Unit 4: Sociological Criticism (Feminism)

Objectives

By the end of this lecture students will be able to:

-define feminism.

-describe the history and characteristics of feminism.

-list and explain the four types of feminism.

-to understand how political and social movements develop over time.

-to connect the feminist movement to other movements for social justice and equal rights.

Introduction

      Feminism is a diverse range of political movements, ideologies and social movements sharing similar objective so as to identify, demonstrate, and realize political, economic, personal and social equality among sexes. Seeking women’s equality and justice in the different walks of life and set up opportunities for women to have the same access to the resources that are otherwise freely available to men is the ultimate premise of feminism. Feminism, therefore, seriously attempts to analyze, comprehend and clarify the numerous psychosocial and cultural constructs of feminity.

Defining Feminism

      The term ‘feminism’ is a derivation from the Latin word ‘femina,’ meaning ‘woman’ and was first used appeared within women’s fight for equality and justice during their Rights Movement.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘feminism’ as a state of being feminine or womanly.  The Webster’s Dictionary defines the term ‘feminism’ as the principle that women should have political rights equal to those of men. “Feminist” or “feminism”, Toril Moi, suggests are political terms supporting the aspirations of the new Women’s Movement which emerged in the late 1960s. (Moi, 1985, p.xiv)  Simone de Beauvoir, sharing the same views, argues that the words, “masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form on the legal papers.” (de Beauvoir, 1956, p.15). In fact,   the definition of the term ‘feminism’ differs from person to person.

       The fundamental conviction beneath feminist theory is that from the inception of human civilization, women have been given a minor and secondary status by masculine dominated social discourse and western philosophical tradition.  Throughout history and different civilizations women have always been subjected to and allotted a position where they have no means to re-claim their unique identity only if they re-visit the history, explore it and re-create it according to their own experiences and insights. Women, thus, have to challenge the male informed ideals and beliefs those generations inherited over different epochs. They had to explore and define their identity against the dominant system which created female subjects who are conditioned to accept the values of that system.

Women’s Thoughts and Conceptual Issues

 

      The thoughts and ideas that have greatly influenced and supported women’s active rebellion against patriarchical [p1] societies are varied enough. In this line, Beauvoir [p2] and Butler [p3] are outstanding women theorists who argue that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate determines the future that the human female presents in society.’ (Beauvoir 1949/1989, 267)[1]    However, other theorists are still raising the question: what is a woman? Some would answer ‘Tota mulier in utero’, ‘woman is a womb’. Connoisseurs about women’s subject have opposed the idea stating that women are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the rest. Nowadays, all concur in regarding that females exist in the human species the fact that they make up about one half of humanity. Nevertheless, women still feel they are in a perilous situation and their feminity is in danger. They are often put into inevitably unquestioned processes: exhorted to be women, remain women, and become women. It would reasonably appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman unless she participates in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. (de Beauvoir 1949/1989, p. 13) Paradoxically however, though half of human beings are women, they are compelled to be women -a resolution dictated by the distinction between sex and gender. For the philosophical minded as we shall explain later, to be born a  woman is to be naturally and essentially female, feminine, womanly, whereas, to be made a woman is to refuse essentially-fashioned, constructed, or constituted as woman by social factors.   Women are, therefore considered only due to their (changeable) situation i.e. a new way of gendered life. Thus, femininity or one’s gender identity is rooted in the social (one’s gender) rather than the biological (one’s sex). (Burke, 1989)

 

Women’s Virtual Freedom Vs Oppression and Objectification

 

As an autonomous and free human being, a woman finds herself inspired to fulfill effectively her political, religious and social activities, but nonetheless, obliged to “assume the status of the Other”, by those who wanted her to be stagnated in the prism of sexual objectification doomed to permanent immanence[p4] . The patriarchal societies have conferred her to the margins utilizing dialogistic essentialist models of women’s identity to legitimize the privileging of patriarchal and exclude women as other from having access to the centre of power. So the exteriority of women as “Other” is based on the division of the sexes which is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand opposed within an ancient Mitsein[p5] [p6]  (co-existence), and woman has not attempted to break it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves held firmly together, and the cleavage[p7]  of society along the lines of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another. (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. xxxi-xxxii)

   To sum up, though there is still too much to say about women’s movement and thoughts with regard oppression, freedom, and objectification, women:  a) should strive for liberty, rather than happiness. b) Oppose willing assumption of ‘immanence’, of the status of an object as a bad faith inflicted on them c) reject self-objectification [p8] which also occurs via bad faith and complicity. d) gender hierarchy is to be evaluated in terms of effects on freedom, not happiness. E)  women also have to expose and eradicate the misogyny [p9] inherent in feminism itself.

      Over the past forty years, sociological criticism has become extremely dominant and consists of many subfields, some of which are themselves quite large, among them, feminism and gender studies, race studies, and ethnicity studies to name but few.  All of these fields sharing the same political views, advocate for liberalization of society, dwell on social issues, and celebrate difference (diversity); however, their main thrust is to address social injustices that stem from social inequality. Consequently, these subfields are very much the legacies of the civil rights agenda in America of the 1960s which put mainstream values, and the social structures they articulated, into question. However, from the humanities point of view, social “criticism addresses the accusation that humanists are navel gazers who don’t do anything that is socially useful.” (Rapaport, 2011, p.46)  Thus, what has made social criticism a very important discipline is the emphasis upon linking the personal identity of the scholar with his or her respective subfield.

   In the light of these circumstances, it is obvious that new methodologies and challenging would spread though the art of humanities.  The study of literature is no longer a merely ad hoc study and evaluation of poems, novels and plays. It is also the study of the ideas, issues and difficulties which arise in any literary text and in its interpretation. Thus, the representation of women in literature, then, was felt to be one of the most important forms of “socialization[p10] ”. It provided the role models which indicated to women, and men, what constituted acceptable versions of the “feminine” and legitimate feminine goals and aspirations. The ideas and issues behind these radical changes in the humanities are often presented without reference to wider contexts or as theories which you can simply ‘add on’ to the texts you read. For example, in the nineteenth century fiction, feminists pointed out that just few women work for a living, unless they are driven to it by dire necessity. “Instead, the focus of interest is on the heroine’s choice of marriage partner, which will decide her ultimate social position and exclusively determine her happiness and fulfillment in life, or her lack of these.” (Rapaport, 2011, p.46) Thus, in feminist criticism in the 1970s the major effort went into exposing what might be called the mechanisms of patriarchy, that is, the cultural “mind-set[p11] ” in men and women which perpetuated sexual inequality. (Barry, 2002, p. 85)

Feminism  

  

       Feminism is a politically motivated movement dedicated to personal and social change. Feminists challenge the traditional power of men (patriarchy) and revalue and celebrate the roles of women. Feminism is created by critical-political agendas which cut across subject areas and are not restricted to education. It shifted from a fringe social interest to focus on a mainstream academic discipline in the 1970s, to reach its apogee [p12] in the 1980s, and has in the 1990s jumped into gender studies. Ultimately, feminism succeeded to institutionalize[p13]  itself in creating formal women’s studies programs. It has nevertheless, remained strongly associated with other disciplines and approaches such as Marxism, postcolonialism and psychological models and methods. Influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, feminist writers, especially those grabbing the human subject from a narrowly patriarchal side, have sought to develop more positively woman-centre and gender-sensitive critical practices. In this respect, feminism has characterized itself in psychoanalytically inclined (French) feminists and historically inclined (Anglo-American) feminist. Later, however, with the internationalization of the women’s movement, feminism “has led to much more flexible and eclectic approach among Feminist critics.” (Pope, 1998, p. 164) Appropriately,  feminism has had the following main concerns: correction  of the social gender imbalance, the critique of patriarchy, transformation of curricula in order that more female intellectuals be admitted to various canons of study, resolution of the question of whether “ difference ” is an essentialist distinction or not, and eventual acceptance of the thesis that social identities are “ constructed ” subject positions. (Rapaport, 2011, p. 47)

    In 1980, there was considerable discussion as to whether, as the philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir had put it in the late 1940s, women are born or made. Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas greatly influenced the second wave feminist advocacies. To be born a woman is to be naturally and essentially female, feminine, and womanly. To be made a woman is to be anti - essentially fashioned, constructed, or constituted as woman by social forces.  Other scholars went even further; they debated over whether woman is nature or culture. In this line, Hélène Cixous, the French intellectual and literary writer, romanticized the vision of the female body as the site of women’s writing. (Moi, 1985, p.98) By her concept of É criture feminine, Cixous presupposed an essential relation between writing and the innate nature of female sexuality (the female body). Besides, Luce Irigaray, a French linguist, philosopher, and practitioner of psychoanalysis, cheerfully prescribed woman’s social and intellectual existence from her “morphology.” She advanced a theory of the feminine that was grounded upon the female body as essentially unphallic, multiply erogenous, and fluid. Irigaray challenged the theory that sexual difference is culturally constructed and symbolically articulated phenomenon by claiming that is a purely natural difference which could receive cultural oppression. (Stone, 2006, p. 1) Being different from her feminist predecessors in her feminist commitment, Irigaray emphasizes a theory of nature as self-differentiating, a theory which can recognize the reality and value of bodily multiplicity as well as that of sexual duality. Thus, for her the lesbian body is most essentially woman, most naturally female. According to this view, sexual difference is absolute and biologically determined, though obviously there will be variation among women. Gayle Rubin an American theorist in an article, “The Traffic of Women” (1975), suggested a distinction between sex and gender (in French there is no corollary for these two terms: sexe refers to both), arguing that gender is a socially constructed identity that determines how sex is made manifest in society. How women are expected to dress, in what they are expected to be educated, how they are expected to function as wives, mothers, workers are all predicated on assumptions about what a woman is supposed to be in terms of social roles.   

   Feminist criticism, then, examines the difficulty the Western literary tradition has had in allowing the two words ‘woman’ and ‘writer’ to be joined together. Specifically, Gilbert and Gubar question the metaphors which have shaped the practice of writing and the idea of creativity, noting that masculine imagery has completely dominated Western thinking about authors and texts. ‘Is the pen a metaphorical penis?’ they ask in the book’s first sentence. (Gilbert and Gubar 3) Their feminist literary theory revolves around investigating how the equation ‘pen = penis’ has limited women writers. They begin by documenting exhaustively the extent of this equation in Western literary history, showing that pen = penis has been the dominant metaphor for all acts of literary creation since at least the Middle Ages. They argue that the predominance of this metaphor relies on the idea that women’s bodies give birth to babies, which are mortal and limited, while men’s bodies ‘give birth’ to immortal things, like books and art.

 

    The anti - essentialist view, as it happened, had some ideological implications more in tune with pragmatic political activism than did the essentialist view. Anti - essentialism led to visions of liberalized, non – conformist self - fashioning – the performance of gender made popular by Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble of 1989. But politically it was also a variant of pro - choice, which in America was a slogan that referred to the right of a woman to have an abortion. There too nature was being overridden by culture. Whereas the essentialist arguments advanced by mainly Continental feminists were given a hearing and commented upon, the political direction of countercultural forces in the United States was such that freedom of choice would become, paradoxically, the essence of anti - essentialism. This, in turn, paved the way for the ascent of social constructivism , which argued that social reality, of which the objectification of gender is a part, can be “ negotiated ” (e.g. chosen, changed, overturned, revolted against) by way of performing the self in everyday social interactions that have the effect of changing perceived social reality (its typify captions). Hence the slogan: “the personal is the political.”

 

According to poststructuralist feminist theorists, subjects who are further away from the controlling influence of the center have more play, more ‘freedom’ to move and to behave as they wish. The capacity to avoid, escape, or evade the structuring rules of the center of a structure or system is what Lacan and the poststructuralist feminist theorists call jouissance which is the French word for ‘orgasm.’

    The word in poststructuralist terminology means a pleasure that is beyond language, beyond discourse, something that can’t be expressed in words or in the structure of language, and which in fact is disruptive to that structure. This form of pleasure, or any activity or position that escapes the rules and structures held in place by the Phallus, is a specifically feminine pleasure, a feminine jouissance which is unrepresentable in language, and which interrupts representation, disturbs the linear flow of language, and rattles the foundations of the structure of the Symbolic. Thus jouissance can be considered a type of deconstruction, as it shakes up the fixity and stability of the structure of language and puts signifiers into play, making them slippery and indeterminate..”

Anglo -American Feminism

            Feminism has acquired a rather negative reputation over the years, conjuring up feelings of anger, dissatisfaction, and images of irrational women. However, feminism has given birth to feminist criticisms, which have become invaluable to the way in which literature is interpreted. This course book chapter deals with the aspects of Anglo-American feminist criticism, a branch of second-wave feminism.

      However, when looking at the second-wave movement, one needs to first look at the first-wave movement in order to gain a greater understanding of Anglo-American feminist criticism. First-wave movements began with the “Women’s Rights and Women’s Suffrage movements which were the crucial determinants in shaping this phase with their emphasis on social, political, and economic reform” (Selden 124). Feminist criticism of the earlier period is more of a reflex of first-wave preoccupations than a fully fledged theoretical discourse of its own.

            One of the most influential feminist critics and writers of the first-wave movement is Virginia Woolf. She is the author of many well known literary works and offered the most important literary model to feminists interested in recovering the experience of women writers, especially those in the second-wave movement. Her contributions have greatly influenced the ideas and progressions of second-wave feminism. “Woolf’s general contribution to feminism then, is her recognition that gender identity is socially constructed and can be challenged and transformed, but apropos of feminist criticism she also continually examined the problems facing women writers” (Selden 125), which may be clearly seen in her essay, “A Room of One’s Own”.

            Moving along into the second-wave movement then, Anglo-American feminist criticism is devoted to the analysis of female fictional characters, the reactions of readers, and the lifestyles of the women writers by means of close textual reading and historical scholarship. In regard to the female fictional characters, women’s experience became a primary objective in the exposure and further development of a women’s tradition in literature. The more diverse Anglo-American feminism includes such women as Kate Millet, Elaine Showalter, Germaine Greer, and Adrienne Rich. 

KATE MILLETT

-born 1934 in Minnesota

-author, teacher, and artist

-published Sexual Politics in 1969

Ø  Key Terms

·         Sex = biological - male and female

·         Gender = psychological and cultural - masculine and feminine (Millett 29)

·         Patriarchy = the ideology of male supremacy socialized through temperament, role, and status (Millett 26)

·         Temperament (political) = formation of human personality along stereotyped lines of sex category (Millett 26)

            For example: Masculine = aggressive/Feminine = passive

·         Role (sociological) = code of conduct, gestures, and attitudes for each sex (Millett 26)

            For example: women’s activity- domestic service and attendance to children

·         Status (psychological) = prejudice of male superiority guarantees superior male status and inferior female status (Millett 26)

            For example: men are granted higher paying jobs therefore women are forced to be economically dependent on men

Ø  Female Sexuality

·         viewed as impure and evil

·          menstruation considered a burden

·          virginity must be controlled by men because female sexuality is feared

·          women denied sexual freedom and biological control through the cult of virginity and the proscription against abortion and birth control (Millett 46-54)

Ø  Family

·          Patriarchy’s primary institution of control through male dominance of name and property and socialization of young

·          women are excluded from their own name and property

·         within marriage, men dominate therefore children are socialized to depend on men

·          infantilization of women, who must seek approval from men

·         women are not remunerated for domestic labour (Millett 33-6) 

ELAINE SHOWALTER

 

-Showalter’s book A Literature of their Own  (1999) was written to try and shift the focus and concentrate specifically on women’s writing, on recuperating a tradition of women authors, and on examining in detail women’s own culture (Selden 129).

 -second wave women celebrate biological attributes as sources of superiority; the       experiences exclusive to women is a source of positive values (Selden 128).

-Anglo-American feminism centers on ‘women’ – real, biological entities who are forging a politics based on shared experience and needs (Eagleton 9). 

Showalter’s Three Phases

·         Feminine (1840-80) in which women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture, and internalized its assumptions about female nature. The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym. Women chose male pseudonyms as a way of coping with a double literary standard. In this phase Showalter points out that women merely imitate men’s writing. This phase include women writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eloit. These writers internalized the dominant patriarchal in values in the construction of women, which manifest themselves in their works.

·         Feminist (1880-1920) in which women protest male values and patriarchy, advocate separatist “sisterhoods”. They used literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood. This second phase includes Elizabeth Robins and Oliver Schreiner, who protest against patriarchal domination and adopted separate spaces for women.

·         Female (1920) in which women create “female writing” in self- discovery. Women reject both imitation and protest – two forms of dependency – and turn instead to female experience as the source of an independent art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature. It includes writers such as Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson as its early exponents.

Gynocriticism

   Gynocentric feminism defines women’s oppression as the devaluation and repression of women’s experience by a masculinist culture that exalts violence and individualism. It argues for the superiority of the values embodied in traditional female experience and rejects the values it finds in traditionally male dominated institutions. Gynocentric feminism contains a more radical critique of male-dominated society than does humanist feminism. (Young, 2005, p.174)

     Gynocentric feminism does not focus its analysis on the barriers to women's self-development and the exclusion of women from spheres of power, prestige and creativity. Instead gynocentric feminism focuses its critique on the values expressed in the dominant social spheres themselves. The male-dominated activities with the greatest prestige in society – politics, science, technology, warfare, business – threaten the survival of the planet and the 1 human race. That our society accords these activities the highest value only indicates the deep perversity of patriarchal culture. Masculine values exalt death, violence, competition, selfishness, a repression of the body, sexuality and affectivity. (Young, 2005, p. 178)

·         it was through A Literature of Their Own that she coined the term “gynocriticism” (Rice 153- 54).

·         the program of gynocritics is to construct a female tradition for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience rather than adopt male models and theories

·         begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture (Rice 149)

·         the gynocritic dedicates herself to the female author and character and develops theories and methodologies based on female experience, and discovers in her authors and characters an understanding of female identity—not that she expects her authors and her heroines to be superwomen, but the essential struggle will be towards a coherent identity, a realization of selfhood and freedom.

·         the most popular sequence in gynocritical reading is from reality, to author, to reader, to reality: there is an objective reality which the author apprehends and describes truthfully in her text; the reader appreciates the validity of the text and relates it to her understanding of her own life

·         in this standard, author, character, and reader can unite in an exploration of what it means to be female—they can even assert a collective identity as ‘we women’ – and the reader is gratified by having her anger, experience, or hopes confirmed by the author and narrative (Eagleton 9) 

GERMAINE GREER

-a second wave feminist whose book The Female Eunuch was “magnificently accessible” (Wallace 157). Greer wrote this book in 1970 in order to “question the most basic assumptions about ‘feminine normality’” (The Female Eunuch 14)

Ø  The Female Eunuch

·         In The Female Eunuch Greer says she “argued that every girl child is conceived as a whole woman but from the time of her birth to her death she is progressively disabled” (The Whole Woman 4).

·         was a huge success and “triggered a shock of recognition in tens of thousands of Western women who read it, and in hundreds of thousands of women who received Greer’s analysis via the media” (Wallace 160) and it became “feminism’s smash-hit” (Wallace 160).

·         Christine Wallace, the author of Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew, criticized The Female Eunuch specifically because she felt that book “is one of the prescriptive extremes of second-wave, every bit as wrong-headed as the other extreme dictating that only lesbians could consider themselves true feminists” (Wallace 164).

·         about religion, patriarchy, sexuality, societal roles, marriage and many other topics.

·         Greer was acclaimed “the star that feminism was waiting for” (Wallace 174). She was a controversial figure who was criticized a great deal both for both her character and her book.

·         Greer wrote many other books since The Female Eunuch including its sequel entitled The Whole Woman. Germaine Greer claims she wrote The Whole Woman because “it was time to get angry again” (The Whole Woman 3) and because “the contradictions women face have never been more bruising than they are now” (The Whole Woman 3). It almost seems that in this book she is calling back the ideals of second wave feminism. 

   ADRIENNE RICH     

- “The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.” - Rich

-concerned with the way women have been oppressed, both materially and psychologically

-women are powerless in our patriarchal society (Evans 83)

- her book, Of Woman Born, discussed motherhood and sexuality

Motherhood

·         Rich denies the existence of an innate mothering instinct, inherent in all women. Instead, she argues that we learn the behaviors associated with motherhood: patience, self-sacrifice, etc. These are not naturally rooted in us. (Evans 83)

·         Defines two halves of motherhood: Institution and Experience -The experience of motherhood is a woman's potential relationship to her powers of reproduction and to children; The institution of motherhood is male dominated, and ensures that woman's potential remains under male control. (Eisenstein 70)

·         The institution of motherhood is oppressing and patriarchal. For example, it is a common belief, especially among men, that due to a woman's ability to have children, all women should have children. (Evans 85)

·         Motherhood gives women power- men dislike this and retaliate in the form of oppression.

Lesbian Continuum

·         All women are lesbian insofar as they want to identify with other women (Tong 126).

·         redefines lesbianism to mean a range of woman identified experience- such a redefinition makes it a part of 'normal' female experience. (Eisenstein 55).

·         Doesn't necessarily refer to physical genital sexual experience. rather, it is the desire to relate to other women. (Eisenstein 56).

Compulsory Heterosexuality

·         argues that heterosexual preference is imposed upon women- it maintains female subordination because it forces women to identify with men (Evans 86).

·         heterosexuality is itself an institution, imposed on women out of man's fear that he might lose woman, and with that, will lose the maternal power she bears.

Conclusion

    The distinct ideas of feminist critics such as those discussed are, in fact, quite representative of feminist criticism.  Feminism encompasses a wide range of ideas, focusing on such themes as the politics of reproduction, the omnipresence of patriarchy, the masculinity of language, the absence of women from the literary ‘canon’, and the celebration of women’s sexual differences, among many others.  In reality, there is not so much a singular feminism as there is a multitude of diverse ‘feminisms’.

Typical questions

ü  How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?

ü  What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters assuming male/female roles)?

ü  How are male and female roles defined?

ü  What constitutes masculinity and femininity?

ü  How do characters embody these traits?

ü  Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this change others’ reactions to them?

ü  What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?

ü  What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of resisting patriarchy?

ü  What does the work say about women’s creativity?

ü  What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics tell us about the operation of patriarchy?

ü  What role does the work play in terms of women's literary history and literary

References

 

Barry, Peter. (2002). Beginning theory An introduction to literary and cultural theory. 2^nd. Edition. UK, Manchester University Press,

 Burke, Peter J. 1989. "Gender Identity, Sex, and School Performance." Social Psychology

Eagleton, Mary. (1991). Introduction: Feminist Literary Criticism. London:  Longman

Eisenstein, Hester.  (1984). Contemporary Feminist Thought. London: Unwin Paperbacks,

Evans, Judith. (1995). Feminist Theory Today. London: Sage Publications

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. (1979).The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

Greene, Gayle and Kahn, Coppelia. (1985). edit. Making a Difference. New York: Routledge,

Greer, Germaine. (1999). The Whole Woman. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd.

Millett, Kate. (1990). Sexual Politics: The Classic Analysis of the Interplay Between Men, Women and Culture. 3^rd ed. New York: Touchstone

 Moi, Toril, (1985). Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory .London: Methuen

Pope, Rob. (1998). Studying English Literature and Language: An Introduction and Companion. New York, Routledge

Rapaport, Herman. (2011). The Literary Theory Toolkit A Compendium of Concepts and Methods. Wiley Blackwell, Ltd.

Rubin, Gayle. (1975).   “Traffic in Women,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press

Selden, Raman. (1997). ed.  A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 4th ed. London: Prentice Hall

Showalter, Elaine. (1971). The Female Eunuch. London: Granada Publishing Ltd.

Showalter, Elaine. (1985). “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, Methuen, pp. 77-94.

Showalter, Elaine. (2001). “Towards a Feminist Poetics.”  Modern Literary Theory. Ed. Philip   Rice and Patricia Waugh. New York: Oxford

Stone, Alison. (2006)  .Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. UK. Cambridge university press, 

Tong, Rosemarie.  (1989). Feminist Thought. Boulder. Westview Press

Wallace, Christine. (1998). The Untamed Shrew. New York: Faber and Faber Inc.

Young, Iris M. (2005). “Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics.” In Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader. Oxford University Press Quarterly 52: 159-169.