Thinking Activity on Feminism

# Feminism: Elaine Showalter and Gayatri Spivak 

Hello readers!

  this is my blog on the Feminism as a part of Cultural studies, there is Elaine and Gayatri Spivak two major contributor,Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist,and writer on culture and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism.while Gayatri Spivak is an Indian schoral feminist critic, who utilizes methods and approaches from Marxism, feminism and deconstruction.

About the author: Elaine Showalter :

      Elaine Showalter born January 21, 1941 is an American literary critic,feminist, and Writer on cultural and social issues.she is one of the founders of Feminist literary criticism in United states academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.

        She is well known and respected in both academic and popular culture fields and also specialist in Victorian literature and the Fin-de-Siecle. Her most innovative work in this field is in madness and hysteria in literature, specially in Women's writing and in the portrayal of female characters.

   

Showalter's best known works are...

• Toward a Feminist poetics (1997)
• The Female Malady:Women,Madness, and English Culture(1985)
• Sexual Anarchy : Gender At Cultural  the Fin de Siecle (1990)
• Hystories : Hysterical Epidemic and Modern Media (1997)

          Showalter's book Inventing Herself (2001), a survey of feminist icon, seems to be the culmination of a long-time interest in communicating the importance of understanding feminist tradition. Showalter's early essays and editorial work in the late 1970s and the 1980s survey the history of the feminist tradition within the "wilderness" of literary theory and criticism

              Working in the field of feminist literary theory and criticism, which was just emerging as a serious scholarly pursuit in universities in the 1970s,  Showalter's writing reflects a conscious effort to convey the importance of mapping her discipline's past in order to both ground it in substantive theory, and amass a knowledge base that will be able to infrm a path for future feminism academic pursuit.

        Showalter  is concern by sterotype of feminism that see feminist critics as being 'obsessed with the phallus'. Another problem for showalter is the way in whick feminists turn away from theory as a result of the attitudes of some male academics.

#The Woman as Reader or feminist Critique 

        ' The way in which a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening it to the significance of its sexual codes' ;' subjects include the images and stereotypes of and misconceptions of literary phenomena'

        One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-orientated. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history , we are learning what women have felt and experience,but only what men thought women should be.

#The Women as Writer or Gynocritics 

     Showalter coined the term 'gynocritics; to describe literary criticism based in a Feminine perspective.Probably the best desciption showalter gives of gynocritics is in Towards a Feminist Poetics:

          The program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women's literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories, it's only intend to gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equel , like angels"

        

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

       Gayatri Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. she is a Univesity Professor at Columbia University and a foundind member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
           A distinguished literary and cultural critic Gayatri Spivak utilizes method and approaches from Maexism, feminism and decostruction. Her work in postcolonial studies has great relevance to Cultural studies, especially those dealing with formerly colonized nations.
   

 

The term 'Subaltern'  Spivak borrows from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to signify the oppressed class. Spivak's well- known argument is that the subaltern cannot speak for him/herself because the very structure of colonial power preventing the speaking. For colonial Woman speaking is even more impossible because both colonialism and patriarchy ensure that she keeps quit. The subaltern cannot, therefore, represent herself. Spivak argues that the work of intellectuals is to make visible the position of the marginalized. The subaltern must be 'spoken for'.


Thank you....