Feminist Criticism

Feminist Criticism

Feminist Criticism takes on how gender roles, patriarchy as well as how the different feminist waves have shaped literature. It asks questions about how women in different forms of literature are either forced into the traditional roles that they have all too often been forced to play, or how they’ve opposed those roles and taken on a different one.

Gender vs. Sex

Gender is referencing the social construct behind how people are supposed to behave or the roles that they are supposed to take on. Generally gender is imposed on children since birth and their gender is tied in with their biological sex, but as children grow and learn they also grow to understand their gender identity.

Read More

Traditional Gender Roles

The role or behavior learned by a person as appropriate to their gender, determined by the prevailing cultural norms.

Patriarchy

social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line

Sexism

prejudice or discrimination based on sex

Ecriture Feminine

Derives from French feminism. This ideal is that women have their own special form of writing which opposes the patriarchal forms of writing.

Womanspeak

The idea that women have their own special language, that comes from the female body.

Reflection

As a woman, I can identify the different hardships that can be faced due to my gender. I will never be able to recognize this in the ways my ancestors, women of color and those who have transitioned may run into forms of prejudice and/or sexism. In using feminism to critique texts, we are able to analyze how the texts represent women and the ways the women in the texts may face hardships or are minimized due to their gender. It is important to look into how women are portrayed in texts and the roles that they are written to play and how in some cases they break the traditional roles they all too often tend to play in texts.

End.