, which she

believed was an unacknowledged and powerful force for social change.

In a similar way, Monique Wittig emphasizes the “lesbian body” and

lesbian consciousness as a precondition for a more inclusive and politi-

cally effective Feminism. Just as Rich and Wittig emphasize sexuality as

the key to Feminism, so bell hooks and other women of color insist that

the fi ght against racism is the fundamental confl ict, the one that all

feminists must fi ght who desire an end to sexism. hooks, in her landmark

work, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), articulated the prin-

cipal problems with Western Feminism. She took issue, as did Gayatri

Spivak and other postcolonial feminists, with the notion that race and

class can be ignored or downplayed in the formulation of a feminist

politic s. “Racism is fundamentally a feminist issue,” hooks argues, “because it is so interconnected with sexist oppression” (53–54). Accord-

ing to hooks, sexist oppression is the foundation of patriarchal culture

and should be the chief concern of a progressive Feminism. Violence

against women, whether in the form of domestic abuse or ritualized social practices like sati and genital mutilation, is the physical manifesta-

tion of this oppression on women?s bodies. Responding to wh at she sees

as a dominant trend in US Feminism towards seeking “social equality

with men” (19), hooks advocates a more general critique of male domina-

tion and a transformation of social relationships, especially marriage and

child rearing. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga were involved in similar projects at this time, with an emphasis on the way that borders,

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both geographical and psychological, determine gender and sexual iden-

tity. What all of these women have in common is a desire to overcome

a two-fold domination, for they are oppressed not only because of their

gender but also because of their race.

Most of the trends I have discussed above continued into the 1990s and

beyond. Postmodern Feminism, particularly the work of Judith Butler

and Nancy Fraser, continue to explore some of the issues that interested

the early French feminists and tackle with new theoretical vigor the problem of the gendered SUBJECT. Of critical importance for the study of

Gender and Sexuality is Butler?s work on PERFORMANCE and PERFORMA- TIVITY (see pp. 104–5). The future of Feminism, and its principal intel-

lectual value, lies in its continued ability to critique its own assumptions

and, by doing so, to open up the discourse to the new problems created

by the globalization of economies, cultures, and discourse.

Note. For more on Feminism, see entries on Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodernism, and Psychoanalysis.

WORKS CITED

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1.4 (Summer 1976): 875–93. Rpt. of “Le Rire de la Méduse.” L?Arc 61 (1975): 39–54.

——and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. 1975. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. 2nd ed. New Haven and

London: Yale University Press, 2000.

Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1970.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 1984. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002.

Internet Modern History Sourcebook. “The Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca

Falls Conference, 1848.” http://ww https://www.360docs.net/doc/e714832927.html,/HALLSAL/MOD/ Senecafalls.html.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. 1974. Trans. Gilliam C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed.

Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

101

Mill, John Stuart. “The Subjection of Women.” 1869. In Essays on Equality, Law, and Education. V ol. XXI of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Ed. John M. Robson. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1984. 259–340.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. 2

nd

ed. London and

New York: Routledge, 1985, 2002.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One?s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.

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Gender and Sexuality

Since the late 1980s, theories of Gender and Sexuality have redefi ned

how we think about culture and society. They have raised new questions

about the construction of the gendered and sexualized subject and put

forward radical new ideas about PERFORMANCE and PERFORMATIVITY as

the means by which the body becomes a SIGNIFYING SYSTEM within

SOCIAL FORMATIONS. At the foundation of most theories of Gender and Sexuality is a thoroughgoing critique of the SUBJECT and SUBJECTIVITY.

As a social and political category, the subject cuts across all disciplinary

and theoretical boundaries. Being a subject can mean many things – a

citizen of a particular community, an AUTONOMOUS being in possession

of a sense of personal wholeness and unity, the subject of an oppressive

ruler or of a discourse. Being a subject and possessing subjectivity are

not the birthrights of all human beings, however; they are specialized

attributes, more or less unique to Western or Westernized cultures. This

notion of the modern subject begins in the Enlightenment, with the ref lections of John Locke, who regarded personal identity as unique, sovereign, and autonomous. Subjectivity, the consciousness of one?s his-

torical and social agency, was the prerogative of the Western individual

who defi ned himself in opposition to the OTHER, to that which was not

a subject and did not possess subjectivity. The classic philosophical expression of this relationship of the subject to what is not the subject is

Hegel?s dialectic of the master and slave. As is so often the case in

Enlightenment thought, the potential for subversion and AMBIV ALENCE

is contained in what appears to be a universal concept. For Hegel?s dia-

lectic also suggests the possibility of the disenfranchised slave or non-

subject acquiring subjectivity by overpowering the master. By the end

of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche could speak of the “subject

as multiplicity,” and by the 1920s, Freud would call into question most

of our preconceived notions about of selfhood and sexual identity.

Closely linked to the concept of the subject is the concept of IDENTITY,

which is typically used to cover the process by which a subject becomes

a particular kind of subject. Rather than a fi xed quality or ESSENCE, iden-

tity is understood by theorists of Gender and Sexuality as an ongoing

process of construction, performance, appropriation, or mimicry. This perspective, strongly inf luenced by Michel Foucault?s theories of sexual-