Thinking Activity:- Critical Theories

 Hello reader,

I am Hinaba Sarvaiya student of English department at MKBU. In this blog I am dealing with the critical theories applyed in to literary peices. This task given by our prof. Dilip Barad sir. 

Feminism Theory:-

The 'women's movement' of the 1960s was not, of course, the start of feminism. Rather, it was a renewal of an old tradition of thought and action already possessing its classic books which had diagnosed the problem of women's inequality in society, and (in some cases) proposed solutions.

What feminist critics do:-

1. Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women. 

2. Revalue women's experience. 

3. Examine representations of women in literature by men and women. 

4. Challenge representations of women as 'Other', as 'lack', as part of 'nature'. 

5. Examine power relations which are obtained in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy. 

6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social and constructed seem transparent and 'natural'. 

7. Raise the question of whether men and women are 'essentially' different because of biology, or are socially constructed as different. 

8. Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an ecriture feminine, and whether this is also available to men. 

9. 'Re-read' psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male identity. 

10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author, asking whether there are only 'subject positions ... constructed in discourse', or whether, on the contrary, the experience (e.g. of a black or lesbian writer) is central. 

11. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly 'neutral' or 'mainstream' literary interpretations. 

A number of feminists have concentrated, not on the woman as reader, but on what Elaine Showalter named gynocriticism—that is, a criticism which concerns itself with developing a specifically female framework for dealing with works written by women, in all aspects of their production, motivation, analysis, and interpretation, and in all literary forms, including journals and letters.

The Madwoman in the Attic by Susan Gubat and Sandra M. Gilbert:-

“It would not be too much to say that Anglo-American feminist criticism barely existed before [Gilbert and Gubar] rocked literary studies.”

-Deborah D. Rogers, The Times Higher Education.

In 1979, Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert published The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, a hallmark of second-wave feminist criticism. Over 700 pages long, The Madwoman in the Attic presents an analysis of a trope found in 19th-century literature. Gilbert and Gubar proposed that all female characters in male-authored novels can be categorised as either an angel or a monster; women in fiction were either pure and submissive or sensual, rebellious, and uncontrollable.

In their book, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the angel/monster trope in novels written by women, covering the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and the Brontës. They claim that 19th-century female writers carried a lot of rage and frustration about the misogynistic world they lived in and the predominantly male literary tradition they tried to enter, and that this gender-specific frustration influenced these writers’ creative output. According to Gilbert and Gubar, their rage was often shown through the figure of the mad woman. They conclude by urging female writers to break out of this patriarchal dichotomy and not to let themselves be limited by its impositions.

The Madwoman in the Attic was revolutionary because Gilbert and Gubar showed that literature written by women is not an anomaly, but that there is, in fact, a distinct female literary tradition to be found. 

Queer Theory:- 

Queer theory is often used to designate the combined area of gay and lesbian studies, together with the theoretical and critical writings about all modes of variance—such as cross-dressing, bisexuality, and transsexuality— from society’s normative model of sexual identity, orientation, and activities. The term “queer” was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and female same-sex love as deviant and unnatural; since the early 1990s, however, it has been adopted by gays and lesbians themselves as a noninvidious term to identify a way of life and an area for scholarly inquiry.

I have to taken one an American poet Andrea Gibson who known for the queer poet under the activist banner and I picked up to understand of queer study in his poem “Swing-Set”, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns. 

Andrea Gibson, an American, gender-queer poet under the activist banner, 

constantly makes visible and disputes the normative aspects of gender identity in the specific socio-cultural context in which they are writing (Pansy 119).

Gibson’s poetry both deals with sexuality 

and also illustrates the complexities and problems that occur when sexuality and gender identity both function according to the norm. 

The poem “Swing-Set,” from Gibson’s 2006 collection, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, raises questions regarding gender identity that can be examined through Bornstein’s concept of “gender attribution”. In this poem the speaker , who is a The child introduces the poem with a simple question: "Are you a boy or a girl?" In the poem, it is precisely this confusion that results in the child’s question “Are you a boy or a girl?” The voice in these lines indicates that there are only two 

alternatives of gender that one can identify with.

In this line we can see the adult is yet again faced with a child reflecting their parents’ understanding 

of gender:

"Uh…my mom says that even though you got hairs that grow from your legs and the hairs on your head grow short and poky and that you smell really bad like my dad"

Gibson uses formal devices in order to put emphasis on the physical characteristics that are used to define gender. The mother figure seems to have taught her child what attributes constitute a man (hairy legs, short hair and smelling bad) and what constitutes a woman (shaved legs, long hair and smelling good).

The next line of “gender attribution” is introduced in a dialogue between the 

gender-queer figure and a woman at a public restroom, where the woman says: 

"Sir! Sir, do you realize this is the ladies’ room?!"

This line also tells the addressee that they are not accepted in the 

category of "woman". The addressee replies by saying, "Yes, ma’am, I do. / It’s just I didn’t feel 

comfortable". The lines indicate that the woman-speaker’s had failed.

In the poem “Swing-Set,” Gibson deals with the notion of “gender attribution,” 

revealing that there are normative expectations of gender, such as hairy legs and short hair that are typically associated with being a man. However, by contradicting this belief, and by 

projecting these physical attributes on a body that is not assigned male at birth, Gibson also shows how gender can indeed be indefinable, ambiguous and indeed queer.

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