Postcolonial Feminist Theory: An Overview - Igcollege.org

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Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, NandedGynocritics and Feminism“A woman’s writing is always feminine; itcannot help being feminine; at its best, it ismost feminine; the only difficulty lies indefining what we mean by feminine”.Virginia WoolfThe process of defining the termfeminism or feminine has started in the lastdecade. Feminist criticism has graduallyshifted from revisionary readings to asustained investigation of literature bywomen. It also engendered the study ofwomen as writers, and its subjects are thehistory, styles, themes, genres, and thestructures of writing by women. The term‘gynocritics’ came out of thepsychodynamics of female creativity; thetrajectory of the individual or collectivefemale career; and the evolution and laws ofa female literary tradition as no English termexisted before. Unlike the feminist critics,gynocritics offers many theoreticalopportunities. But the question arises howcan we constitute women as a distinctliterary group?Patricia Meyer Spacks was the firstacademic critic to notice this shift from anandrocentric to a gynocentric feministcriticism. In ‘The FemaleImagination’(1975), she pointed out that fewfeminist theories had concerned themselveswith women’s writing. Simone deBeauvoir’s treatment of women writers in‘The Second Sex’ always suggests a priorytendency to take them less seriously thantheir masculine counterparts. Mary Ellmann,in ‘Thinking about Women’, characterizedwomen’s literary success as escape from thecategories of womanhood.-- Dr. B. T. LahaneSambhajirao Kendre Mahavidyalaya,Jalkot(M.S)Spacks’s wide ranging studyinaugurated a new period of feminist literaryhistory and criticism which asked again andagain, how women’s writing had beendifferent, how womanhood itself shapedwomen’s creative expression. In manybooks and in hundreds of essays and papers,women’s writing asserted itself as thecentral project of feminist literary study.And the European feminist criticismaccepted this special shift.Some critics identify two modes offeminist criticism. The first of these modesis righteous, angry, and admonitory, whichthey compared to the Old Testament,‘looking for the sins and errors of the past.’The second mode disinterested and seeking‘the grace of imagination’, comparing to theNew Testament. They also suppose itnecessary to lead to the promised land ofhumanism. While some other critics thoughtthat feminist literary critics are wandering inthe wilderness which was an exclusivelymasculine domain. Mathew Arnold alsothought that literary critics might perish inthe wilderness before they reached thepromised land of disinterestedness. Actuallyit is ideology masculine or feminine thatgoes wilder.Surprisingly, until recently, feministcriticism has not had a theoretical basis. Itwas an empirical orphan in the storm ofvaried storms. No theoretical manifestoaccounted the methodologies and ideologieswhich could be called feminist reading orwriting. Annette Kolodny observed thatfeminist literary criticism appeared morelike a set of interchangeable strategies than287 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nandedany coherent school. Since then, theexpressed goals have not been notablyunified. Black critics protest the ‘massivesilence’ of feminist criticism about blackand Third-World women writers and call fora black feminist aesthetic that would dealwith both racial and sexual politics. Marxistfeminists wish to focus on class along withgender as a crucial determinant of literaryproduction. While Freudian and Lacaiancritics want to theorize about women’srelationship to language and signification.To date, most well knowncommentary on French feminist criticaldiscourse has stressed its fundamentaldissimilarity from the empirical Americanorientation, its unfamiliar intellectualgrounding in linguistics, Marxism, neo-Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, andDerridean deconstruction.Helene Cixous advocated ecriturefeminine in which there has not been anywriting that inscribes femininity. NancyMiller explains it as a literary production ofthe late twentieth century. Nonetheless, theconcept of ecriture feminine provides a wayof talking about women’s writing whichreasserts the value of the feminine andidentifies the theoretical project of feministcriticism as the analysis of difference.Now a days English, French andeven Marxist theories focus on women’swriting though the emphasis falls some whatdifferently. English feminist criticismstresses oppression; French feministcriticism, essentially psychoanalytic,stresses repression; American feministcriticism, essentially textual, stressesexpression. All, however, have beengynocentric. All are struggling to find aterminology that can rescue the femininefrom its stereotypical associations withinferiority.To be conclusive, it is difficult todefine the unique difference of women’swriting as Woolf and Cixous have wane,must present a slippery and demandingtask. It is because the difference is amatter of style, genre and experience. Italso makes use of four models ofdifference: biological, linguistic,psychoanalytic, and cultural. Each is aneffort to define and differentiate thequalities of the woman writer and thewoman’s text. And each model alsorepresents a school of gynocentricfeminist criticism with its own favouritetexts, styles, and methods.References:1. Annette Kolodny, ‘LiteraryCriticism’, review Essay, Signs 2(Winter 1976)2. Patricia Spack, The FemaleImagination (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1975)3. Nancy K. Miller, ‘Women andLanguage in Literature andsociety, ed. Sally McConnel-Ginnet(New York: Praeger, 1980)4. Helene Cixous, ‘The Laugh of theMedusa’, Signs 1(1976)5. Virginia Woolf, ‘Speech, ManuscriptNotes’ New York (1977).288 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
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