an essay on feminist criticism

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Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 27, 2016 • ( 6 )

Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft ‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves — the first wave (political), the second wave (cultural) and the third wave (academic). Incidentally Toril Moi also classifies the feminist movement into three phases — the female (biological), the feminist (political) and the feminine (cultural).

The first wave of feminism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began in the US and the UK as a struggle for equality and property rights for women, by suffrage groups and activist organisations. These feminists fought against chattel marriages and for polit ical and economic equality. An important text of the first wave is Virginia Woolf ‘s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which asserted the importance of woman’s independence, and through the character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), explicated how the patriarchal society prevented women from realising their creative potential. Woolf also inaugurated the debate of language being gendered — an issue which was later dealt by Dale Spender who wrote Man Made Language (1981), Helene Cixous , who introduced ecriture feminine (in The Laugh of the Medusa ) and Julia Kristeva , who distinguished between the symbolic and the semiotic language.

The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, was characterized by a critique of patriarchy in constructing the cultural identity of woman. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) famously stated, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” – a statement that highlights the fact that women have always been defined as the “Other”, the lacking, the negative, on whom Freud attributed “ penis-envy .” A prominent motto of this phase, “The Personal is the political” was the result of the awareness .of the false distinction between women’s domestic and men’s public spheres. Transcending their domestic and personal spaces, women began to venture into the hitherto male dominated terrains of career and public life. Marking its entry into the academic realm, the presence of feminism was reflected in journals, publishing houses and academic disciplines.

Mary Ellmann ‘s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett ‘s Sexual Politics (1969), Betty Friedan ‘s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and so on mark the major works of the phase. Millett’s work specifically depicts how western social institutions work as covert ways of manipulating power, and how this permeates into literature, philosophy etc. She undertakes a thorough critical understanding of the portrayal of women in the works of male authors like DH Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Jean Genet.

In the third wave (post 1980), Feminism has been actively involved in academics with its interdisciplinary associations with Marxism , Psychoanalysis and Poststructuralism , dealing with issues such as language, writing, sexuality, representation etc. It also has associations with alternate sexualities, postcolonialism ( Linda Hutcheon and Spivak ) and Ecological Studies ( Vandana Shiva )

Elaine Showalter , in her “ Towards a Feminist Poetics ” introduces the concept of gynocriticism , a criticism of gynotexts, by women who are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning. The gynocritics construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, and focus on female subjectivity, language and literary career. Patricia Spacks ‘ The Female Imagination , Showalter’s A Literature of their Own , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ‘s The Mad Woman in the Attic are major gynocritical texts.

The present day feminism in its diverse and various forms, such as liberal feminism, cultural/ radical feminism, black feminism/womanism, materialist/neo-marxist feminism, continues its struggle for a better world for women. Beyond literature and literary theory, Feminism also found radical expression in arts, painting ( Kiki Smith , Barbara Kruger ), architecture( Sophia Hayden the architect of Woman’s Building ) and sculpture (Kate Mllett’s Naked Lady).

42 What Are Feminist Criticism, Postfeminist Criticism, and Queer Theory?

Feminist Criticism

Feminist criticism is a critical approach to literature that seeks to understand how gender and sexuality shape the meaning and representation of literary texts. While feminist criticism has its roots in the 1800s (First Wave), it became a critical force in the early 1970s (Second Wave) as part of the broader feminist movement and continues to be an important and influential approach to literary analysis.

Feminist critics explore the ways in which literature reflects and reinforces gender roles and expectations, as well as the ways in which it can challenge and subvert them. They examine the representation of female characters and the ways in which they are portrayed in relation to male characters, as well as the representation of gender and sexuality more broadly. With feminist criticism, we may consider both the woman as writer and the written woman.

As with New Historicism and Cultural Studies criticism, one of the key principles of feminist criticism is the idea that literature is not a neutral or objective reflection of reality, but rather, literary texts are shaped by the social and cultural context in which they are produced. Feminist critics are interested in gender stereotypes, exploring how literature reflects and reinforces patriarchal power structures and how it can be used to challenge and transform these structures.

Postfeminist Criticism

Postfeminist criticism is a critical approach to literature that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s as a response to earlier feminist literary criticism. It acknowledges the gains of feminism in terms of women’s rights and gender equality, but also recognizes that these gains have been uneven and that new forms of gender inequality have emerged.

The “post” in postfeminist can be understood like the “post” in post-structuralism or postcolonialism. Postfeminist critics are interested in exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed and represented in literature, but they also pay attention to the ways in which other factors such as race, class, and age intersect with gender to shape experiences and identities. They seek to move beyond the binary categories of male/female and masculine/feminine, and to explore the ways in which gender identity and expression are fluid and varied.

Postfeminist criticism also pays attention to the ways in which contemporary culture, including literature and popular media, reflects and shapes attitudes towards gender and sexuality. It explores the ways in which these representations can be empowering or constraining and seeks to identify and challenge problematic representations of gender and sexuality.

One of the key principles of postfeminist criticism is the importance of diversity and inclusivity. Postfeminist critics are interested in exploring the experiences of individuals who have been marginalized or excluded by traditional feminist discourse, including women of color, queer and trans individuals, and working-class women. If you are familiar with t he American Dirt controversy, where Oprah’s book pick was widely criticized because the author was a white woman, is an example of this type of approach.

Queer Theory

Queer theory is a critical approach to literature and culture that seeks to challenge and destabilize dominant assumptions about gender and sexuality. It emerged in the 1990s as a response to the limitations of traditional gay and lesbian studies, which tended to focus on issues of identity and representation within a binary understanding of gender and sexuality. According to Jennifer Miller,

“The film theorist Teresa de Lauretis (figure 1.1) coined the term at a University of California, Santa Cruz, conference about lesbian and gay sexualities in February 1990…. In her introduction to the special issue, de Lauretis outlines the central features of queer theory, sketching the field in broad strokes that have held up remarkably well.”

While queer theory was formalized as a critical approach in 1990, scholars built on earlier ideas from Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, as well as the works of Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, and others.

Queer theory is interested in exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed and performative, rather than innate or essential. As with feminist and postfeminist criticism, queer theory seeks to expose the ways in which these constructions are shaped by social, cultural, and historical factors, but additionally, queer theory seeks to challenge the rigid binaries of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Queer theory also emphasizes the importance of intersectionality, or the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with other forms of identity such as race, class, and ability. It seeks to uncover the complex and nuanced ways in which multiple forms of oppression and privilege intersect.

Queer theory focuses on the importance of resistance and subversion. Scholars are interested in exploring the ways in which marginalized individuals and communities have resisted and subverted the dominant culture’s norms and values, observing how these acts of resistance and subversion can be empowering and transformative.

Learning Objectives

Use a variety of approaches to texts to support interpretations (CLO 1.2)
Using a literary theory, choose appropriate elements of literature (formal, content, or context) to focus on in support of an interpretation (CLO 2.3)
Be exposed to a variety of critical strategies through literary theory lenses, such as formalism/New Criticism, reader-response, structuralism, deconstruction, historical and cultural approaches (New Historicism, postcolonial, Marxism), psychological approaches, feminism, and queer theory (CLO 4.1)
Understand how context impacts the reading of a text, and how different contexts can bring about different readings (CLO 4.3)
Demonstrate awareness of critical approaches by pairing them with texts in productive and illuminating ways (CLO 5.5)
Demonstrate through discussion and/or writing how textual interpretation can change given the context from which one reads (CLO 6.2)
Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)

Scholarship: Examples from Feminist, Postfeminist, and Queer Theory Critics

Feminist criticism could technically be considered to be as old as writing. Since Sappho of Lesbos wrote her famous lyrics, women authors have been an active and important part of their cultures’ literary traditions. Why, then, are we sometimes not as familiar with the works of women authors? One of the earliest feminist critics is the French existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). In her important book, The Second Sex, she lays the groundwork for feminist literary criticism by considering how in most societies, “man” is normal, and “woman” is “the Other.” You may have heard this famous quote: “One is not born a woman but becomes one.” (French: “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient”). This phrase encapsulates the essential feminist idea that “woman” is a social construct.

Feminist: Excerpt from Introduction to The Second Sex (1949), translated by H.M. Parshley

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”? To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer. The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that my only defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man’, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete 3 hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam. Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being …’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself … Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’ The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged. Excerpt from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (translated by H.M. Parshley) is licensed All Rights Reserved and is used here under Fair Use exception.

How do you feel about de Beauvoir’s conception of woman as “Other”? How are her approaches to gender similar to what we have learned about deconstruction and New Historicism? Could feminist criticism, like Marxist, postcolonial, and ethnic studies criticism, also be thought of as having “power” as its central concern?

Let’s move on to postfeminist criticism. When you think of Emily Dickinson, sadomasochism is probably the last thing that comes to mind, unless you’re postfeminist scholar and critic Camille Paglia . No stranger to culture wars, Paglia has often courted controversy; a 2012 New York Times article noted that “ [a]nyone who has been following the body count of the culture wars over the past decades knows Paglia.” Paglia continues to write and publish both scholarship and popular works. Her fourth essay collection, Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education , was published by Pantheon in 2018.

This excerpt from her 1990 book Sexual Personae , which drew on her doctoral dissertation research, demonstrates Paglia’s creative and confrontational approach to scholarship.

Postfeminist: Excerpt from “Amherst’s Madame de Sade” in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia (1990)

Consciousness in Dickinson takes the form of a body tormented in every limb. Her sadomasochistic metaphors are Blake’s Universal Man hammering on himself, like the auctioneering Jesus. Her suffering personae make up the gorged superself of Romanticism. I argued that modern sadomasochism is a limitation of the will and that for a Romantic like the mastectomy-obsessed Kleist it represents a reduction of self. A conventional feminist critique of Emily Dickinson’s life would see her hemmed in on all sides by respectability and paternalism, impediments to her genius. But a study of Romanticism shows that post-Enlightenment poets are struggling with the absence of limits, with the gross inflation of solipsistic imagination. Hence Dickinson’s most uncontrolled encounter is with the serpent of her antisocial self, who breaks out like the Aeolian winds let out of their bag. Dickinson does wage guerrilla warfare with society. Her fractures, cripplings, impalements, and amputations are Dionysian disorderings of the stable structures of the Apollonian lawgivers. God, or the idea of God, is the “One,” without whom the “Many” of nature fly apart. Hence God’s death condemns the world to Decadent disintegration. Dickinson’s Late Romantic love of the apocalyptic parallels Decadent European taste for salon paintings of the fall of Babylon or Rome. Her Dionysian cataclysms demolish Victorian proprieties. Like Blake, she couples the miniature and grandiose, great disjunctions of scale whose yawing swings release tremendous poetic energy. The least palatable principle of the Dionysian, I have stressed, is not sex but violence, which Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Emerson exclude from their view of nature. Dickinson, like Sade, draws the reader into ascending degrees of complicity, from eroticism to rape, mutilation, and murder. With Emily Brontë, she uncovers the aggression repressed by humanism. Hence Dickinson is the creator of Sadean poems but also the creator of sadists, the readers whom she smears with her lamb’s blood. Like the Passover angel, she stains the lintels of the bourgeois home with her bloody vision. “There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House,” she announces with a satisfaction completely overlooked by the Wordsworthian reader (389). But merely because poet and modern society are in conflict does not mean art necessarily gains by “freedom.” It is a sentimental error to think Emily Dickinson the victim of male obstructionism. Without her struggle with God and father, there would have been no poetry. There are two reasons for this. First, Romanticism’s overexpanded self requires artificial restraints. Dickinson finds these limitations in sadomasochistic nature and reproduces them in her dual style. Without such a discipline, the Romantic poet cannot take a single step, for the sterile vastness of modern freedom is like gravity-free outer space, in which one cannot walk or run. Second, women do not rise to supreme achievement unless they are under powerful internal compulsion. Dickinson was a woman of abnormal will. Her poetry profits from the enormous disparity between that will and the feminine social persona to which she fell heir at birth. But her sadism is not anger, the a posteriori response to social injustice. It is hostility, an a priori Achillean intolerance for the existence of others, the female version of Romantic solipsism. Excerpt from Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia is licensed All Rights Reserved and is used here under Fair Use exception.

It’s important to note that these critical approaches can be applied to works from any time period, as the title of Paglia’s book makes clear. In this sense, post-feminist scholarship is similar to deconstruction and borrows many of its methods. After reading this passage, do you feel the same way about Emily Dickinson’s poetry? How does Paglia’s postfeminist approach differ from Simone de Beauvoir’s approach to feminism?

Our final reading is from Judith Butler , who is considered both a feminist scholar and a foundational queer theorist. Their 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is considered an essential queer theory text. Expanding on the ideas about gender and performativity, Bodies that Matter (2011) deconstructs the binary sex/gender distinctions that we see in the works of earlier feminist scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir.

Queer Theory: Excerpt from “Introduction,” Bodies that Matter by Judith Butler (2011)

Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? -Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs If one really thinks about the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it. -Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In a Word,” interview with Ellen Rooney There is no nature, only the effects of nature: denaturalization or naturalization. -Jacques Derrida, Donner le Temps Is there a way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender? And how does the category of “sex” figure within such a relationship? Consider first that sexual difference is often invoked as an issue of material differences. Sexual difference, however, is never simply a function of material differences that are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices. Further, to claim that sexual differences are indissociable from discursive demarcations is not the same as claiming that discourse causes sexual difference. The category “sex” is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a “regulatory ideal.” In this sense, then, “sex” not only functions as a norm but also is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce-demarcate, circulate, differentiate-the bodies it controls. Thus, “sex” is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words, “sex” is an ideal construct that is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize “sex” and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled. Indeed, it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerialization, opened up by this process that mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law. But how, then, does the notion of gender performativity relate to this conception of materialization? In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names. What will, I hope, become clear in what follows is that the regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive effect. And there will be no way to understand “gender” as a cultural construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as “the body” or its given sex. Rather, once “sex” itself is understood in its normativity, the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materializatiqn of that regulatory norm. “Sex” is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the “one” becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility. At stake in such a reformulation of the materiality of bodies will be the following: (1) the recasting of the matter of bodies as the effect of a dynamic of power, such that the matter of bodies will be indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization and the signification of those material effects; (2) the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of dis.course to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains; (3) the construal of “sex” no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies; (4) a rethinking of the process by which a bodily norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on as not, strictly speaking, undergone by a subject, but rather that the subject, the speaking “I,” is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex; and (5) a linking of this process of “assuming” a sex with the question of identification, and with the discursive means by which the heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/ or disavows other identifications. This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of so cial life, which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreadful identification against which-and by virtue of which-the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation. The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of”sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation that produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge. This is a repudiation that creates the valence of “abjection” and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre. Further, the materialization of a given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identificatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed. And yet, this disavowed abjection will threaten to expose the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed subject, grounded as that subject is in repudiation whose consequences it cannot fully control. The task will be to consider this threat and disruption not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility. Lastly, the mobilization of the categories of sex within political discourse will be haunted in some ways by the very instabilities that the categories effectively produce and foreclose. Although the political discourses that mobilize identity categories tend to cultivate identifications in the service of a political goal, it may be that the persistence of disidentification is equally crucial to the rearticulation of democratic contestation. Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminists and queer politics are mobilized. Such collective disidentifications can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern. Excerpt from Bodies that Matter by Judith Butler is licensed All Rights Reserved and is used here under Fair Use exception.

You can see in Butler’s work how deconstruction plays a role in queer theory approaches to texts. What do you think of her approach to sexuality and gender? Which bodies matter? Why is this question important for literary scholars, and how can we use literary texts to answer the question?

In our next section, we’ll look at some ways that these theories can be used to analyze literary texts.

Using Feminist, Postfeminist, and Queer Theory as a Critical Approach

As you can see from the introduction and the examples of scholarship that we read, there’s some overlap in the concepts of these three critical approaches. One of the first choices you have to make when working with a text is deciding which theory to use. Below I’ve outlined some ideas that you might explore.

Character Analysis: Examine the portrayal of characters, paying attention to how gender roles and stereotypes shape their identities. Consider the agency, autonomy, and representation of both male and female characters, and analyze how their interactions contribute to or challenge traditional gender norms.
Theme Exploration: Investigate themes related to gender, power dynamics, and patriarchy within the text. Explore how the narrative addresses issues such as sexism, women’s rights, and the construction of femininity and masculinity. Consider how the themes may reflect or critique societal attitudes towards gender.
Language and Symbolism: Analyze the language used in the text, including the representation of gender through linguistic choices. Examine symbols and metaphors related to gender and sexuality. Identify instances of language that may reinforce or subvert traditional gender roles, and explore how these linguistic elements contribute to the overall meaning of the work.
Authorial Intent and Context: Investigate the author’s background, motivations, and societal context. Consider how the author’s personal experiences and the cultural milieu may have influenced their portrayal of gender. Analyze the author’s stance on feminist issues and whether the text aligns with or challenges feminist principles.
Intersectionality: Take an intersectional approach by considering how factors such as race, class, sexuality, and other identity markers intersect with gender in the text. Explore how different forms of oppression and privilege intersect, shaping the experiences of characters and influencing the overall thematic landscape of the literary work.

Postfeminist

Interrogating Postfeminist Tropes: Examine the text for elements that align with or challenge postfeminist tropes, such as the notion of individual empowerment, choice feminism, or the idea that traditional gender roles are no longer relevant. Analyze how the narrative engages with or subverts these postfeminist ideals.
Exploring Ambiguities and Contradictions: Investigate contradictions and ambiguities within the text regarding gender and sexuality. Postfeminist criticism often acknowledges the complexities of contemporary gender dynamics, so analyze instances where the text may present conflicting perspectives on issues like agency, equality, and empowerment.
Media and Pop Culture Influences: Consider the influence of media and popular culture on the text. Postfeminist criticism often examines how cultural narratives and media representations of gender impact literature. Analyze how the text responds to or reflects contemporary media portrayals of gender roles and expectations.
Global and Cultural Perspectives: Take a global and cultural perspective by exploring how the text addresses postfeminist ideas in different cultural contexts. Analyze how the narrative engages with issues of globalization, intersectionality, and diverse cultural perspectives on gender and feminism.
Temporal Considerations: Examine how the temporal setting of the text influences its engagement with postfeminist ideas. Consider whether the narrative reflects a specific historical moment or if it transcends temporal boundaries. Analyze how societal shifts over time may be reflected in the text’s treatment of gender issues.
Deconstructing Norms and Binaries: Utilize Queer Theory to deconstruct traditional norms and binaries related to gender and sexuality within the text. Explore how the narrative challenges or reinforces heteronormative assumptions, and analyze characters or relationships that subvert or resist conventional categories.
Examining Queer Identities: Focus on the exploration and representation of queer identities within the text. Consider how characters navigate and express their sexualities and gender identities. Analyze the nuances of queer experiences and the ways in which the text contributes to a more expansive understanding of LGBTQ+ identities.
Language and Subversion: Analyze the language used in the text with a Queer Theory lens. Examine linguistic choices that challenge or reinforce societal norms related to gender and sexuality. Explore how the text employs language to subvert or resist heteronormative structures.
Queer Time and Space: Consider how the concept of queer time and space is represented in the text. Queer Theory often explores non-linear or non-normative temporalities and spatialities. Analyze how the narrative disrupts conventional timelines or spatial arrangements to create alternative queer realities.
Intersectionality within Queer Narratives: Take an intersectional approach within the framework of Queer Theory. Analyze how factors such as race, class, and ethnicity intersect with queer identities in the text. Explore the intersections of different marginalized identities to understand the complexities of lived experiences.

Applying Gender Criticisms to Literary Texts

As with our other critical approaches, we will start with a close reading of the poem below (we’ll do this together in class or as part of the recorded lecture for this chapter). In your close reading, you’ll focus on gender, stereotypes, the patriarchy, heteronormative writing, etc. With feminist, postfeminist, and queer theory criticism, you might look to outside sources, especially if you are considering the author’s gender identity or sexuality, or you might bring your own knowledge and lived experience to the text.

The poem below was written by Mary Robinson, an early Romantic English poet. Though her works were quite popular when she was alive, you may not have heard of her. However, you’re probably familiar with her male contemporaries William Blake, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Keep in mind that reading this poem is thus itself a feminist act. When we choose to include historical voices of woman that were previously excluded, we are doing feminist criticism.

“January, 1795”

BY MARY ROBINSON

Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing, Lords in ermine, beggars freezing; Titled gluttons dainties carving, Genius in a garret starving.

Lofty mansions, warm and spacious; Courtiers cringing and voracious; Misers scarce the wretched heeding; Gallant soldiers fighting, bleeding.

Wives who laugh at passive spouses; Theatres, and meeting-houses; Balls, where simp’ring misses languish; Hospitals, and groans of anguish.

Arts and sciences bewailing; Commerce drooping, credit failing; Placemen mocking subjects loyal; Separations, weddings royal.

Authors who can’t earn a dinner; Many a subtle rogue a winner; Fugitives for shelter seeking; Misers hoarding, tradesmen breaking.

Taste and talents quite deserted; All the laws of truth perverted; Arrogance o’er merit soaring; Merit silently deploring.

Ladies gambling night and morning; Fools the works of genius scorning; Ancient dames for girls mistaken, Youthful damsels quite forsaken.

Some in luxury delighting; More in talking than in fighting; Lovers old, and beaux decrepid; Lordlings empty and insipid.

Poets, painters, and musicians; Lawyers, doctors, politicians: Pamphlets, newspapers, and odes, Seeking fame by diff’rent roads.

Gallant souls with empty purses; Gen’rals only fit for nurses; School-boys, smit with martial spirit, Taking place of vet’ran merit.

Honest men who can’t get places, Knaves who shew unblushing faces; Ruin hasten’d, peace retarded; Candor spurn’d, and art rewarded.

“January, 1795” by Mary Robinson is in the Public Domain.

Questions (Feminist and Postfeminist Criticism)

What evidence of gender stereotypes can you find in the text?
What evidence of patriarchy and power structure do you see? How is this evidence supported by historical context? Consider, for example, the 1794 contemporary poem “London” by William Blake. These two poems have similar themes. How does the male poet Blake’s treatment of this theme compare with the female poet Mary Robinson’s work? How have these two works and authors differed in their critical reception?
Who is the likely contemporary audience for Mary Robinson’s poetry? Who is the audience today? What about the audience during the 1940s and 50s, when New Criticism was popular? How would these three audiences view feminism, patriarchy, and gender roles differently?
Do a search for Mary Robinson’s work in JSTOR. Then do a search for William Blake. How do the two authors compare in terms of scholarship produced on their work? Do you see anything significant about the dates of the scholarship? The authors? The critical lenses that are applied?
Do you see any contradictions and ambiguities within the text regarding gender and sexuality? What about evidence for subversion of traditional gender roles?

Example of a feminist thesis statement: While William Blake’s “London” and Mary Robinson’s “January, 1795” share similar themes with similar levels of artistry, Robinson’s work and critical reception demonstrates the effects of 18th-century patriarchal power structures that kept even the most brilliant women in their place.

Example of a postfeminist thesis statement: Mary Robinson’s “January, 1975” slyly subverts gender norms and expectations with a brilliance that transcends the confines of traditional eighteenth century gender roles.

To practice queer theory, let’s turn to a more contemporary text. “The Eyepatch” by transgender author and scholar Cassandra Arc follows a gender-neutral protagonist as they navigate an ambiguous space. This short story questions who sees and who is seen in heteronormative spaces, as well as exploring what it means to see yourself as queer.

“The Eyepatch”

The lightning didn’t kill me, though it should’ve. The bolt pierced my eyes, gifted curse from Zeus or Typhon or God. I remember waking up in that hospital, everything was black. I felt bandages, pain, fire. I tried to sit up, but a hand gently pushed me back into the bed. I heard the shuffling of feet and the sound of scrubs rubbing against each other. I smelled the pungent disinfectant in the air. I heard the slow methodical beep of a heart rate monitor. That incessant blip-blip-blip was my heart rate. I heard the thunder of my heart beating to the same methodical rhythm. A metronome to a wordless melody of ignorance, an elegy to blindness.

I wasn’t awake long. They put me back to sleep. To salvage my face. My burned face, my charred face. I should’ve died. The next time I woke the bandages were gone. I could see the doctors, but I couldn’t see me. They wouldn’t let me see me, told me they would fix my face, make it look good again. I didn’t trust them. The doctors thought their faces were pretty. They weren’t. I asked to see my face. They wouldn’t let me. I’m lucky to be alive, that’s what they said. I’m lucky I can see.

But some things I can’t see. They left the eyepatch on my left eye. Told me the left eye would never work again. My right eye can’t see everything. It sees the doctors, their heads swathed in sterile caps, their wrinkled noses, their empty eyes. It sees the nurses, their exhaustion, their bitterness. It sees the bleak beige walls and the tiny tinny television hanging in the corner by the laminated wood door. It sees the plastic bag of fluid hanging from the metal rack on wheels, the plastic instruments and the fluorescent light panel above my head. But it can’t see my mom, it can’t see my sister. It can’t see myself. They never believe me.

My mom comes to visit me on the third day I’m awake. I hear her enter, smell her usual perfume, lilac with a hint of dirt and rain. I feel her hand hold mine, warmth and comfort and kindness. My right eye can’t see her. She came from the garden to see me, to make sure I’m okay. My right eye can’t see my mom. The doctors don’t believe me. My mom believes me.

The doctors pull her away from me. They say they need to fix my face. She can see me tomorrow. I smell the anesthesia and hear the spurt of the needle as they test to make sure no air bubbles formed in the syringe. I hear my mom crying. She assures me she’ll come back tomorrow. I can’t see her tears. They put me back to sleep.

In my dreams I can see them, my mother and sister. There is no eyepatch on my left eye; it can see them, and it can see me, reflected in the water. We swim across the pond to the island with the tree in the center. The reeds grow tall along the banks. The water smells of fish shit and moss. the reflection is murky except for the shallow blue eyes.

The reflection is broken by a ripple. My sister swims to me, wraps her arms around me, then splashes water directly into my face. Some droplets stick to my forehead and nose, like beads of cold sweat. She giggles, a grin emerges on her freckled face. Her wet blonde hair has strands of moss hanging from it. I smile back and with a quick flick of my wrist she too is drenched. I feel peace from the water. My mother calls us to shore. Storm clouds, she says. The lightning might kill you. That’s what she said then. I didn’t believe her. Thunder echoes like the heartbeat of the sky.

The doctors wake me up. They have thunder too. I cannot see them, can’t see anything. Bandages surround my face. My face is fixed. That’s what they claim. I didn’t see anything wrong before. They wouldn’t let me see me. It’s a miracle. I’m lucky to be alive. I don’t believe them. They apologize for not being able to fix my eye.

My sister comes with my mom today. I can’t see her. She believes me, reminds me about the lightning. It could’ve killed me. When she learns I can’t see her, she cackles. She says she’ll have fun when I come home. She asks when I’ll come home.

I don’t know when I’ll come home. The doctors don’t know. I should’ve died. They want to keep me. My mother wants to take me. They shout at each other. My sister holds my left hand. I can’t see her hand, or mine.

The doctors remove the bandages. They show me a mirror. I see behind me, but I don’t see me . I see the eyepatch float. When I try to remove it the doctors stop me. My eye is too damaged. They tell me to never remove the eyepatch. They hold up a vase. My mom brought me flowers. I can’t see the flowers. They don’t believe me. Their voices are angry. Stop being childish, they say. I lie and say I see the flowers.

Once one of the nurses I can’t see, he brought me food from outside. I saw the bag float in the room. I heard his footsteps. He handed me the brown paper bag and told me to enjoy. He sounded old. I felt a band of metal on his left-hand ring finger when I took the bag. The smell of chicken nuggets and French fries pierced the stale aroma of bleach and disinfectant. I heard the edge of the bed creak, the cushion indented slightly. The invisible nurse told wild tales of dragons and monsters while I ate. He didn’t know when I’ll be home. He watered invisible flowers before leaving. I fell back asleep.

In my dreams I’m still swimming. The sun is blocked by clouds. Drops of rain hit my hair. Mother calls from the cabin on the shore. My sister runs out of the water, her leg kicks water into my eyes. I’m blinded for a moment. I don’t leave. I stay in the water, dropping my eyes level with the water. They both hear the thunder. I don’t hear the thunder. They both see the lightning.

All I feel is heat. I’m blind. The lightning should’ve killed me. The lightning in my eyes, lucky to be alive. My sister screams for help. Smell the ozone. Pungent and sweet. I don’t scream, I can’t scream. I’m dead. I’m alive. The lightning killed me. I can’t see my mom. I can’t see my sister. I can’t see the flowers. The lightning saved me. I can see the doctors, I can see the nurses, I can see the hospital.

The lightning killed me, that’s what they said. They brought me back with lightning, pads of metal, artificial energy. My eye is broken, the one the lightning struck. Three minutes. That’s what they told me. Three minutes of death. My face was burned. I can’t see it. They fixed it.

The doctors worried my body was broken too. The lightning still might kill me. They say I need to move, I need to walk. Lightning causes paralysis, or weakness. They bring in a special doctor. I can’t see this doctor. The other doctors leave. The invisible doctor takes me to a room for walking practice. I think I walk just fine. They hold me anyway. Crutches line the walls, pairs of metal handrails take up the center, and exercise equipment sits off to the right side. The invisible doctor lets go and I fall. My hands are too slow to catch me. My face hits one of the many black foam squares that make up the floor. I turn my head left and see the eyepatch almost fall off in the mirror on the wall. For a second, I think I see me, but I can’t see me. The invisible doctor fixes it and helps me to my feet. They tell me to be like a tree, that I’ll be okay. That I’ll be able to walk again soon. They tell me when I can walk I will go home. I place my hands on the rails. The metal is cold. The doctor yelps in shock and withdraws their hand; it was just static. My arms are weak but they hold me. My legs move slowly, but I can’t walk without the rails.

The invisible doctor takes me back after a while. They tell me I did good work. It’s a miracle I can still move. They tell me lightning takes people’s movement. The lightning should’ve killed me. That’s what they say. They tell me strength should come back to me. Lightning steals that too. Lightning can’t keep strength like it keeps movement.

My mom comes back again. She brings me the manatee, Juno. I can see Juno. Soft gray fabric, small black plastic eyes. I hold her tightly in my arms. Mom wants me home. The doctors still won’t let her take me. Juno will keep me safe, that’s what she said. She brings me homework too, and videos of teachers explaining how the world works. I can see them. I can’t see my mom.

I miss the smell of earth when my mom leaves. I want to smell her garden again. To swim in the pond and feel the moss brush against my skin. I want to feel the peace of the water and hear the crickets sing their lullaby. The invisible doctor tells me I will. They tell me I need to steal my strength from the lightning. They take me back to that room for walking. I only need one hand to guide me now. They tell me I’ll go home soon. They tell me I’m stronger than lightning. I still can’t see them.

Back in my room I learn about lightning. It’s hotter than the sun. I remember the heat I felt and wonder if that’s how it feels to touch the surface of a star. The video says that direct strikes are usually fatal. I’m lucky to be alive. I hold Juno tightly.

It takes a month to steal my strength back from the lightning. I walk without holding the rails. The invisible doctor applauds me and tells me I’m ready to go home. They call my mom. I still can’t see my mom.

I can’t see the trees with my right eye, my good eye. I know where they should be by the shaded patches of dirt in the ground. I can see the grass, the road, the dirt covered green Volvo Station wagon, Mom’s car. My sister shouts for joy and runs toward me. I fall to the ground. Her arms squeeze Juno into my chest. I can’t see my sister.

Mom drives me to the cabin. I can see the towering buildings of the city. In the reflection of the tinted glass, I see the station wagon. The eyepatch floats in the window right above Juno’s head. Mom tells me about what she’ll make for dinner. She killed one of the chickens and plucked carrots and celery from the ground. Soup gives strength. That’s what she said. She reminds me that I’m lucky to be alive.

I can’t see the reeds. Mom stops the car in front of the cabin. I can’t see the cabin, nor the rustic wood threshold. Mom helps me across it. The hand-carved wooden table is invisible, but I can see the small electric stove. I smell the soup, hear the water boil, guide my hand along the wood of the narrow hallway to help me walk. I can’t see my bedroom, nor the bed alcove carved into the wall. My mattress floats in the air as if by magic. I can see the plastic desk my mom bought me for school, and the lightbulb in the ceiling. I see wires in invisible walls.

My sister wants to play. She tugs on my arm. I set Juno into the bed alcove and feel my way back to the main room. Mom reminds me to be careful. She tells my sister to be gentle. She reminds us both that I can’t take off my eyepatch. We both take off our shoes.

My sister guides me to the shore. I enjoy the sensation of dirt beneath my feet and the occasional pain of a rock. We move slowly, some of my strength still belongs to the lightning. She runs in. I can’t see the pond. I can’t see the moss in the pond. I can’t see my sister. My sister asks about the eyepatch. She wants to know why I can’t take it off. I don’t know. She asks about my eye. The dark one. The one filled with abyss. The right eye. She asks why it’s dark. I don’t know. I put my foot in the invisible water. My sister jumps out. Something shocked her. She thinks I shocked her. She gets back in.

I stay close to the shore I can’t see. I don’t want to drown. I don’t want my eyes near the water. There are no storm clouds today. I fiddle with moss between my toes. Mom calls us in for dinner. My sister runs ahead. I try walking on my own. I trip over a tree root that I couldn’t see. I fall and hit my chin on the ground. The eyepatch slides up a bit. I quickly push it back down before it can come off. I can’t take off my eyepatch.

My mom hears the thud and comes running. She helps me to my feet, guides me back to the cabin, and sits me at the table. She brings me a bowl of soup, tells me I need to be careful. She wants me to stay alive. I sip the soup and listen to her sing while she cleans the soup pot. I can’t see my mom.

When I sleep, I dream of before. Before the lightning stole my left eye. Before it stole my strength. I dream of the pond. I dream of the old willow tree on the island. Its dark drooping branches blossoming every spring. The leaves fall on the pond. Nature’s Navy of little boats. The tree is stronger than lightning. I am the tree. I want to see the tree again.

My sister tells me she’ll guide me to the island. I refuse. I can’t see the tree, or the water. My eyes would have to be close to it. The eyepatch might come off. I spend the day holding Juno. My mom brings me a sandwich and sits with me a while. I only know she’s there from the sound of her bouncing leg. She’s nervous. She doesn’t smell of the garden yet. She won’t smell of the garden today. I want to smell of the garden, but I can’t see the garden.

In the evening I sit outside the cabin and listen to the crickets. I’m lucky to be alive. The lightning didn’t kill me. I scratch at an itch under the eyepatch. I feel a shock in my hand and pull it back. I smell the ozone on my fingertip. In my mind I’m in the water again. I remember the heat, the pain. My mom comes running when I scream. She puts Juno in my arms. I feel safe again. I am stronger than the lightning. The lightning didn’t kill me.

While I sleep I am the tree, standing tall, guarding my island. The lightning wants to take it. It strikes at the water around me, burning my Navy of leaves. Once it struck me, but the rain extinguished its flames. I grew back stronger. My Navy rebuilt. The lightning always comes back. I am always stronger.

My sister and I play in the lake. I go out deeper today. My legs can tell how deep I am. We go to the tree. The lightning couldn’t steal the ability to swim. I follow the sound of my sister’s splashing. We push through invisible reeds, I feel the plants surround me. My sister holds my hand and guides me through the canopy of branches. I feel the incomplete ships of Nature’s Navy brush against my face. She puts my hand against the tree. I guide my hand along it until I find the once charred wood where lightning burned it. The lightning should’ve killed us.

My sister and I sit under the tree for a while. I feel the bugs occasionally crawl across my hands. She rests her shoulder on mine. I’m lucky to be alive. The lightning didn’t kill us.

We walk back to the shore. I feel the water, and one of Nature’s boats brush against my foot and look down. I still can’t see the water. I can’t see myself. I can see the Navy. The floating leaves atop the tranquil pond. The tears begin to fall. My sister asks why the tears from beneath the eyepatch are white as ash. I wish I knew.

The crickets sing again that evening. Tonight, they sing the ballad of the tree. Loud and harmonic. I whisper my thanks into the wind. The crickets whistle back. They believe me.

In the morning I wake up before anyone else. I shuffle through the halls and out to the porch to listen to the morning bird song. I let my head weave side to side in tune with their melody. I dance across invisible dirt. A laugh escapes my lips. I jump into invisible water. I sail with Nature’s Navy to the tree.

My soul sits atop resilient roots. Hands find the burned wood, where the lightning almost killed it. I bring the left hand to the eyepatch, where the lightning almost killed me. The wind blows through the leaves. Splashes echo from the opposite shore, sounds of someone swimming. Thunder echoes from my stomach, I rise to return home. Gallivanting down the invisible slope back towards my invisible home.

I trip across a root near the water. The eyepatch sinks beneath the surface of the lake. I yank my head back. The eyepatch slips off. My left hand covers my eye. A shock forces me to pull it away. The eyelid flutters opened. I see the lightning. Nature’s Navy set ablaze by my gaze. My eye touches the sun again as the lightning leaves. The tree set ablaze by my gaze. The crickets echo a lament. The birds resound a harmonizing elegy. The drooping branches fall lower, as if bowing. I bow in return. The splashing water calms.

My left eye sees the water, sees the earth, sees myself. Authentic and whole. It observes my leaves of joy, fingers stretched in shallows. My left eye witnesses my roots of kindness, feet planted on solid shores. It beholds the resilience of my trunk, a beautiful body. The eyepatch floats in the water. I perceive my eyes again, the dark one and the white. my black and white tears drift across the surface of water. Someone shuffles the dirt behind me. I turn with a smile on my face.

Cassandra Arc is an autistic trans woman living in Portland, Oregon. In her writing she likes to focus on themes of healing, gender identity issues, and nature as a means of understanding authenticity. This story was originally published in the Talking River Review and is reprinted here by permission of the author (All Rights Reserved).

Who is the narrator of this story? What do we know about their gender? How do we know this? What does the lightning signify?
What does the eyepatch represent? When the narrator says, “I see behind me, but I don’t see me,” what does this mean? What ideas about social constructs are present in this narrative, and how does the story subvert those social constructs?
How do characters navigate and express their gender identities in the text? Does the story expand your understanding of the queer experience? In what ways? What do you think about the way some things can’t be seen and some things can in the story? How might this experience relate to being queer?
How are time and space treated in this story?
How does the story subvert or resist conventional categories?

Example of a queer theory thesis statement: In “The Eyepatch” by Cassandra Arc, the binary oppositions of light, darkness, sight, and blindness are used to subvert heteronormative structures, deconstructing artificially constructed binaries to capture the experience of being in the closet and the explosive nature of coming out.

Limitations of Gender Criticisms

While these approaches offer interesting and important insights into the ways that gender and sexuality exist in texts, they also have some limitations. Here are some potential drawbacks:

Essentialism: Feminist theory may sometimes be criticized for essentializing gender experiences, assuming a universal women’s experience that overlooks the diversity of women’s lives.
Neglect of Other Identities: The focus on gender in feminist theory may overshadow other intersecting identities such as race, class, and sexuality, limiting the analysis of how these factors contribute to oppression or privilege.
Overlooking Male Perspectives: In some instances, feminist theory may be perceived as neglecting the examination of male characters or perspectives, potentially reinforcing gender binaries rather than deconstructing them.
Historical and Cultural Context: Feminist theory, while valuable, may not always adequately address the historical and cultural contexts of literary works, potentially overlooking shifts in societal attitudes towards gender over time.
Oversimplification of Feminist Goals: Post-feminist criticism may be criticized for oversimplifying or prematurely declaring the achievement of feminist goals, potentially obscuring persistent gender inequalities.
Individualism and Choice Feminism: The emphasis on individual empowerment in post-feminist criticism, often associated with choice feminism, may overlook systemic issues and structural inequalities that continue to affect women’s lives.
Lack of Intersectionality: Post-feminist approaches may sometimes neglect intersectionality, overlooking the interconnectedness of gender with race, class, and other identity factors, which can limit a comprehensive understanding of oppression.
Commodification of Feminism: Critics argue that post-feminism can lead to the commodification of feminist ideals, with feminist imagery and language used for commercial purposes, potentially diluting the transformative goals of feminism.
Complexity and Jargon: Queer Theory can be complex and may use specialized language, making it challenging for some readers to engage with and understand, potentially creating barriers to entry for students and scholars.
Overemphasis on Textual Deconstruction: Critics argue that Queer Theory may sometimes prioritize textual deconstruction over concrete political action, leading to concerns about the practical impact of this theoretical approach on real-world LGBTQ+ issues.
Challenges in Application: Queer Theory’s emphasis on fluidity and resistance to fixed categories can make it challenging to apply consistently, as it may resist clear definitions and frameworks, making it more subjective in its interpretation.
Limited Representation: While Queer Theory aims to deconstruct norms, some critics argue that it may still primarily focus on certain aspects of queer experiences, potentially neglecting the diversity within the LGBTQ+ spectrum and reinforcing certain stereotypes.

Some Important Gender Scholars

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986): A French existentialist philosopher and writer, de Beauvoir is best known for her groundbreaking work “The Second Sex,” which explored the oppression of women and laid the groundwork for feminist literary theory.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): A celebrated English writer, Woolf is known for her novels such as “Mrs. Dalloway” and “Orlando.” Her works often engaged with feminist themes and issues of gender identity.
bell hooks (1952-2021): An American author, feminist, and social activist, hooks wrote extensively on issues of race, class, and gender. Her works, such as “Ain’t I a Woman” and “The Feminist Theory from Margin to Center,” are essential in feminist scholarship.
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012): An American poet and essayist, Rich’s poetry and prose explored themes of feminism, identity, and social justice. Her collection of essays, “Of Woman Born,” is a notable work in feminist literary criticism.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: An Indian-American literary theorist and philosopher, Spivak is known for her work in postcolonialism and deconstruction. Her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a key text in postcolonial and feminist studies.
Susan Faludi: An American journalist and author, Faludi’s work often explores issues related to gender and feminism. Her book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” critically examines the societal responses to feminism.
Camille Paglia: An American cultural critic and author, Paglia is known for her provocative views on gender and sexuality. Her work, including “Sexual Personae,” challenges conventional feminist perspectives.
Rosalind Gill: A British cultural and media studies scholar, Gill has written extensively on gender, media, and postfeminism. Her work explores the intersection of popular culture and contemporary feminist thought.
Laura Kipnis: An American cultural critic and essayist, Kipnis has written on topics related to gender, sexuality, and contemporary culture. Her book “Against Love: A Polemic” challenges conventional ideas about love and relationships.
Judith Butler: A foundational figure in both feminist and queer theory, Judith Butler has made profound contributions to the understanding of gender and sexuality. Their work Gender Trouble has been influential in shaping queer theoretical discourse.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: An influential scholar in queer studies, Sedgwick’s works, such as Epistemology of the Closet , have contributed to the understanding of queer identities and the impact of societal norms on the construction of sexuality.
Michel Foucault: Although not exclusively a queer theorist, Foucault’s ideas on power, knowledge, and sexuality laid the groundwork for many aspects of queer theory. His works, including The History of Sexuality, are foundational in queer studies.
Teresa de Lauretis: An Italian-American scholar, de Lauretis has contributed significantly to feminist and queer theory. Her work Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities explores the complexities of sexuality and identity.
Jack Halberstam: A gender and queer studies scholar, Halberstam’s works, including Female Masculinity and In a Queer Time and Place, engage with issues of gender nonconformity and the temporalities of queer experience.
Annamarie Jagose: A New Zealand-born scholar, Jagose has written extensively on queer theory. Her book Queer Theory: An Introduction provides a comprehensive overview of key concepts within the field.
Leo Bersani: An American literary theorist, Bersani’s work often intersects with queer theory. His explorations of intimacy, desire, and the complexities of same-sex relationships have been influential in queer studies.

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Feminist Criticism and The Turn of the Screw

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Feminist criticism comes in many forms, and feminist critics have a variety of goals. Some are interested in rediscovering the works of women writers overlooked by a masculine-dominated culture. Others have revisited books by male authors and reviewed them from a woman’s point of view to understand how they both reflect and shape the attitudes that have held women back.

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James, H., Beidler, P.G. (1995). Feminist Criticism and The Turn of the Screw . In: Beidler, P.G. (eds) The Turn of the Screw. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13713-8_8

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Feminist theory.

Pelagia Goulimari Pelagia Goulimari Department of English, University of Oxford
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.976
Published online: 19 November 2020

Feminist theory in the 21st century is an enormously diverse field. Mapping its genealogy of multiple intersecting traditions offers a toolkit for 21st-century feminist literary criticism, indeed for literary criticism tout court. Feminist phenomenologists (Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Toril Moi, Miranda Fricker, Pamela Sue Anderson, Sara Ahmed, Alia Al-Saji) have contributed concepts and analyses of situation, lived experience, embodiment, and orientation. African American feminists (Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Hortense J. Spillers, Saidiya V. Hartman) have theorized race, intersectionality, and heterogeneity, particularly differences among women and among black women. Postcolonial feminists (Assia Djebar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Florence Stratton, Saba Mahmood, Jasbir K. Puar) have focused on the subaltern, specificity, and agency. Queer and transgender feminists (Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Susan Stryker) have theorized performativity, resignification, continuous transition, and self-identification. Questions of representation have been central to all traditions of feminist theory.

continuous transition
heterogeneity
intersectionality
lived experience
performativity
resignification
self-identification
the subaltern

Mapping 21st-Century Feminist Theory

Feminist theory is a vast, enormously diverse, interdisciplinary field that cuts across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. As a result, this article cannot offer a historical overview or even an exhaustive account of 21st-century feminist theory. But it offers a genealogy and a toolkit for 21st-century feminist criticism. 1 The aim of this article is to outline the questions and issues 21st-century feminist theorists have been addressing; the concepts, figures, and narratives they have been honing; and the practices they have been experimenting with—some inherited, others new. This account of feminist theory will include African American, postcolonial, and Islamic feminists as well as queer and transgender theorists and writers who identify as feminists. While these fields are distinct and while they need to reckon with their respective Eurocentrism, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, or transphobia, this article will focus on their mutual allyship, in spite of continuing tensions. Particularly troubling are feminists who define themselves against queer and transgender theory and activism; by way of response, this article will be highlighting feminist queer theory and transfeminism.

On the one hand, literary criticism is not high on the agenda of many 21st-century feminist theorists. This means that literary critics need to imaginatively transpose feminist concepts to literature. On the other hand, a lot of feminist theorists practice literature; they write in an experimental way that combines academic work, creative writing, and life-writing; they combine narrative and figurative language with concepts and arguments. Contemporary feminist theory offers a powerful mix of experimental writing, big issues, quirky personal accounts, and utopian thinking of a new kind.

Feminists have been combining theory, criticism, and literature; Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Hélène Cixous, and Alice Walker have written across these genres. In African Sexualities: A Reader ( 2011 ), Sylvia Tamale’s decision to place academic scholarship side by side with poems, fiction, life-writing, political declarations, and reports is supported by feminist traditions. 2 Furthermore, the border between feminist theory, literature, and life-writing has been increasingly permeable in the 21st century , hence the centrality of texts in hybrid genres: theory with literary and life-writing elements, literature with meta-literary elements, and so on. Early 21st-century terms such as autofiction and autotheory register the prevalence of the tendency. This is at least partly a question of addressing different audiences—aiming for public engagement and connection with activism outside universities and bypassing the technical jargon of academic feminist theory. Another reason is that feminist theorists, especially those from marginalized groups, have found some of the conventions of academic scholarship objectionable or false—for example, the assumption of a universal, disembodied, or unsituated perspective.

Nevertheless, recent feminist experiments with genre—for example, by Anne Carson, Paul B. Preciado, Maggie Nelson, or Alison Bechdel—nod toward an integral part of women’s writing and feminist writing. 3 Historic experiments in mixed genre, going back to Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s poem-novel Aurora Leigh , include: Virginia Woolf’s critical-theoretical-fictional A Room of One’s Own ; Julia Kristeva’s poetico-theoretical “Stabat Mater”; Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time , oscillating between speculative science fiction and naturalist novel; Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami ; the mix of theory, fiction, and life-writing in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick ; or Qurratulain Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist , hovering between historical fiction and romance. 4

Twenty-first-century feminist theory also tends to be thematically expansive and more than feminist theory narrowly understood, in that it is not only about “women” (those assigned female at birth or socially counted as women or self-identifying as women). It is a mature field that addresses structural injustice, social justice, and the future of the planet. As a result, cross-fertilization with other academic fields abounds. Relatively new academic fields such as feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory—emerging since the 1960s, established in the 1980s, and having initially to cement their distinctiveness and place within the academy—have been increasingly coming together and cross-fertilizing in the 21st century . Distinct feminist perspectives (phenomenological, poststructuralist, African American intersectional, postcolonial, Islamic, queer, transgender) have also been coming together and variously informing 21st-century feminist theory. While this article will introduce these perspectives, it will aim to show that feminist theorists are increasingly difficult to put in a box, and this is a good thing.

Feminist Phenomenology (Beauvoir, Young, Moi, Fricker, Anderson, Ahmed, Al-Saji): Situation, Lived Experience, Embodiment, Orientation

Simone de Beauvoir initiates feminist phenomenology, her existentialism emerging within the broader tradition of phenomenology. While the present account of feminist theory begins with Beauvoir, it is important to acknowledge the continuing influence of older feminists and proto-feminists, as “feminism” only acquired its current ( 20th- and 21st-century ) meaning in the late 19th century , according to the Oxford English Dictionary. See, for example, Christine de Pizan, “Jane Anger,” Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Anne Finch, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Davies, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and Virginia Woolf.

All contemporary feminist theory has been influenced by Beauvoir, in some respect or other. Her famous claim that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” opening volume 2 of The Second Sex ( 1949 ), points to the asymmetrical socialization of men and women. 5 In her philosophical terms, man is the One, the universal, subject, freedom, transcendence, mind, spirit, culture; woman is the Other, the particular, object, situation, immanence, body, flesh, nature. Patriarchy for Beauvoir is a system of binary oppositions, whose terms are mutually exclusive: the One/the Other, the universal/the particular, subject/object, freedom/situation, transcendence/immanence, mind/body, spirit/flesh, culture/nature. Men have been socialized to aim for—indeed to become—the valued terms in each binary opposition (the One, the universal, subject, freedom, transcendence, mind, spirit, culture); while the undesirable terms (the Other, the particular, object, situation, immanence, body, flesh, nature) are projected onto women, who are socialized to become those terms—to become object, for example. Emerging from this system is the illusion of a transhistorical feminine essence or a norm of femininity that misconstrues, disciplines, and oppresses actual, historical women. Women for Beauvoir are an oppressed group, and her aim is their liberation. 6

Beauvoir critiques the social aims and myths of patriarchy, pointing to the pervasiveness of patriarchal myths in philosophy, literature, and culture. But she also critiques the very forms of patriarchy—binary opposition, dualistic thinking, essentialism, universalism, abstraction—while not completely able to free her own analysis from them. Instead of them, Beauvoir advocates attention to concrete situation and close phenomenological description; indeed The Second Sex abounds in vivid and richly detailed descriptions of early 20th-century French women’s lives. Such close attention and description allow her to demonstrate that all humans are, potentially, both subject and object, free and situated, transcendent and immanent, spirit and flesh, hence the ambiguity of the human condition. 7

The philosophy of existentialism and the broader philosophical movement of phenomenology, within which Beauvoir situates her work, claim to offer radical aims and methods. Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon) is committed to the phenomenological description of the particular in order to avoid the abstractions of scientism. It aims to avoid traditional philosophical dualisms such as mind/body. It re-describes human beings not as disembodied minds but as intentional beings engaged with the world, being-in-the-world (Heidegger’s term), situated in a particular time and place; as lived bodies that are centers of perception, action, and lived experience rather than mere objects; and as being-with and being-for others in inter-subjective relationships rather than just subject/object relationships. Human beings immerse themselves in their projects, using the world and their own bodies—with all their acquired skills, competencies, and sedimented habits—as instruments. While these instruments are indispensable to their projects, they are usually unperceived and remain in the background. They are the background against which objects of perception and action objectives come into view. And yet what is backgrounded can always come to the foreground, suddenly and rudely—when the world resists one, when a blunt knife does not cut the bread, when one’s body is in pain or sick and intrudes, interrupting one’s vision and plans. 8

Without minimizing the novelty of Beauvoir’s theorization of patriarchy, the present quick sketch of phenomenology ought to have highlighted its suitability for feminist appropriations. Nevertheless, Sartre, Beauvoir’s closest collaborator, for example, continues to think that one is distinctively human only to the extent that they transcend their situation. This arguably universalizes Sartre’s particular situation as a member of a privileged group determined to be free, while effectively blaming the situation of oppressed groups on their members, blaming the victims for lacking humanity. 9 By contrast, Beauvoir sheds light on women’s social situation and lived experience: men have “far more concrete opportunities” to be effective; women experience the world not as tools for their projects but as resistance to them; their “energy” is “thrown into the world” but “fails to grasp any object”; a woman’s body is not the “pure instrument of her grasp on the world” but painfully objectified and foregrounded. 10 Beauvoir goes on to distinguish between a variety of unequal social situations with different degrees of freedom inherent in them. Yes, on the whole, French men are freer, less constrained than French women. But Beauvoir discusses the “concrete situation” of other groups “kept in a situation of inferiority”—workers, the colonized, African American slaves, her contemporary African Americans, Jews—while explicitly acknowledging that women themselves are socially divided by class and race. 11

Beauvoir outlines impediments to women’s collective and individual liberation and sketches out paths to collective action and to the “independent woman” of the future, placing literature center stage. She claims that women lack the “concrete means” to organize themselves “in opposition” to patriarchy, in that they lack a shared collective space, such as the factory and the racially segregated community for working-class and black struggles, instead living dispersed private lives. 12 While white middle-class women “are in solidarity” with men of their class and race, rather than with working-class and black women, Beauvoir calls for solidarity among women across class and race boundaries. 13 She addresses white middle-class women like herself, who benefit materially from their connection to white middle-class men, asking them to abandon these benefits for the precarious pursuit of women’s solidarity and freedom. To the extent that women lack freedom by virtue of their social situation qua women, they need to claim their freedom in collective “revolt.” 14 Beauvoir’s 1949 call to organized political action was “the movement before the movement,” according to Michèle Le Doeuff. 15

However, Beauvoir also advocates writing literature as a means of liberation for women and considers all her writing—philosophical, literary, life-writing—a form of activism. Beauvoir devotes considerable space to literary criticism throughout The Second Sex . She shows how writers have reproduced patriarchal myths, often unwittingly. 16 But her future-oriented, crucial chapter “The Independent Woman” centers on a discussion of women writers and even addresses women writers. Having sketched out a history of women’s writing, she turns to young writers to offer advice, based on her analysis of women’s “situation.” 17 To overcome women’s socially imposed apprenticeship in “reasonable modesty,” they need to undertake a counter-practice of “abandonment and transcendence,” “pride” and boldness; they need to become “women insurgents” who feel “responsible for the universe.” 18 Her call, “The free woman is just being born” energizes new women writers to live and write freely—and has been answered by many. 19 But this is not triumphalist empty rhetoric; women writers also need to understand the “ambiguity” of the human condition and of truth itself. 20

Iris Marion Young returns to Beauvoir’s description of women’s social situation and lived experience in “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality” ( 1980 ). Young takes Beauvoir’s description as the starting point for her own phenomenology of women’s project-oriented bodily movement in “contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society,” arguing that their movement is inhibited, ambiguous, discontinuous, and ineffective. 21 Women exhibit a form of socially induced dyspraxia. Young contends that women’s movement “exhibits an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings.” 22 Young turns to women’s bodies in their “orientation toward and action upon and within” their surroundings, particularly the “confrontation of the body’s capacities and possibilities with the resistance and malleability of things” when the body “aims to accomplish a definite purpose or task.” 23 It will be remembered that the phenomenological tradition theorizes the human body as a lived body that is the locus of subjectivity, perception, and action, a capable body extending itself into the world rather than a thing; this is especially the case with Merleau-Ponty. Young’s description of the deviation of women’s bodily experience from this norm is a powerful indictment of women’s social situation.

Firstly, Young identifies that women experience their bodies as ambiguously transcendent: both as a “capacity” and as a “ thing ”; both striving to act upon the world and a “burden.” 24 Secondly, they experience an inhibited intentionality: while acting, they hesitate, their “hesitancy” resulting in “wasted motion . . . from the effort of testing and reorientation.” 25 Thirdly, they experience their bodies as discontinuous with the world: rather than extending themselves and acting upon their surroundings, which is the norm, they live their bodies as objects “ positioned in space.” 26 Or rather, the “space that belongs to her and is available to her grasp and manipulation” is experienced as “constricted,” while “the space beyond is not available to her.” 27 In other words, she experiences her surroundings not as at-hand and within-reach for her projects but as out-of-reach. This discontinuity between “aim and capacity to realize” it is the secret of women’s “tentativeness and uncertainty.” 28 Even more ominously, they live the “ever-present possibility” of becoming the “object of another subject’s . . . manipulations.” 29 In the very exercise of bodily freedom—for example, in opening up the “body in free, active, open extension and bold outward-directedness”—women risk “objectification,” Young argues. 30

Young describes the situation of women as one in which they have to learn “actively to hamper” their “movements.” 31 If this has been the norm of genderization in modern Western urban societies, is it still at work and is it lived differently depending on one’s class, race, sexuality, and so on? 32 Similarly with Beauvoir’s theorization of the situation of women: does it continue to be relevant and useful?

The emergence of “sexual difference” feminism or écriture féminine in France in the mid-1970s, with landmark publications by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, brought with it a critique of Beauvoir. 33 In view of the present discussion of Beauvoir, one might argue that Beauvoir’s aim is the abolition of gender. Her horizon is the abolition of gender binarism and an end to the oppression of women. However, in “Equal or Different?” ( 1986 ) Irigaray reads this as a pursuit of equality through women’s adoption of male norms, at a great cost, that of “suppress[ing] sexual difference.” 34 In Irigaray’s eyes, Beauvoir’s work is assimilationist, while her own work is radical—it aims to redefine femininity in positive terms. Irigaray insists on the political autonomy of women’s struggles from other liberation movements and, controversially, the priority of feminism over other movements because of the priority of gender over class, race, and so on. Gender is “the primary and irreducible division.” 35

In 1994 feminist literary critic Toril Moi compares Beauvoir to Irigaray and Frantz Fanon, one of the founders of postcolonial theory. Like Fanon who redefined blackness positively and viewed anticolonial struggles as autonomous, Irigaray aims to redefine femininity and mobilize it autonomously, while Beauvoir failed to “grasp the progressive potential of ‘femininity’ as a political discourse” and also “vastly underestimated the potential political impact of an independent woman’s movement.” 36 However, Moi sides with Beauvoir against Irigaray and other “sexual difference” feminists, when comparing their aims. Beauvoir’s ultimate aim is the disappearance of gender, while difference feminists “focus on women’s difference, often without regard for other social movements,” claiming that “women’s interests are best served by the establishment of an enduring regime of sexual difference.” 37

Aiming toward the disappearance of gender does not mean blinding oneself to the situation and lived experience of women. In a 2009 piece on women writers, literature, and feminist theory, Moi turns to Beauvoir to analyze the social situation of women writers. Importantly, Beauvoir focuses on what happens “ once somebody has been taken to be a woman ”—the woman in question might or might not be assigned female at birth and might or might not identify as a woman. 38 While the body of someone taken to be a man is viewed as a “direct and normal connection with the world” that he “apprehends objectively,” the body of someone taken to be a woman is viewed as “weighed down by everything specific to it: an obstacle, a prison.” 39 Concomitantly, male writers and their perspectives and concerns are associated with universality—women writers associated with biased particularity. But if women writers adopt male perspectives and concerns to lay claim to universality, they are alienated from their own lived experience. This is how a “sexist (or racist) society” forces “women and blacks, and other raced minorities, to ‘eliminate’ their gendered (or raced) subjectivity” and “masquerade as some kind of generic universal human being, in ways that devalue their actual experiences as embodied human beings in the world.” 40 All too often women writers have declared “I am not a woman writer,” but this has to be understood as a “ defensive speech act”: a “ response ” to those who have tried to use her gender “against her.” 41

In 2001 feminist philosopher and Beauvoir scholar Michèle Le Doeuff announces a renaissance in Beauvoir studies, in her keynote for the Ninth International Simone de Beauvoir Conference: “It is no longer possible to claim, in the light of a certain New French Feminism, that Beauvoir is obsolete.” 42 She prioritizes the need for scholarship on the conflicts between Sartre and Beauvoir, with a view to making the case for Beauvoir’s originality as a philosopher, in spite of Beauvoir’s self-identification as a writer and reluctance to clash with Sartre philosophically.

Feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker returns more than once to the question of whether Beauvoir is a philosopher or a writer. In 2003 Fricker locates Beauvoir’s originality in her understanding of ambiguity and argues that life-writing has been the medium most suited to her thought, focusing on Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life ( La Force de l’age , 1960 ). 43 Beauvoir found in the institution of philosophy, as she experienced it, a pathological, obsessional attitude—a demand for abstract theorizing that divorces thinkers from their situation to lend their thought universal applicability. This imperious, sovereign role was seriously at odds with Beauvoir’s sense of reality, history, and the self. For Beauvoir, reality is “full of ambiguities, baffling, and impenetrable” and history a violent shock to the self: “History burst over me, and I dissolved into fragments . . . scattered over the four quarters of the globe, linked by every nerve in me to each and every other individual.” 44 Beauvoir uses narrative, particularly life-writing, to connect with her past selves but also to appeal to the reader: “self-knowledge is impossible, and the best one can hope for is self-revelation” to the reader. 45 Fricker claims that Beauvoir primarily addresses female readers; and Beauvoir’s alliance-building with her readers—her “feminist commitment to female solidarity”—promises to bring out, through the reader, “the ‘unity’ to that ‘scattered, broken’ object that is her life.” 46

An example of the role of the reader is Fricker’s 2007 reading of Beauvoir’s under-written account of an early epistemic clash with Sartre. 47 Beauvoir’s first-person narrative voice doesn’t quite say that Sartre undermined her as a knower, but Fricker interprets this incident as an epistemic attack by Sartre that Beauvoir had the resilience to survive, and which contributed to her self-identification as a writer rather than a philosopher. Here the violence of history and the institution of philosophy take very concrete, embodied, intimate form. But the incident also serves as a springboard for Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice and its two forms: testimonial injustice, and hermeneutical injustice and lacunas. For Fricker, Sartre in this instance does Beauvoir a “testimonial injustice” in that he erodes her confidence and her credibility as a knower. 48 This process might also be “ongoing” and involve “persistent petty intellectual underminings.” 49 Hermeneutical (or interpretive) injustice, on the other hand, has to do with a gap in collective interpretative resources, where a name should be to describe a social experience. 50 For example, the relatively recent term “sexual harassment” has described a social experience where previously there was a hermeneutic lacuna, according to Fricker. Such lacunas are often due to the systemic epistemic marginalization of some groups, and any progress (for example, in adopting a proposed new term) is contingent upon a “virtuous hearer” who will try to listen without prejudice but also requires systemic change. 51 In George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss Maggie Tulliver suffers both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. 52

This article will now turn to feminist phenomenology within queer theory and critical race theory. Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology ( 2006 ), offers not a phenomenology of queerness but rather a phenomenological account of heteronormativity as well as a feminist queer critique of phenomenology. In an important reversal of perspective, Ahmed denaturalizes being straight—denaturalizes heteronormativity—by asking: how does one become straight? This is not simply a matter of sexual orientation and choice of love-object. Rather heteronormativity is itself “something that we are oriented around, even if it disappears from view”; “bodies become straight by ‘lining up’” with normative “lines that are already given.” 53 Being straight is “an effect of being ‘in line.’” 54 Unlike earlier phenomenologists such as Heidegger, what is usually being backgrounded and thus invisible is a naturalized system that Ahmed hopes to foreground and bring “into view”: heteronormativity. 55 Ahmed thus extends Beauvoir’s and Young’s analyses of the systematic oppression and incapacitation of women, respectively. 56 Ahmed puts Young’s language to use in order to talk about lesbian lives: heteronormativity “puts some things in reach and others out of reach,” in a manner that incapacitates lesbian lives. Ahmed searches for a different form of sociality, “a space in which the lesbian body can extend itself , as a body that gets near other bodies.” 57 Her critique of even the most promising phenomenologists is that in their work “the straight world is already in place” as an invisible background. 58

Ahmed extends her analysis of the production of heteronormativity to the production of whiteness in “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” ( 2007 ), asking: how does one become white? Ahmed thus furthers her critique of phenomenology from within. Phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty define the body as “successful,” as “‘able’ to extend itself (through objects) in order to act on and in the world,” as a body that “‘can do’ by flowing into space.” 59 However, far from this being a universal experience, it is the experience of a “bodily form of privilege” from which many groups are excluded. 60 Ahmed does not here acknowledge Young’s analysis of women’s socially induced dyspraxia but turns instead to Fanon’s “phenomenology of ‘being stopped.’” 61 Ahmed calls “discomfort” the social experience of being impeded and goes on to outline its critical potential in “bringing what is in the background, what gets over-looked” back into view. 62 More than a negative feeling, discomfort has the exhilarating potential of opening up a whole world that was previously obscured. 63 Ahmed’s subsequent work has focused on institutional critique, especially of universities in their continuing failure to become inclusive, hospitable spaces for certain groups, in spite of their managerial language of diversity. 64

Where Ahmed calls for critical and transformative “discomfort,” Alia Al-Saji calls for a critical and transformative “hesitation” in “A Phenomenology of Hesitation” ( 2014 ). Al-Saji’s concept of hesitation revises the work of Beauvoir and Young and enlarges their focus on gender to include race. Beauvoir’s analysis of patriarchy as a system that projects and naturalizes fixed, oppositional, hierarchical identities is redeployed toward a “race-critical and feminist” project, though Al-Saji does not acknowledge Beauvoir explicitly but credits Fanon’s work. 65 The systematic and “socially pathological othering” of fluid, relational, contextual, contingent differences into rigid, frozen, naturalized hierarchies remains “hidden from view.” 66 Experience, affect, and vision, in their pathological form, are closed and rigid; in their healthy form, they have a “creative and critical potential . . . to hesitate”—they are ambiguous, open, fluid, responsive, receptive, dynamic, changing, improvisational, self-critical. 67 Al-Saji argues that the “paralyzing hesitation” analyzed by Young can be “mined” to extract a critical hesitation, as Young’s own work exemplifies. 68 By contrast, the “normative ‘I can’ – posited as human but in fact correlated to white, male bodies”—rigidly “excludes other ways of seeing and acting”; it is “objectifying – racializing and sexist[,] . . . reifying and othering .” 69 The alternative to both thoughtless action and paralyzing inaction is: “ acting hesitantly ” and responsively. 70

Feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson’s last writings on “vulnerability” build on Michèle Le Doeuff’s critique of unexamined myths and narratives underlying the Western “imaginary.” One values and strives for invulnerability and equates vulnerability with exposure to violence and suffering. One projects vulnerability onto “the vulnerable” to disavow their own vulnerability: “a dark social imaginary continues to stigmatize those needing to be cared for as a drain on an economy, carefully separating ‘the cared for’ from those who are thought to be ‘in control’ of their lives and of the world.” 71 Furthermore, members of privileged groups often exhibit a “wilful ignorance” of systemic forms of social vulnerability and social injustice. 72 But Anderson also outlines “ethical” vulnerability as a capability for a transformative and life-enhancing openness to others and mutual affection—occasioned by ontological vulnerability. Ethical vulnerability is envisaged as a project where reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, concepts, arguments, myths and narrative all have a role to play, while also needing to be reimagined and rethought.

African American Feminisms (Morrison, Lorde, Walker, Spillers, Hartman): Race, Intersectionality, Differences among Women and among Black Women

African American and postcolonial feminists have struggled to create space for themselves, caught between a predominantly white women’s movement on the one hand, and male-led civil-rights and anticolonial struggles and postcolonial elites on the other hand. They have fought against assumptions that “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men” and that white women are “saving brown women from brown men.” 73 African American and postcolonial writers and thinkers (from Toni Morrison to Chandra Talpade Mohanty) have hesitated to self-identify with a primarily white movement that, they argued powerfully, effectively excluded them in unthinkingly prioritizing the concerns of white, middle-class women. Some have avoided self-identifying as a feminist, self-identifying as a “black woman writer” instead. Alice Walker invented the term “womanism” to signal black feminism. “Intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and other African American feminists to highlight the intersections of gender and race, feminist and antiracist struggles, creating a space between the white women’s movement and the male-led civil-rights movement. 74 Postcolonial feminists (Assia Djebar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty) similarly created a space between Western feminists and male-led anticolonial struggles and postcolonial elites.

African American feminists have been critical of Beauvoir and of the women’s movements of the 1960s. They have been reconstructing oral, written, and activist traditions of black women such as abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs, and modernists Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen—all previously neglected and marginalized. 75 These traditions prioritize: collectivism; the need to critique and resist internalized but unlivable white middle-class norms; waywardness or willfulness rather than individualism; differences among women; difference among black women; and friendship and solidarity among black women across their differences. (By contrast, contemporary white American feminist critics such as Elaine Showalter emphasized self-realization and self-actualization. 76 ) African American women writers—rather than literary critics—have led the way, inspired by orators, musicians, and collective oral forms, as critics have acknowledged. 77

Toni Morrison, as a self-identified black woman writer, announces these strategic priorities in her first novel, The Bluest Eye ( 1970 ). 78 In The Bluest Eye she revises Beauvoir’s analysis of patriarchy as a binary opposition—man/woman—that projects onto “woman” what men disown in themselves. She examines a related binary opposition: white, light-skinned, middle-class, beautiful, proper lady vs. dark-skinned, poor, ugly girl (the racialized opposition between angelic and demonic woman). The first novel to focus on black girls, The Bluest Eye shows the systemic propagation and internalization of white norms of beauty and femininity, leading to hierarchical oppositions between black and white girls as well as between black girls (light-skinned middle-class Maureen, solidly working-class Claudia and Frieda, and precariously poor Pecola). The projection, by everyone, of all ugliness onto poor, dark-skinned Pecola, combined with white norms that are impossible for her, lead to Pecola’s madness. Her attempts at existential affirmation are crushed by the judgment of the world. Pecola’s Bildungsroman turns out naturalist tragedy. However, Claudia, the narrator, develops anagnorisis and shares her increasingly complex critique with the readers.

In “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib” ( 1971 ) Morrison uses Beauvoir’s language to bring attention both to the situation of African American women and to their traditions of resistance. Reminding readers of two segregation-era signs—“White Ladies” and “Black Women”—she asserts that many black women rejected ladylike behavior and “frequently kicked back . . . [O]ut of the profound desolation of her reality” the black woman “may very well have invented herself.” 79 Black women have been working and heading single-parent households in a hostile world. If ladies are all “softness, helplessness and modesty,” black women have been “tough, capable, independent and immodest.” 80

Audre Lorde explores similar themes. Her poem, “Who Said It Was Simple” ( 1973 ) illustrates the hierarchy between white “ladies,” in their feminist struggle for self-realization, and black “girls” on whose work they rely. Sister Outsider , Lorde’s essays and speeches from 1976 to 1984 , theorizes intersections of race, sexuality, class, and age that are particularly binding and threatening for black lesbian women. 81 White feminists are ignorant of racism and wrongly assume their concerns to be universally shared by all women, thus replicating the patriarchal elevation of men to the universal analyzed by Beauvoir; they need to drop the “pretense to a homogeneity of experience,” educate themselves about black women, read their work, and listen. 82 In “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” delivered during a Beauvoir conference, Lorde argues that Beauvoir’s call to know “the genuine conditions of our lives” must include racism and homophobia. 83 Black men misdirect their anger for the racism they encounter toward black women, who, paid less and more socially devalued, are easy targets. Falsely equating anti-sexist with anti-Black, black men are hostile to black feminists and especially lesbians; so black men’s sexism is different from the sexism of privileged white men analyzed by Beauvoir. 84 Black women have also been hostile toward each other, due to internalized racism and sexism, projected toward the most marginalized among them; identifying with their oppressors, black women suffer a “misnaming” and “distortion” in their understanding of their situation. 85

But Lorde also exalts traditions of black women’s solidarity across their differences. Once differences among women and among black women are properly understood and named, they can be creative and generative. To achieve this, she extols recording, examining, and naming one’s experience, perceptions, and feelings, as a path to clarity, precision, and illumination, leading to concepts and theories but also to empowerment. Anger, unlike hatred, is potentially both full of information and generative. 86 Affect, more broadly, can be a path to understanding, as affect and rationality are not mutually exclusive: “I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy.” 87 Particularly innovative is Lorde’s theorization of the “erotic.” In contrast to the pornographic, the erotic is a power intrinsically connected to (and cutting across) love, friendship, self-connection, joy, the spiritual, creativity, work, collaboration, and the political—especially among black women. 88 But relations of interdependence and mutuality among women are only possible in a context of non-hierarchical differences among equals and peers, Lorde stresses repeatedly. 89

Alice Walker attends to many of these themes in Color Purple ( 1982 ). 90 In her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose ( 1983 ), she pays tribute to black women’s traditions of resistance, due to which “womanish” connotes “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.” 91 Her term “womanism” honors these collectivist traditions and their commitment to the “survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” 92 But she also calls for the reconstruction of a written tradition of forgotten black women writers, resurrecting Zora Neale Hurston from oblivion in “Looking for Zora,” initially published in Ms . magazine in 1975 . 93

In 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination established the enforced privatization and entrapped idleness of 19th-century white middle-class women. 94 In 1987 Hortense J. Spillers powerfully added that this was made possible by the enforced hard labor of black women, as house or field slaves and later as domestic servants who often headed single-parent households. 95 Furthermore, the gender polarization within the white middle-class family was accompanied by the ungendering of African American slaves, who were not allowed to marry and raise their children, and the structural rape of black women. In the late 1980s Crenshaw and Collins formally introduced the concept of intersectionality, though intersectionality-like ideas—that the black woman is the “mule uh de world”—have been a part of black women’s thought for a long time. 96

“Slavery and gender” has been a core topic since the 1980s, with publications such as Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death ( 1982 ), Toni Morrison’s Beloved ( 1987 ) and Playing in the Dark ( 1992 ), and Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection ( 1997 ). 97 Hartman’s abiding topic has been a lost history of black girls and women that can only partially be retrieved and that requires new methodologies. Archives and official records are full of gaps, systematically “dissimulate the extreme violence” of slavery, and “disavow the pain” and “deny the sorrow” of slaves. 98 Even while reading them “against the grain,” Hartman underlines the “ impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved.” 99 In Lose Your Mother ( 2006 ) Hartman’s concept of the “afterlife of slavery” describes the persistence of “devalued” and “imperiled” black lives, racialized violence, “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.” 100 In “Venus in Two Acts” ( 2008 ), Hartman defines her method as “critical fabulation”: mixing critical use of archival research, theorization, and multiple speculative narratives, in an experimental writing that acknowledges its own failure and refuses “to fill in the gaps” to “provide closure.” 101 This writing is:

straining against the limits of the archive . . . and . . . enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration . . . [in order] to displace the . . . authorized account, . . . to imagine what might have happened[,] . . . to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity[,] . . . to illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierarchy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices. 102

In “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner” ( 2018 ) Hartman returns to “critical fabulation” and offers a “speculative history” of Esther Brown, her friends, and their life in Harlem around 1917 . 103 Their experiments in “free love and free motherhood” were criminalized as “Loitering. Riotous and Disorderly. Solicitation. Violation of the Tenement House Law. . . . Vagrancy.” 104 Questions such as “ Is this man your husband? Where is the father of your child ?”—meant to detect the “likelihood” of their “future criminality” and moral depravity—might render them “three years confined at Bedford and . . . entangled with the criminal justice system and under state surveillance for a decade.” 105 In official records, these measures were narrated as rescuing, reforming, and rehabilitating, therapeutic interventions for the benefit of young black women.

Reading such records against the grain, Hartman tells the story of a “ revolution in a minor key ”: of “ too fast girls and surplus women and whores ” as “social visionaries, radical thinkers, and innovators.” 106 Their “wild and wayward” collective experiments, at the beginning of the 20th century , were building on centuries of black women’s “mutual aid societies” conducted “in stealth.” 107 Their aspiration has been “singularity and freedom”—not the “individuality and sovereignty” coveted by white liberal feminists. 108

Hartman’s work emerges out of African American feminist traditions but also out of postcolonial feminists, whose work pays particular attention to impossibility, failure, aporia, and the limits of representing the subaltern, as well as the heterogeneity and specificity of women’s agency.

Postcolonial Feminisms (Djebar, Spivak, Mohanty, Stratton, Mahmood, Puar): The Subaltern, Specificity, Agency

Colonized women had to contend not only with the “imbalances of their relations with their own men but also the baroque and violent array of hierarchical rules and restrictions that structured their new relations with imperial men and women.” 109 Furthermore, they were central to powerful orientalist fantasies that rendered their actual lives invisible. The relation of colonized land to colonizer was figured as that of a nubile, sexually available woman waiting for her lover, as in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines where the map of the land centers around “Sheba’s Breasts” and “Mouth of treasure cave.” 110 Algerian writer Assia Djebar exposes this colonial fantasy in Fantasia ( 1985 ). 111 The city of Algiers is seen by the arriving colonizers as a virginal bride waiting for her groom to possess her. She is an “Impregnable City” that “sheds her veils,” as if this was “mutual love at first sight” and “the invaders were coming as lovers!” 112 The Victorian patriarchal, hierarchical nuclear family, ruled by a benign and loving husband and father, was key to the colonial “civilizing mission” because it was the perfect metaphor for the relation between colonizer and colonized in colonial ideology. 113 However, in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment ( 1980 ; mirroring the title of Eugène Delacroix’s orientalist paintings) Djebar reminds her readers that women took part in large numbers in the Algerian anticolonial struggle and suffered torture, rape, and loss of life, but that their contribution was marginalized in post-independence narratives, while they were expected to return to a patriarchal mold ostensibly for the good of the new nation. 114 By contrast, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment foregrounds Algerian women’s heterogeneity but also the intergenerational transmission of their socially repressed, traumatic history, which cannot be fully recovered—hence the self-conscious aporia of Djebar’s project.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” ( 1983 , 1988 , 1999 ) is a subtle theorization of what remains outside colonial, anticolonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, and even “liberal multiculturalist” elites and discourses. 115 Spivak’s starting point is the unpresentability of the “subaltern” (those most marginalized and excluded). The subaltern exceeds any representation treating it as a full identity with a fixed meaning. The subaltern is an inaccessible social unconscious that can only be ethically presented in its unpresentability—fleetingly visible in fragments.

Rather than documenting “subaltern” resistance in its “taxonomic” difference from the elite and rather than assuming that political forces are self-conscious and already constituted identities, Spivak assumes that political identities are being constituted through political action. 116 Many subaltern groups are highly articulate about their aims and their relations to elites and other subaltern groups, but Spivak understands the “subaltern” as singular acts of resistance that are “irretrievably heterogeneous” in relation to constituted identities. 117 Rather than asking for the recognition of “subjugated” and previously “disqualified” forms of knowledge, Spivak is intent on acknowledging her privileged positionality and insists that what she calls the “subaltern” is irretrievably silenced; the “subaltern” is what escapes—or is excluded from—any discourse. 118

Spivak’s heterogeneous subaltern is a (Derridean) singularity that cannot be translated fully or repeated exactly but can only be repeated differently. 119 The singularity in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is Talu’s suicide, as retold by Spivak. Spivak interprets it as a complex political intervention, by a young middle-class woman activist, that remained illegible as such. Entrusted with a political assassination in the context of the struggle for Indian independence, Spivak claims that Talu’s suicide was a complex refusal to do her mission without betraying the cause. Talu questioned anticolonial nationalism, sati suicide, and female “imprisonment” in heteronormativity, but her “Speech Act was refused” by everyone because it resisted translation into established discourses. 120 Spivak iterates Talu’s singularity differently: as a postcolonial feminist heroine. She does not present her version of Talu’s story as restoring speech to the subaltern. Speech acts are addressed to others and completed by others; they involve “distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception.” 121 To claim that Talu has finally spoken through Spivak would be a neocolonial “missionary” claim of saving the subaltern. 122 To avoid this, Spivak self-dramatizes her privileged institutional “positionality” and calls for “unlearning” one’s privilege. 123

Postcolonial feminists have been telling the story of the marginalization of women of color within anticolonial movements, postcolonial states, and within Western feminist movements. In “Three Women’sTexts and a Critique of Imperialism” ( 1985 ), Spivak argues that Gilbert and Gubar, in their reading of Jane Eyre in Madwoman in the Attic , unwittingly reproduce the “axioms of imperialism.” 124 For Spivak, in Jane Eyre Bertha, a dark colonial woman, sets the house on fire and kills herself so that Jane Eyre “can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction”; she is “sacrificed as an insane animal” for her British “sister’s consolidation” in a manner that is exemplary of the “epistemic violence” of imperialism. 125 Gilbert and Gubar fail to see this and only read Jane and Bertha in individual, “psychological terms.” 126 By contrast, Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea ( 1966 ) makes this visible and enables Spivak’s critique. 127 Rhys allows Bertha to tell her story and keeps Bertha’s “humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact.” 128 In “Does the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak articulates the value of postcolonial feminism but refuses to defend it as a redemptive breakthrough. Instead she issues a call for self-reflexivity.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in “Under Western Eyes” ( 1984 ), calls for studies of local collective struggles and for localized theorizing by investigators. 129 The category of “Third World Woman” is an essentialist fabrication reducing the irreducible “heterogeneity” of women in the Third World. 130 Mohanty’s call for specificity is a rejection of white middle-class feminists’ generalizations on “women” and “Third World women” as neocolonial:

Women are constituted as women through the complex interaction between class, culture, religion and other ideological institutions and frameworks. . . . [R]eductive cross-cultural comparisons result in the colonization of the conflicts and contradictions which characterize women of different social classes and cultures. 131

Mohanty is here remarkably close to African American feminists. What is at stake for Mohanty is for groups of marginalized women to represent themselves and to retrieve forms of agency within their own traditions. As she stresses in Feminism without Borders ( 2003 ): the “application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the Third World colonizes and appropriates the pluralities” of their complex location and “robs them of their historical and political agency .” 132

Saba Mahmood, in “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival” ( 2001 ), argues that rather than reading a specific cultural phenomenon through an established conception of agency, agency should be theorized through the specific phenomenon studied. 133 Her target is the Western feminist equation of feminist agency with secularism, resistance, and transgression, which she finds unhelpful when studying the “urban women’s mosque movement that is part of the larger Islamic revival in Cairo.” 134 While in some contexts feminist agency might take the form of “dramatic transgression and defiance,” for these Egyptian women it took the form of active participation and engagement with a religious movement. 135 It would be a neocolonial gesture to understand their involvement as due to “false consciousness” or internalized patriarchy. 136 Mahmood’s “situated analysis” thus endorses plural, local theories and concepts. 137

Florence Stratton focuses on gender in African postcolonial literature and criticism. She analyses the multiplicity of “ways in which women writers have been written out of the African literary tradition.” 138 They have been ignored by critics, marginalized by definitions of the African canon that universalize the tropes and themes of male writers, and silenced by “gender definitions which . . . maintain the status quo of women’s exclusion from public life.” 139 Particularly pernicious has been the “iteration in African men’s writing of the conventional colonial trope of Africa as female.” 140 Stratton discerns a ubiquitous pattern in African postcolonial men’s writing. Women are cast as symbols of the nation, in sexualized or bodily roles: as nubile virgin to be impregnated or as mother (Stratton calls this the “pot of culture” trope); or, alternatively, as degraded prostitute (the “sweep of history” trope). 141 So women are figured either as embodiments of an ostensibly static traditional culture (trope 1) or as passive victims of historical change (trope 2). This is coupled with a male quest narrative, where the male hero and his vision actively transform prostitute into mother Africa. Underlying this is a patriarchal division of active/passive and subject/object, which denies women as artists and citizens and neglects women’s issues (so actual sex work is totally obscured by its metaphorical role). Stratton goes on to show how African women writers have been “initiators” of “dialogue” with African male writers in order to self-authorize their work and make space for it in the African literary canon. 142 Stratton is also critical of white feminists who read African women writers through their own formal and thematic priorities, oblivious to African feminist traditions. 143

Jasbir K. Puar analyses how the “war on terror” and rising Islamophobia in the West, particularly the United States, have coopted feminist and queer struggles. While colonial orientalist fantasies projected sexual license onto the Middle East, 21st-century orientalist fantasies are “Islamophobic constructions” othering Muslims as “homophobic and perverse,” while constructing the West as “‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal.” 144 On the one hand, Muslims are presented as “fundamentalist, patriarchal, and, often even homophobic.” 145 On the other hand, a “rhetoric of sexual modernization” turns American queer bodies into “normative patriot bodies.” 146 This involves the loss of an intersectional perspective and the “fissuring of race from sexuality.” 147 Muslims are seen as only marked by race and “presumptively sexually repressed, perverse, or both,” while Western queers are seen as only marked by sexuality and “presumptively white,” male, and “gender normative.” 148

Queer and Transgender Feminisms (Butler, Halberstam, Stryker): Performativity, Resignification, Continuous Transition, Self-Identification

Queer theory emerged in the period from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, in the midst of the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. 149 Queer theory, as an academic field, can be located at the intersection of poststructuralism (especially the work of Michel Foucault, but also Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze), Francophone feminism from Beauvoir to Irigaray, and African American feminism. Queer theorists have negotiated this genealogy variously; some are predominantly influenced by Foucault, less by feminist thought. The present account will focus on feminist queer theory, especially the work of Judith Butler, and its relation to earlier and subsequent feminist, queer, and transgender thought. As queer theory evolved, postcolonial feminists also became increasingly influential.

In brief, feminist queer theory, while indebted to “sexual difference” feminists such as Irigaray, critiques them through African American feminism. A core theoretical insight of African American feminism is that gender must not be considered on its own or as primary in relation to other social categories and hierarchies. Queer theorists adopt this insight. For queer theorists, sexual orientation is at least as important as gender. Indeed, they contend that what underpins the gender binary (the polarization of two genders) is the institution of “compulsory heterosexuality” or heteronormativity.

Transgender theory emerged in the mid to late 1990s, within the orbit of queer theory but also through its critique. The crux of this critique is that, despite queer theorists’ best intentions, the queer subject is primarily or implicitly white, Western, gender-normative, and cisgender. In attending to sexual orientation, queer theory neglected the spectrum of gender identities and translated issues of gender identification into issues of sexual orientation. Strands of queer activism—for example, figures such as Sylvia Rivera or Stormé DeLarverie in the United States—were marginalized by a politics of respectability led by affluent, white, cisgender queers. 150 This is particularly ironic, given the aspirations invested in the term “queer.”

In queer theory, the term “queer” was intended as an appropriation and resignification of a term of abuse but also as a floating signifier without a fixed meaning or definition and thus open to multiple and changing uses, in keeping with poststructuralist theory. “Queer” has been defined as beyond definition, transgressive, excessive, beyond polar opposites, and exceeding false polarization. So “queer” is both a particular social identity but also exemplary of a potential for openness, fluidity, and transformation in all identities (what poststructuralist theory calls the infinite deferral of the signified). It is important to point out that Spivak defined the “subaltern” and Irigaray the “feminine” in similar terms, also within a poststructuralist frame. A problem with such terms is that, though they are intended to be inclusive, they are exclusive in some of their effects. The chosen term is privileged as the only term that stands for marginality, potential for change, or openness to the past or future. In the process, the privileged term also loses specificity and becomes a metaphor. This is perhaps replicated in some uses of the term “trans” or “trans*,” where once again the term becomes a metaphor for the element of fluidity and openness in all identities.

Retracing one’s steps back to the beginnings of queer theory, while Beauvoir called for equality and the disappearance of gender, “sexual difference” feminists, such as Irigaray and Cixous, called for autonomous women’s struggles and a radical, utopian revisioning of the “feminine” to be performed by their écriture féminine . Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ( 1990 ), one of queer theory’s inaugural texts, questions Irigaray’s utopianism and takes as her starting point Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” 151 Forty years after The Second Sex , Butler contends that societies continue to systematically produce two “discreet and polar genders,” as a prerequisite of heteronormativity; two “[d]iscreet genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary society; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right.” 152 One is produced as a recognizably human individual in their very repetition of genderizing practices, performance of gender norms, and iteration of speech acts that bring about gender and its effect of timeless naturalness. But the performativity and iterability of gender show up the “ imitative structure of gender ” and its historical “ contingency .” 153 In spite of the pervasiveness of genderizing practices and the unavailability of a position outside gender, the very performativity and iterability of gender open up the possibility of repeating it slightly differently. Butler hopes for destabilized and constantly resignified genders: “a fluidity of identities,” “an openness to resignification,” and “proliferating gender configurations.” 154 While gender is a normalizing, disciplinary force, it is possible to engage consciously with gender norms and open them to resignification. However, the success or failure of an attempt at resignification also depends on its audience or addressees and the authority they are prepared to attribute to it.

In the context of feminist theory, Butler’s call for continuous resignification takes the form of resignifying “woman” and “feminism” itself. As part of her “radical democratic” feminist politics, she aims to “release” the term “woman” into a “future of multiple significations.” 155 In resignifying feminism, she writes against those feminists who assume that there is an “ontological specificity to women. . . . In the 1980s, the feminist ‘we’ rightly came under attack by women of color who claimed that the ‘we’ was invariably white.” 156 Not only heterogeneity but contentions among feminists ought to be valued: “the rifts among women over the content” of the term “woman” ought to be “safeguarded and prized.” 157 Furthermore, Butler distrusts the utopianism of those feminists who believe they are “beyond the play of power,” asking instead for self-reflexive recognition of feminists’ inevitable embeddedness in power relations. 158

One of the targets of Butler’s critique is Irigaray. Her nuanced reading of Irigaray in Bodies That Matter defends her from accusations of essentialism but rejects the primacy of sexual difference over other forms of difference—race, class, sexual orientation, and so on—in Irigaray’s work. For example, Butler finds that Irigaray’s alternative mythology of two labial lips touching and being touched by each other is a self-conscious textual “rhetorical strategy” intended to counter established understandings of women’s genitals as a lack, a wound, and so on. 159 Rather than describing an essential sexual difference, Irigaray’s reparative, positive figuration of the two lips is a deliberately improper and catachrestic form of mimicry akin to Butler’s resignification; it is “not itself a natural relation, but a symbolic articulation.” 160 Irigaray distinguishes between the false feminine within gender binaries and a true feminine “excluded in and by such a binary opposition” and appearing “only in catachresis .” 161 The true feminine is an “ excessive feminine” in that it “exceeds its figuration”; its essence is to have no essence, to undermine binary oppositions and their essences, and to exceed conceptuality. 162 Irigaray’s textual practice is intended as the “very operation of the feminine in language.” 163 Butler seems to endorse Irigaray’s purely strategic essentialism. However, it is troubling that Irigaray’s true feminine is a name for all that escapes binary oppositions and social hierarchies.

Butler’s critique of Irigaray is that her exclusive focus on the feminine is an implicitly white, middle-class, heterosexual position attending to the marginalization of women qua women but neglecting other forms of social marginalization. Since Irigaray’s true feminine is “exactly what is excluded” from binary oppositions, it “monopolizes the sphere of exclusion,” resulting in Irigaray’s “constitutive exclusions” of other forms of difference. 164 For Irigaray “the outside is ‘always’ the feminine,” breaking its link to race, class, sexual orientation, and so on. 165 By contrast, Butler embraces intersectionality. Whereas for Irigaray sexual difference is “autonomous” and “more fundamental” than other differences, which are viewed as “ derived from” it, for Butler gender is “articulated through or as other vectors of power.” 166

Butler acknowledges her debt to African American literature and feminist thought, in a rare foray into literary criticism, her close reading of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing . She also pays tribute to feminists of color, such as Chicana feminist Norma Alarcón, who similarly theorized women of color as multiply rather than singly positioned and marginalized. In Passing and in related African American literary criticism by Barbara Christian, Hazel Carby, Deborah McDowell, and others, Butler finds valuable theoretical insights that “ racializing norms ” and gender norms are “articulated through one another.” 167 But these texts also identify the value of solidarity among black women and the many obstacles to this solidarity. Versions of “racial uplift” adhering to the white middle-class nuclear family have been obstructive; they have been “masculine uplift” whose disproportionate “cost . . . for black women” has been the “impossibility of sexual freedom” for them. 168 Larsen’s critique of “racial uplift”—and its promotion of white middle-class gender norms, marriage, nuclear family, and heteronormativity—grasps the interimplication of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. By contrast, Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s Sula uphold the precarious “promise of connection” among black women. 169

If “racial uplift” has been obstructive, Irigaray’s exclusive focus on the feminine is equally obstructive, according to Butler. Irigaray seems to assume that sexual difference is “unmarked by race” and that “whiteness is not a form of racial difference.” 170 By contrast, Larsen highlights historical articulations “of racialized gender, of gendered race, of the sexualization of racial ideals, or the racialization of gender norms.” 171 In Passing Clare passes as white, and Butler’s reading particularly traces the convergence of race and sexuality. Clare’s “risk-taking” takes the dual form of “racial crossing and sexual infidelity” that undermines middle-class norms, questioning both the “sanctity of marriage” and the “clarity of racial demarcations.” 172 Sexual and racial closeting are also interlinked: “the muteness of homosexuality converges in the story with the illegibility of Clare’s blackness.” 173 The word “queering” in Passing is “a term for betraying what ought to remain concealed,” in relation to both race and sexuality. 174

If some early commentators interpreted Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender and her call for gender resignification as a voluntarist, individualist, consumerist lifestyle choice for privileged Westerners, this article has tried to show just how constrained gender resignification is, and how inextricable from other social struggles. In Butler’s more recent work, issues of gender and sexual orientation are situated in interlocking frames of social exclusion and social precarity. Neither gender nor sexual orientation on their own can determine what counts as a human, livable, and grievable life. 175

Susan Stryker, one of the founders of transgender theory, addresses her first publication, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” ( 1994 ), to feminist and queer communities and exposes their exclusion and abjection of the “transgendered subject” as a monster. 176 Through a close reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , she expresses her affinity with Frankenstein’s monster. 177 She criticizes the medical discourse that “produced sex reassignment techniques” for its “deeply conservative attempt to stabilize gendered identity in service of the naturalized heterosexual order” and insists on the disjunction between the “naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve” and the “subjective experience” of this transformation. 178 She rejects the continuing pathologization of the transgendered subject by psychiatrists, with the effect that “the sounds that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed.” 179 Notable here is an emphasis on self-identification and lived experience, which inherits the insights of phenomenological feminists that the body is not an object but a center of perception. To honor this emphasis, Stryker enlists a mixed form that combines criticism, diary entry, poetry, and theory.

Jack Halberstam’s 1998 Female Masculinity is a complex negotiation between feminist theory, queer theory, and the emerging field of transgender theory. While in medical discourse the approved narrative for the authorization of hormones and gender confirmation surgery is that of being in the wrong body and transitioning toward the right body, Halberstam warns that the “metaphor of crossing over and indeed migrating to the right body from the wrong body merely leaves the politics of stable gender identities, and therefore stable gender hierarchies, completely intact.” 180 Indeed he endorses the very “refusal of the dialectic of home and border” in Chicana/o studies and postcolonial studies. 181 Taking a broadly intersectional position, he argues that “alternative masculinities, ultimately, will fail to change existing gender hierarchies to the extent to which they fail to be feminist, antiracist, and queer.” 182

In his 2018 “Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition” of Female Masculinity Halberstam defines “female masculinity” and “the butch” in a manner that bears a family resemblance to Irigaray’s “feminine,” Spivak’s “subaltern,” and queer theory’s “queer.” “Female masculinity” includes “multiple modes of identification and gender assignation” without “stabilizing” their “meanings.” 183 “The butch” is a “placeholder for the unassimilable, for that which remains indefinable or unspeakable within the many identifications that we make and that we claim”; “let the butch stand as all that cannot be absorbed into systems of signification, legitimation, legibility, recognition, and legality.” 184 The butch is “neither cis-gender nor simply transgender” but a “bodily catachresis . . . the rhetorical practice of misnaming something for which there would otherwise be no words.” 185 In Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability ( 2018 ) Halberstam defines trans* in similar terms. In keeping with his commitment to gender identity as “continuous transition,” the term trans* “embraces the nonspecificity of the term ‘trans’ and uses it to open the term up to a shifting set of conditions and possibilities rather than to attach it only to the life narratives of a specific group of people”; the asterisk “keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be.” 186 His 2018 “Theory in the Wild,” co-written with Tavia Nyong’o, folds a “range of concerns” in addition to gender and sexuality—“race, coloniality, ecology, anarchy”—in a language that stretches from academic to creative writing. 187

In “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” ( 2004 ), Susan Stryker launches transgender studies as an academic field “born of the union of sexuality studies and feminism” but distinct from them. The rationale for this autonomization is that “all too often queer remains a code word for ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’” while “transgender phenomena are misapprehended through a lens that privileges sexual orientation.” 188 Transgender studies is intended to disrupt the “privileged . . . narratives that favor sexual identity labels” at the expense of “gender categories.” 189 But Stryker is keen to acknowledge her own Western privilege: transgender studies is “marked by its First World point of origin” and the new field risks reproducing the “power structures of colonialism by subsuming non-Western configurations of personhood into Western constructs of sexuality and gender.” 190

In “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies” ( 2006 ), Stryker continues to argue that, within queer theory, “the entire discussion of ‘gender diversity’” was “subsumed within a discussion of sexual desire—as if the only reason to express gender was to signal the mode of one’s attractions.” 191 While the term transgender “began as a buzzword of the early 1990s,” in the 21st century it is established as the name for a “wide range of phenomena that call attention to the fact that ‘gender,’ as it is lived, embodied, experienced, performed, and encountered, is more complex and varied” than previously thought. 192 As this definition suggests, transgender studies draws on the insights of all the strands of feminist theory discussed in this article—phenomenological, poststructuralist, intersectional, and postcolonial. Stryker reminds readers that, since at least Sojourner Truth, “fighting for representation within the term ‘woman’ has been . . . a part of the feminist tradition,” and “the fight over transgender inclusion within feminism is not significantly different.” 193 As with African American and postcolonial feminisms, transgender theory calls for feminists’ examination of their “exclusionary assumptions.” 194 In turn, transgender theorists need to reckon with the “whiteness” of their academic field and the “First World origin” of the term transgender, as it is being exported globally across “racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic communities.” 195 Arundati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness explores the clash, in India, between the terms of transgender theory—emanating from the United States and disseminated by NGOs, magazines, and other publications—and the terminology, self-understanding, and practices of hijras . 196

Stryker is particularly critical of the modern Western correlation of biological or bodily sex (particularly genital status) and gender identity, where gender is taken to be merely the “representation of an objectively knowable material sex.” 197 Stryker is adamant that “Sex . . . is not the foundation of gender.” 198 Nor is sex as self-evident as it appears to be, in that the different components of sex—chromosomal, anatomical, reproductive, and morphological—do not necessarily line up. (For example, one’s chromosomal status might not line up with their anatomical sex.) This supposedly “objective” correlation is based on the “assumed correlation of a particular” component of “biological sex with a particular,” normative “social gender,” with the result that transgender people (among others) are forever viewed as making “false representations of an underlying material truth.” 199 Many feminist strands have shed light on the correlation of biological sex and “gender normativity,” and Stryker promises that transgender theory will continue to analyze the “operations of systems and institutions that simultaneously produce various possibilities of viable personhood, and eliminate others.” 200 In recognizing diversity beyond “Eurocentric norms,” Stryker notes that “relationships between bodily sex, subjective gender identity, social gender roles, sexual behaviors, and kinship status” have varied greatly. 201 Of central importance to transgender theory is subjective gender identity, which Stryker understands within the tradition of feminist phenomenology.

It is important to distinguish between gender as a social category within social classifications and hierarchies and gender as one’s self-identification and sense of self. Stryker focuses on the latter and connects it to the body, as the “contingent ground of all our knowledge.” 202 The antidote to fake objectivity is the recognition of “embodiment,” “embodied experience,” and “experiential knowledge”; one’s “gendered sense of self” and “lived complexity” of gender are “inalienable.” 203 All voices are embodied and no voice should be allowed to “mask” its “particularities and specificities” under the cloak of “false universality.” 204 It is therefore imperative to either speak from “direct experience” or to represent others “in an ethical fashion.” 205 It is equally vital to include forms of knowledge previously “disqualified as nonconceptual[,] . . . naïve” and “hierarchically inferior.” 206 Once again, Stryker here joins several strands of feminist theory that have practiced formal innovation—for example, in mixing theory, literature, and life-writing—not for its own sake but in the pursuit of truth and justice.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Julie Rak and Jean Wyatt for their suggestions for revision, John Frow for his comments, and Ian Richards-Karamarkovich for his in-house editorial support.

Introduction

Gill Plain and Susan Sellers

The impact of feminism on literary criticism over the past thirty-five years has been profound and wide-ranging. It has transformed the academic study of literary texts, fundamentally altering the canon of what is taught and setting a new agenda for analysis, as well as radically influencing the parallel processes of publishing, reviewing and literary reception. A host of related disciplines have been affected by feminist literary enquiry, including linguistics, philosophy, history, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, film and media studies, cultural studies, musicology, geography, economics and law.

Why is it, then, that the term feminist continues to provoke such ambivalent responses? It is as if the very success of the feminist project has resulted in a curious case of amnesia, as women within and without the academy forget the debt they owe to a critical and political project that undid the hegemony of universal man. The result of this amnesia is a tension in contemporary criticism between the power of feminism and its increasing spectrality. Journalists and commentators write of ‘post-feminism’, as if to suggest that the need to challenge patriarchal power or to analyse the complexities of gendered subjectivities had suddenly gone away, and as if texts were no longer the products of material realities in which bodies are shaped and categorised not only by gender, but by class, race, religion and sexuality. This is not a ‘post-feminist’ history that marks the passing of an era, but rather a ‘still-feminist’ one that aims to explore exactly what feminist criticism has done and is doing from the medieval era to the present. It is a history that both records and appraises, examining the impact of ideas in their original contexts and their ongoing significance for a new generation of students and researchers. Above all, A History of Feminist Literary Criticism regards the feminist critical project as a vital dimension of literary studies, and it aims to provide an accessible introduction to this vast and vibrant field.

DEFINING FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

Feminist literary criticism properly begins in the aftermath of ‘second-wave’ feminism, the term usually given to the emergence of women’s movements in the United States and Europe during the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s. Clearly, though, a feminist literary criticism did not emerge fully formed from this moment. Rather, its eventual self-conscious expression was the culmination of centuries of women’s writing, of women writing about women writing, and of women – and men – writing about women’s minds, bodies, art and ideas. Woman, as Virginia Woolf observes in A Room of One’s Own , her formative text of feminist literary criticism, is ‘the most discussed animal in the universe’ (1929/1977: 27). 1 Whether misogynist or emancipatory, the speculation excited by the concept of woman, let alone by actual women and their desires, created a rich history upon which second-wave feminism could be built. From the beginning feminist literary criticism was keen to uncover its own origins, seeking to establish traditions of women’s writing and early ‘feminist’ thought to counter the unquestioning acceptance of ‘man’ and male genius as the norm. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism thus begins by illustrating the remarkable ‘protofeminist’ writing that would eventually form the basis of modern feminist thought.

As the title of the book indicates, in this history of feminism our principal emphasis is on literary criticism and textuality. However, as the reader progresses through the volume, it will become clear that the boundaries between literature and politics, activism and the academy, are fluid and, consequently, can be difficult to determine. Although these blurred boundaries are frequently productive, we would argue that feminist literary criticism can be distinguished from feminist political activism and social theory. Most obviously, the difference lies in the dimension of textuality. From Carolyn Dinshaw’s account of medieval symbolism, to Mary Eagleton’s consideration of patriarchal critique, to Heather Love’s analysis of queer bodies, debates around representation underpin all the chapters in this book. Across the centuries woman has been the subject of innumerable reconfigurations, and with every reinscription comes the necessity of re-reading. In the space of the text woman can be both defamed and defended, and it is here that the most persuasive possibilities can be found for imagining the future of the female subject.

USING A HISTORY OF FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

The book is divided into three parts, each of which is prefaced by an introduction explaining the rationale behind the territory covered. The chapters themselves have been produced by experts in the diverse fields of feminist literary criticism, and have been written in an accessible manner to provide orientation in the subject area for the beginner. However, because each chapter has been freshly commissioned for this project, and the contributors asked to return to the original sources, the resulting essays do more than provide an overview – they also offer new insights into the material, its history, reception and ongoing relevance, and these new readings will be of interest to scholars working in all areas of literary practice. Feminist literary criticism is a field characterised by the extensive cross-fertilisation of ideas. A number of key thinkers and their essays will appear in different contexts, and it is important to acknowledge these productive overlaps. Texts such as Adrienne Rich’s ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Hélène Cixous’ ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble did not simply influence one school of feminist thought, but rather resonated across the entire spectrum of critical activity. The index will guide readers to the multiple locations in which discussions of key thinkers, essays, articles and books can be found. We recommend reading ‘across’ the book as well as through it in order to experience the divergent, dissonant and challenging encounters that characterise the feminist enterprise.

Despite the battles and the bad press, feminist literary criticism is a source of pleasure, stimulation, confirmation, insight, self-affirmation, doubt, questioning and reappraisal: it has the potential to alter the way we see ourselves, others and the world. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism is indebted to the many wonderful studies of women, gender and writing that have enriched our understanding of the potentialities of feminist enquiry. In looking afresh at this material we are both taking stock and embracing the emergence of new critical possibilities. Feminist literary criticism is a subject with a future and it deserves the considered reflection of a substantial history. We hope this volume will contribute to that process.

1. Virginia Woolf (1929/1977), A Room of One’s Own , London: Grafton.

Pioneers and protofeminism

Introduction to part i.

The history of feminist literary criticism properly begins some forty or fifty years ago with the emergence of what is commonly termed second-wave feminism. The history of this critical movement and its impact on culture and society will be charted in the second and third parts of this volume, but it is important to recognise that this story has a prequel. To write of pioneers and protofeminism is to explore the diverse texts, voices and lives that articulated feminist ideas and feminist critical positions before such categories existed. Medieval women were not ‘feminists’ and they had few opportunities to be critics, but as Carolyn Dinshaw observes in the opening essay, ‘texts affect lived lives, and … if women had relatively little opportunity to author texts, they nonetheless felt their effects’ (Dinshaw, 15). The history of women’s engagement with texts and textuality far exceeds the parameters of second-wave feminism, and this history is integral to contemporary understandings of feminist practice.

Yet the history of the representation of women, their writing, their reading and their literary critical acts would in total need not a single volume but a library of texts, and in consequence Part I of this book sets out a combination of overview and example that indicates the complexity of feminism’s origins without attempting an exhaustive survey. The overview begins with the first two chapters, Carolyn Dinshaw’s ‘Medieval Feminist Criticism’ and Helen Wilcox’s ‘Feminist Criticism in the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century’, which together establish the conditions of pre-Enlightenment female subjectivity. These chapters illustrate that ‘woman’ was a site of intense literary and critical activity that examined the power of the feminine as symbol even as it worked to contain and constrain women in practice. For Dinshaw, the tension between literary embodiments and lived reality is at the heart of the often fraught debates that surrounded narrative practice. These debates in many cases prefigured the concerns of contemporary feminist enquiry, but ultimately Dinshaw concludes that ‘medieval critical gestures’ cannot straightforwardly be regarded as ‘protofeminism’. Nonetheless, there are important historical continuities that need to be acknowledged, and a recognition of the relationship between gender and textuality is integral to understanding the literature and culture of the medieval period, from Chaucer’s iconic Wife of Bath to Margery Kempe’s autobiographical acts of self-construction.

By the early modern period, however, it is possible to trace a significant shift in women’s relationship to textual culture. Helen Wilcox observes that it is now possible to describe women as ‘feminists’, and to define a range of ‘phenomena’ that might be termed feminist literary criticism. Indeed, she argues that a woman writer could ‘play the part of a protofeminist simply by virtue of her decision to write’ (Wilcox, 31). This was a period in which ‘continuing constraints as well as new freedoms’ provoked ‘an outburst of writing by women’ (37), and although in general women’s literacy levels remained low, they nonetheless acquired far greater visibility as both producers and consumers of texts. From pamphlets to poetry and from devotional literature to advice books, women became active participants in literary culture. Their position, however, was not uncontested, and Wilcox traces the dominant debates that circulated around women’s character, her writing, her place in society and her relationship to the legacy of Eve. Drawing on a remarkable range of often anonymous publications, Wilcox finds a dynamic political engagement taking shape in women’s licensed and unlicensed engagement with the practices of reading and writing.

Dinshaw and Wilcox together provide a crucial mapping of the often evasive and unexpected territory of women’s textual encounters, and their work gives a clear indication of the historical embeddedness of literary critical practice. The remaining chapters of Part I, however, adopt a contrasting but supplementary approach. Across the historical expanse of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many women could have stood as pioneers of ‘protofeminism’: writers and activists whose thinking, writing and ‘living’ challenged the tenets of patriarchal social organisation and questioned the prescriptive norms of gender. In Britain writers such as Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot produced unconventional texts – and in some cases lived unconventional lives – which have long since been recognised as prefiguring the concerns of later feminist enquiry. Similarly political ‘feminist’ activists from Frances Power Cobbe to Millicent Garrett Fawcett produced groundbreaking journalism, polemics and cultural criticism. Much of this work has slipped from view, but it stands as a pertinent reminder of the symbiotic relationship between feminist politics and textual practice. 1 Even the seemingly conventional Jane Austen can be seen as a contributor to a history of pre-feminist writing, producing in Northanger Abbey (1803/1818) both a witty demonstration of the value of women’s education and a powerful defence of that most ‘female’ of literary forms, the novel.

Fiction, then, was a crucial means through which women engaged with politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in America too the literary and the political were inescapably intertwined. As Elaine Showalter has observed, ‘there were few novels by English women in the nineteenth century as radical or outspoken with regard to the woman question as those by their American counterparts’ (1991: 3): from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Louisa May Alcott, from Margaret Fuller to Sojourner Truth, American women wrote, articulated and embodied a discourse that acknowledged the agency and independence of the female subject. The plenitude of pioneers around the world continues into the fin de siècle and the early twentieth century. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner and Winifred Holtby were just some of the influential writers whose textual practice was profoundly political and whose fictions constituted vital acts of cultural criticism, women who left a legacy of argument and ideas that would enrich the later practice of feminist literary criticism. Yet, from this wealth of women writers and early feminist activists, one woman stands out as exemplary. The influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on over two hundred years of feminist enquiry cannot be overstated, and Susan Manly’s chapter offers a detailed analysis of Wollstonecraft as a literary critic and advocate of reason, who eloquently anticipated the concerns of second-wave feminism. At the heart of Wollstonecraft’s work is an attack on the authority of Edmund Burke, John Milton and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘fellow authors of a fictitious femininity, and patriarchal enemies in league against female emancipation’ (Manly, 49). Manly demonstrates the critical strategies through which Wollstonecraft exposed Burke’s sentimental ‘aestheticisation of beauty’, Rousseau’s construction of an ideal, objectified woman, and the flawed misogynistic construction of Milton’s Eve. In her detailed readings of these texts, Wollstonecraft reveals herself adept at the deployment of what would later be termed feminist critique. But this is not the limit of her achievement. As Manly illustrates, Wollstonecraft also struggled to escape the confines of gendered subjectivity by exposing ‘the fictionality of both femininity and masculinity’ (50). Wollstonecraft’s argument for the constructed nature of gender was a strategic one: if writing and thinking could demonstrably be seen to transcend the body, then there would be no argument for excluding women from the public sphere. Yet her eloquent exposure of gendered textuality makes more than a transient political point: it also makes explicit the extent to which textual constructions shape subjectivities. Wollstonecraft viewed the woman writer as rational, ethical and humane, the antithesis of ‘false sensibility’ (49), an achievement which, over a century later, would see her Vindication of the Rights of Woman acclaimed by Winifred Holtby as ‘the bible of the women’s movement in Great Britain’ (1934: 41).

Manly’s chapter traces the legacy of Wollstonecraft across the nineteenth century, exploring her often unacknowledged influence on writers from Maria Edgeworth to George Eliot. But it would not be until the twentieth century that another writer would leave a legacy of feminist thought and critical enquiry to rival that of Wollstonecraft. Our second ‘pioneer’, then, is Virginia Woolf, ‘the founder of modern feminist literary criticism’ (Goldman, 66). As Jane Goldman demonstrates, Woolf’s groundbreaking essay A Room of One’s Own constitutes a ‘modern primer’ for feminist criticism, and her influence on later generations of feminist thought has been immense. Woolf matters to feminist literary criticism not simply as a writer and critic, but also as a subject of critical enquiry. The rescuing of Woolf from the apolitical prisons of Bloomsbury and madness was one of the formative projects of second-wave feminist literary criticism (see Carr, Chapter 7), giving rise to a constructive relationship between the writer, her criticism and her critics. It is Woolf we must thank for the provocative concepts of thinking back through our mothers, the woman’s sentence and the androgynous mind. It is Woolf who wrote of killing the angel in the house and demanded the adaptation of the book to the body. Goldman’s chapter illustrates how, in Woolf’s creative contradictions and her disruptive boundary-crossing imagination, we find sources for the many, often conflicting, theoretical positions of contemporary feminist thought.

Finally, Part I of this book examines the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir. Like Woolf, Beauvoir has left feminism with a rich lexicon of images and ideas, not least of which is her definitive assertion that ‘one is not born a woman’. This concept is implicit in the work and debates surrounding all our protofeminists and pioneers, but in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex this fundamental idea receives explicit articulation. As discussed in the general introduction, the recognition of the social construction of gender and the coercive nature of gendered subjectivities has been at the centre of feminist literary criticism, enabling it as a discourse to challenge humanist assumptions about identity, nature and progress, and to scrutinise the potent mythical formations of femininity and masculinity. From Kate Millett to Judith Butler, feminist critics have been inspired by Beauvoir, but, as Elizabeth Fallaize argues, the full substance of her monumental work is hardly known. Since the 1990s, a new generation of feminist literary critics have been working to revise the limited perceptions of Beauvoir’s work, and Fallaize contributes to this vital process through a study of Beauvoir’s analysis of myth. Myth, claimed Beauvoir, was instrumental in ‘persuading women of the naturalness of their fate’, and Fallaize traces her examination of feminine archetypes from Stendhal to Sade, in the process finding an ecumenical methodology that anticipates later literary-critical movements from Marxism to structuralism to psychoanalysis. The Second Sex prefaces the point at which A History of Feminist Literary Criticism more obviously begins and, as with Wollstonecraft and Woolf, the echoes of Beauvoir’s influence will resonate throughout its pages.

1. See Barbara Caine (1997), English Feminism 1780–1980 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Holtby, Winifred (1934), Women and a Changing Civilization , London: John Lane.

Showalter, Elaine (1991), Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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feminist criticism

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A modern tradition of literary commentary and polemic devoted to the defence of women's writing or of fictional female characters against the condescensions of a predominantly male literary establishment.

The beginnings of this movement are to be found in the journalism of R. West from about 1910. More influential as founding documents are the essays of V. Woolf, notably A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), and S. de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe (1949, translated as The Second Sex, 1953). In its developed form, the tradition was reborn amid the cultural ferment of the post‐1968 period, especially in the United States. The misogynist or belittling attitudes of male critics and novelists were subjected to ironic scrutiny in Mary Ellmann's Thinking About Women (1968) and to iconoclastic rage in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), the latter work berating D. H. Lawrence and Mailer in particular. Many feminist academics continued the investigation into stereotyped representations of female characters, for example in S. Cornillon (ed.), Images of Women in Fiction (1972).

Concentration upon the offences of male writers tended to give way in the later 1970s to woman‐centred literary histories seeking to trace an autonomous tradition of women's literature and to redeem neglected female authors. Influential examples of such work in America were Ellen Moers, Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). By the beginning of the 1980s, feminist criticism was becoming more self‐critical and internally differentiated: the mainstream of American feminist criticism eschewed ‘male’ literary theory and saw its purpose as the affirmation of distinctly female ‘experience’ as reflected in writing; but black‐feminist and lesbian‐feminist critics objected that their own experiences were being overlooked. Meanwhile the value of ‘experience’ as a clue to women's writing was doubted by feminists allied to Marxist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and post‐structuralism, especially but not exclusively in Britain and France. One such school, led by the French writers Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, sought to define an écriture féminine (for which ‘feminine writing’ would be a misleading translation) on the basis of a psychological ‘politics’ of language itself: if language belongs not to women but to masculine social order, the distinctive female literary strategy will be to subvert it with bodily, even orgasmic, pulsations. British feminist criticism, although drawing upon both American and French approaches, has usually been more historical and sociological.

Feminist criticism has thus become a varied field of debate rather than an agreed position. Its substantial achievements are seen in the re‐admission of temporarily forgotten women authors to the literary canon, in modern reprints and newly commissioned studies by feminist publishing houses such as Virago (1977) and the Women's Press (1978), in anthologies and academic courses.

From: feminist criticism in The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature »

Subjects: Literature

Feminist Literary Criticism

Feminism Definition

History Of Feminism
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J.D., Hofstra University
B.A., English and Print Journalism, University of Southern California

Feminist literary criticism (also known as feminist criticism) is the literary analysis that arises from the viewpoint of feminism , feminist theory , and/or feminist politics.

Critical Methodology

A feminist literary critic resists traditional assumptions while reading a text. In addition to challenging assumptions which were thought to be universal, feminist literary criticism actively supports including women's knowledge in literature and valuing women's experiences. The basic methods of feminist literary criticism include:

Identifying with female characters: By examining the way female characters are defined, critics challenge the male-centered outlook of authors. Feminist literary criticism suggests that women in literature have been historically presented as objects seen from a male perspective.
Reevaluating literature and the world in which literature is read: By revisiting the classic literature, the critic can question whether society has predominantly valued male authors and their literary works because it has valued males more than females.

Embodying or Undercutting Stereotypes

Feminist literary criticism recognizes that literature both reflects and shapes stereotypes and other cultural assumptions. Thus, feminist literary criticism examines how works of literature embody patriarchal attitudes or undercut them, sometimes both happening within the same work.

Feminist theory and various forms of feminist critique began long before the formal naming of the school of literary criticism. In so-called first-wave feminism, the "Woman's Bible," written in the late 19th century by Elizabeth Cady Stanton , is an example of a work of criticism firmly in this school, looking beyond the more obvious male-centered outlook and interpretation.

During the period of second-wave feminism, academic circles increasingly challenged the male literary canon. Feminist literary criticism has since intertwined with postmodernism and increasingly complex questions of gender and societal roles.

Tools of the Feminist Literary Critic

Feminist literary criticism may bring in tools from other critical disciplines, such as historical analysis, psychology, linguistics, sociological analysis, and economic analysis. Feminist criticism may also look at intersectionality , looking at how factors including race, sexuality, physical ability, and class are also involved.

Feminist literary criticism may use any of the following methods:

Deconstructing the way that women characters are described in novels, stories, plays, biographies, and histories, especially if the author is male
Deconstructing how one's own gender influences how one reads and interprets a text, and which characters and how the reader identifies depending on the reader's gender
Deconstructing how women autobiographers and biographers of women treat their subjects, and how biographers treat women who are secondary to the main subject
Describing relationships between the literary text and ideas about power and sexuality and gender
Critique of patriarchal or woman-marginalizing language, such as a "universal" use of the masculine pronouns "he" and "him"
Noticing and unpacking differences in how men and women write: a style, for instance, where women use more reflexive language and men use more direct language (example: "she let herself in" versus "he opened the door")
Reclaiming women writers who are little known or have been marginalized or undervalued, sometimes referred to as expanding or criticizing the canon—the usual list of "important" authors and works (Examples include raising up the contributions of early playwright Aphra Behn and showing how she was treated differently than male writers from her own time forward, and the retrieval of Zora Neale Hurston 's writing by Alice Walker .)
Reclaiming the "female voice" as a valuable contribution to literature, even if formerly marginalized or ignored
Analyzing multiple works in a genre as an overview of a feminist approach to that genre: for example, science fiction or detective fiction
Analyzing multiple works by a single author (often female)
Examining how relationships between men and women and those assuming male and female roles are depicted in the text, including power relations
Examining the text to find ways in which patriarchy is resisted or could have been resisted

Feminist literary criticism is distinguished from gynocriticism because feminist literary criticism may also analyze and deconstruct literary works of men.

Gynocriticism

Gynocriticism, or gynocritics, refers to the literary study of women as writers. It is a critical practice exploring and recording female creativity. Gynocriticism attempts to understand women’s writing as a fundamental part of female reality. Some critics now use “gynocriticism” to refer to the practice and “gynocritics” to refer to the practitioners.

American literary critic Elaine Showalter coined the term "gynocritics" in her 1979 essay “Towards a Feminist Poetics.” Unlike feminist literary criticism, which might analyze works by male authors from a feminist perspective, gynocriticism wanted to establish a literary tradition of women without incorporating male authors. Showalter felt that feminist criticism still worked within male assumptions, while gynocriticism would begin a new phase of women’s self-discovery.

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Foundational Questions of Feminist Criticism

Consider stereotypical representations of women as the beloved, mothers, virgins, whores, and/or goddesses. Does the text refer to, uphold, or resist any of these stereotypes? How?
What roles have been assigned to the men and women in the text? Are the roles stereotypical? Do gender roles conflict with personal desires?
Does the text paint a picture of gender relations? If so, how would you describe gender relations in the text? On what are they based? What sustains them? What causes conflict between men and women?
Are gender relations in the text celebrated? Denigrated? Mocked? Mystified? If so, how?

Discussion Questions and Activities: F eminist/Gender Studies

Define gender, gender roles, patriarchy, and stereotypical representations of gender in your own words.
Describe the relationship between culture and gender roles. How do culture and gender roles inform each another?
Read “ Barbie Doll ” by Marge Piercy. Choose the stanza that you think most markedly represents how gender itself is socially constructed. What words, phrases, or lines in the stanza inform your choice?
Compare and contrast how society treats and advises the girl in the poem with what she does after her good nature wears out “like a fan belt.” Does the poem present the socially constructed nature of gender as positive?
Evaluate the role that the lines “Consummation at last, / To every woman a happy ending” play in the poem. Quote from the poem to support your interpretation.

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Feminist Perspectives on Argumentation

The noun “argument” and verb “to argue” can describe various things in ordinary language and in different academic disciplines (O’Keefe 1982; Wenzel 1980 [1992]). “Argument” may identify a logical premise-conclusion complex, a speech act, or a dialogical exchange. Arguments may play off other arguments or support each other; smaller arguments can serve as sub-arguments inside larger arguments to which they contribute. Following the practice of Anglophone philosophers, this entry uses the term “argument” only to indicate a premise-conclusion complex that may involve sub-arguments. “Argumentation” also includes the larger context belonging to the activity of “arguing”, understood as the offering of reasons.

Feminist philosophical work on argumentation takes a number of different directions. Some feminists note a general association of arguing with aggression, competition, and masculinity, and they question the necessity of these connections. Also, because many view arguing as a central method of philosophical reasoning, if arguing involves gendered assumptions and standards then that would pose special problems for the discipline. In particular, the goal of winning might get in the way of the other purposes for arguing. So, some feminists ask: Can allegedly “feminine” modes of arguing provide an alternative or supplement to allegedly “masculine” modes? Can overarching epistemological standards account for the benefits of different approaches to arguing? These are some of the prospects for argumentation inside and outside of philosophy that feminists consider.

Some feminists charge, moreover, that the academic study of argumentation—by philosophers and other scholars—has failed to account for the type of reasoning required to provide social justice. Ordinary politeness or even a more robust conception of civility can be inadequate to counteract the influence on argumentation of inequalities based on social identity. What resources can informal logic and interdisciplinary argumentation studies provide to help arguing practices avoid the reinforcement of social injustices? Are informal logic and the study of rhetoric any more helpful than deductive logic? Feminist scholars suggest certain strategies for reasoning and for argument pedagogy, especially looking at ways to address the personal nature that arguing often has.

Other feminists find problems with argumentation standards fairly specific to the discipline of philosophy. It emerges that philosophers often invoke claims about arguments and arguing contrary to accepted argumentation scholarship. Feminists especially note this problem in the way that philosophers employ fallacy labels and how they teach argument in critical thinking courses. Even though argumentation scholarship stands in need of further feminist development, it provides some resources to help philosophy better address social justice concerns.

1.1 Metaphors and norms of masculine aggression

1.2 the adversary paradigm and the discipline of philosophy, 2.1 gendered reasoning, 2.2 caring and coalescent argumentation, 2.3 knowledge and criticism, 2.4 politeness and civility, 3.1 formal logic, 3.2 rhetorical approaches and power differences, 4. credibility and argumentative injustice, 5. the fallacies approach to argument evaluation, 6. critical thinking and argument pedagogy, 7. feminism, the discipline of philosophy, and argumentation scholarship, other internet resources, related entries, 1. arguing to win.

Theories about arguing generally assume that arguers disagree, and sometimes arguing operates as a type of battle among ideas that may be preferred over physical combat among people. Adversarial orientation among people arguing may, however, marginalize women’s patterns of communication and discount social norms of “femininity” (that regularly attach to women and girls but vary across time and culture). The connection between “masculinity” (understood also as a social norm, ideal, or role) and adversarial processes for reasoning may be heightened and even become stylized as a disciplinary method in contemporary Euro-American philosophy (Moulton 1983; Burrow 2010; Rooney 2010; Alcoff 2013). [ 1 ] When reasoners treat arguing as a contest, each aiming to win by defeating the other’s claim, it can become “eristic”, which is to say that the goal of winning takes over from other purposes that arguing serves. In the same way as adversarial reasoning and eristics, other discursive norms can complicate the ways that women may be marginalized and marginalize other groups of people, including men. Little attention has been given in Euro-American philosophy to the gendered dimensions of arguing in other cultures. However, feminists regularly suggest that where adversarial arguing dominates, non-dominant styles of reasoning can provide productive alternatives or complements to it, and this often involves styles gendered as “feminine”.

Some feminist philosophers suggest that an aggressive culture associated with masculinity poorly serves processes of reasoning and hinders the discipline of philosophy insofar as it sidelines, downgrades, and even excludes people’s non-adversarial engagement with each other and with each other’s reasoning. Evidence for this problem emerges in various places, beginning with the prevalence of military and aggressive language to describe philosophical discourse and rational arguing more generally (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Ayim 1988; Cohen 1995).

Janice Moulton (1983) argues that a particular style she calls “the Adversary Method” dominates the discipline of philosophy, and this goes beyond a set of attitudes or styles of interaction to include prioritizing a particular discursive logic. Further evidence for Moulton’s characterization of disciplinary practices in philosophy comes from Phyllis Rooney (2012) and Catherine Hundleby (2010).

The metaphor of argument-as-war provides a central example for George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s landmark book, Metaphors We Live By (1980). War can operate as “structural metaphor” for arguing:

Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument—attack, defense, counterattack, etc.—reflects this. (1980: 4)

Without that structure, Lakoff and Johnson suggest that we could not even recognize a piece of discourse as an argument.

Moulton (1983) observes that prioritizing aggression in the practice of arguing and the association of aggression with certain forms of masculinity is problematic. If people assume that success requires aggression, then discussants must appear aggressive in order to appear competent at arguing. Not only may the assumption be false, but it may entail a distinct disadvantage for women. Cultures that treat aggression as a natural quality in men encourage and advantage men in eristic modes of engagement. When success demands aggression, contributions to an exchange of reasons made in other styles—including those that read as feminine—will not measure up; and they may not even be noticed. At the same time, a woman can seem to be aggressive merely by asserting her own viewpoint or by showing competence in some other fashion. She may tend to stand out in many contexts as behaving inappropriately, even as her actions become acknowledged, because of her feminine social identity (Moulton 1983: 150; Rancer & Stewart 1985; Hample et al. 2005; Kukla 2014; Olberding 2014).

Moulton calls attention to ways in which philosophical approaches to arguing and reasoning in Euro-American culture take on a pronounced adversarial dynamic that reflects aggressive expectations. Her concern about the discipline and about models for argumentation is shared by many feminist philosophers (Ayim 1988; Burrow 2010; Gilbert 1994, 1997; Hundleby 2010, 2013b, Rooney 2003, 2010) and some who are not specifically feminist (Cohen 1995). Maryann Ayim observes that a culture of hostility can be viewed in the militaristic, violent, subjugating, and controlling language used to describe philosophical arguing, especially the metaphor of argument-as-war:

Philosophers tend to value their “sharper” students, whom they may openly praise for their “penetrating” insights. Occasionally they find students of “piercing” intelligence, one or two perhaps with minds like “steel traps”. Philosophers regard such students as important: They require “tough-minded” opponents with whom they can “parry” in the classroom, so they can exhibit to the others what the “thrust” of philosophical argumentation is all about. This “battle of wits” is somewhat risky, however, and a “combatant” must take care always to “have the upper hand”, to “win thumbs down”, to “avoid being hoist by your own petard”. If you find yourself pressed for time at the end of a lecture, with your “back to the wall”, or as it is occasionally even more colorfully expressed, “between a rock and a hard place”, you may have to resort to “strong arm tactics”, to “barbed” comments, to “go for the jugular”, to “cut an opponent’s argument to pieces”, or to “bring out the big guns or heavy artillery”. If caught in the throes of a real dilemma, you many even have to “take the bull by the horns” or rebut the dilemma by advancing a “counter” dilemma. (Ayim 1988: 188)

Martial metaphors and competitive evaluation foster the eristic goal of defeating others and their views (Cohen 1995), even perhaps, Ayim suggests, for instructors in regard to their students. While this attitude may seem obviously inappropriate for instructors to take with students over whom they have authority, the available range of such language suggests a general disciplinary culture that enforces aggression through conflating it with success (Moulton 1983).

Admittedly, aggressive interaction may be comfortable for many women and uncomfortable for some men, and it may be inflected with class and race biases with similarly variable effect. Yet these may be merely exceptions to the “masculine” homosocial culture of hostility that many feminists maintain prevails in philosophical arguing. Rooney argues that culture reinforces male status in the discipline and resonates with narratives of opposition against not just ideas but also against people who present them, especially women (Rooney 2010: 229). Common ideals of masculinity and rationality coincide with the association of aggression with success, power, effectiveness, and vitality; they contrast with emotion, unreason, body, sexuality, instinct, nature, and rhetoric, [ 2 ] all notions that Euro-American cultures regularly associate with femininity.

In the history of Euro-American philosophy, Rooney (2010) observes, masculine reason regularly appears in battle against feminine elements of unreason, a battle that occurs both within the knower and among aspects of thought. “Embattled reason” constantly struggles to subordinate feminine elements of unreason, and the suppression of perceived negative qualities that are gendered as “feminine” provides a central means for achieving the ideals of reason and rationality central to the discipline. That the discipline functions this way can discourage women’s participation. So, Rooney argues

that a full feminist accounting of the general cultural problem with gender, adversariality, and authority must include consideration of philosophy’s history and its lingering effects. (2010: 209, 217–219)

Otherwise the discipline may continue to perpetuate sexist standards of reason from the larger culture and its history.

Daniel Cohen (1995) suggests that antagonistic attitudes may not actually enhance competition and the knowledge it is supposed to serve, and that imposing the goal of agreement can silence rational discourse and undermine the goal of philosophy to further inquiry. The value of information that challenges our own beliefs can always be hard to recognize, a difficulty described as “confirmation bias”, and this problem can be exacerbated when the focus of arguing is winning rather than learning or ascertaining truth (Makau & Marty 2013: 39–40, 167; Linker 2015).

Norms of masculine aggression may help a particular reasoning method to dominate the discipline of philosophy, Janice Moulton argues in an early article (1983). She describes the process of competitive reasoning through deductive refutation—typically by counter-example—as the “Adversary Method”. [ 3 ] According to Moulton, the Method employs opposing views on a topic as tests for each other—the more severe the opposition, the better, and surviving the confrontation grants “objectivity” to a view. Winning at arguing in this fashion depends on defeating competing positions based on faults identified in them. Defeat of the opposite position becomes more decisive when the claims are very specific, as specificity aids deductive refutation.

Philosophy, at least in Moulton’s (1983) context of late twentieth century Anglo-American or “analytic” philosophy, may be so permeated by the combination of adversarial arguing and deductive logic that the Adversary Method operates as a disciplinary “paradigm”. Moulton argues that this “paradigm” for philosophy demands aggressive opposition to other people’s opinions, in the same way that Thomas Kuhn observed that mature scientific disciplines demand adherence to an overarching theory, an ideal, and a practice that together constitute a cultural paradigm. Philosophers’ technique of aiming to falsify each other’s claims reflects Karl Popper’s epistemology but adversarial reasoning in philosophy has taken many different forms and traces back at least to Aristotle. Descartes and Kant shifted the normative focus of the study of logic from dialogue to individual cognition, and the logic of opposition became internalized (Dutilh Novaes 2011, 2015). Yet, arguing as a dialogical form of reasoning retains the oppositional dynamic.

Moulton criticizes how the operation of the Adversary Method as a paradigm can hobble the progress of philosophical reasoning by narrowing the possibilities for discussion. Isolating claims maximizes their vulnerability and prepares them for Adversarial testing, forcing proponents to rely on ad hoc revisions, and prohibiting the systematic reconsiderations that encourage theories to evolve. For instance, ad hoc concessions “for the sake of argument” create common ground for discussion only by restricting the basis for disagreement; and so, Moulton maintains, they slow the development of philosophical thought (1983: 154–155).

Moulton (1983) argues that the narrow discourse of the Adversary Method seriously limits the relevance of philosophy to feminist concerns. She takes the example of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s classic philosophical defense of the moral permissibility of abortion that concedes a great deal (that the fetus is a full-fledged person with a right to life) to show that the right to life does not supersede the right to bodily autonomy. Moulton’s concern is that even though Thomson’s position supports feminist theoretical views, it employs reasoning so remote from the circumstances of pregnancy that it provides no guidance for people seeking to make decisions about actual abortions. Taking the purpose of arguing to be the defeat of a view limits the practical relevance of the argumentative exchange.

Moulton makes a further related point that forcing narrow theories to compete can make philosophy look quite absurd. Moral arguments are directed at egoists and epistemology is offered to skeptics. Debates over the existence of the external world and the existence of God occupy philosophers at the expense of attention to the character of the world we live in or the role of God in our religions. Philosophers rarely question the assumption that there must be a supreme moral principle, Moulton explains, because otherwise there would be little sense to making different theories compete for recognized supremacy (1983: 157–158). Losing sight of other reasons for arguing may have even resulted in the misinterpretation of key figures in the history of philosophy. Moulton suggests that interpreters often miss various purposes for which Socrates argued because they assume that his only goal was refutation (1983: 155–157). The assumption that the Adversary Method drives philosophical progress may distort philosophers’ understanding of the value of their own discipline.

The Adversary Method’s prevalence and constitution of a Kuhnian paradigm may be recognized in Rooney’s observation that philosophers tend to engage each other from a “default skeptical stance”. The skeptical stance challenges the quality of the components of another’s arguments, including the basis for premises, the support premises provide for the conclusion, and the possibility of counterexamples. The skeptical stance operates as a default without consideration of the appropriateness of the challenges for the topic under discussion. Rooney notes in particular,

skeptical argumentative responses that take necessary truths and valid arguments as the ideal poorly serve the variety of arguments and forms of argumentation that important philosophical works have presented and will continue to present. (2012: 321)

Inappropriate standards undermine the general epistemic aims of truth and understanding. They create specific problems for discussion of social justice issues which depends extensively on testimony and therefore on deft employment of the epistemology of testimony and sensitivity to the danger of testimonial injustice (see Section 4 on Credibility and argument interpretation ). The unsuitability of the Adversary Method for discussions of social justice will stall social justice projects, Rooney concludes, including those within the discipline of philosophy.

Hundleby presents as evidence for the paradigmatic operation of the Adversary Method an analysis of critical thinking textbooks in philosophy. Twenty-four textbooks of the thirty examined—four-fifths—revealed in their presentation of fallacies the norms of the Adversary Method: narrow discourse and decisive refutation. Most of these textbooks exhibiting the Adversary Paradigm have authors with no research expertise in argumentation more specific than doctoral training in philosophy, whereas the much smaller number of textbooks (six out of thirty) authored by scholars of argumentation do not show the same signs of the Adversary Method. Given this evidence that argumentation scholarship differently orients argument pedagogy, the prevalence of the Adversary Method in so many other textbooks seems to derive simply from the disciplinary culture of philosophy (Hundleby 2010).

Some empirical educational studies suggest, too, that while students learn a great deal from learning eristic practices of argument, it undermines their progress as learners by emphasizing winning over gaining understanding (Makau & Marty 2013: 13). People—including feminists—Moulton (1983) suggests, might expect more relevant advice from the discipline of philosophy. More practical philosophies addressing mundane problems also may be found outside Euro-American cultures (Olberding 2015).

2. Other Goals for and Styles of Arguing

Feminist philosophical models of arguing aim either to replace or to complement arguing practices and norms defined in terms of a contest between people or reasons. In addition to the goal of defeating an interlocutor or their reasons, arguments can serve many purposes. Explanation and explanatory argument (sometimes considered to be the same thing) already receive attention from argumentation theorists and philosophers of science. Other functions of arguing, such as educating the uninitiated or the undecided and discussing matters with like-minded people, remain neglected by theorists (Goodwin & Innocenti 2019). None of the alternatives need to take over as a new “paradigm”, but exploring various purposes, methods, and styles of arguing may help to scrutinize accepted procedures and purposes (Moulton 1983). Such questioning of methods deters their dogmatic acceptance.

According to Cohen, more important for the role of arguing in philosophy and education than to praise or condemn any particular norms of arguing may be the exploration of multiple approaches. Philosophers and arguers more generally might find means for innovation and constructive questioning in many new models and metaphors. Cohen finds that traffic metaphors seem to work especially well:

We can say that arguments are (i) conversational traffic jams—(ii) gridlock with a lot of honking and little movement; (iii) conversational traffic accidents; (iv) wrong turns, or (v) detours, or (vi) dead ends or (vii) roundabouts on the streets of discourse; or should we have said that they are (viii) short cuts to the truth at the end of the road; maybe (ix) they are long and winding roads to nowhere; or, instead, we can conceive of arguments as (x) intellectual one way roads to their conclusions although maybe they are really (xi) one-lane roads but with two-way traffic. More positively, they can be thought of as a case of (xii) a merging traffic of ideas or even better as (xiii) conceptual roads under construction. (Cohen 1995: 184)

The availability of so many traffic metaphors suggests something appropriate about this analogy. Another option identified by Keith Lloyd (2014) lies in perceptual metaphors, especially regarding what arguers can see. However, visual metaphors have a fraught history in feminist philosophy because ideal vision tends to be associated with abstraction, and to lean on a hierarchy of the senses (Keller & Grontkowski 1983). In any case it is likely that no metaphor or analogy can capture all the shapes that arguments take and the purposes they serve (Cohen 1995: 187).

Metaphors, models, and methods that tend to be “gendered” as feminine may carry connotations of subordination—and so they may seem inferior, yet they may be also especially useful for women and hence powerful for feminists. These approaches can provide a potent basis for generating alternatives to eristic standards and an understanding of the processes that may go alongside or support arguing as a contest. Metaphors and models based on collaboration fit with the work of physical and emotional care that regularly constitutes women’s roles and responsibilities. Yet collaboration also proves quite apt for many other contexts and functions of arguing such as explanation and deliberation. Rooney suggests that because people converse with rather than against each other, and because arguing is a species of conversation, we should speak of arguing with rather than against people and their views (2010: 221). This possibility suggests that the argument-as-war metaphor may not be so overwhelming as to make alternatives unimaginable in the way Lakoff and Johnson suggest (1980: 4). Alternative structures for argument can be found in our ordinary language.

Patterns that might seem to distinguish how women argue may not express deep cognitive differences between the genders. A range of communicative styles including gendered norms of polite discourse that have people constrain their public reasoning may equally serve cognitive functions common to men and women. Gendered roles may even complement each other’s epistemological operation. The most aggressive and disruptive behavior will not endure norms of politeness. However, some feminists consider that politeness can require conformity to structures of social authority that marginalize women, people of color, and others belonging to subordinated social categories.

The gendered associations of different styles of reasoning suggest that a source for alternative models of arguing might be found in what have been seen as “feminine” styles of reasoning. Whether or not women reason differently from men depends on what we count as reasoning (Verbiest 1995), and the evidence from psychology and sociology reveals no significantly gendered differences in the mental processes of inference and cognition (Fine 2010). Yet women’s communication practices often reflect distinct “values of intimacy, connection, inclusion, and problem sharing” (Burrow 2010: 247).

Ayim argues that in order to avoid reinforcing patterns of subordination, we must detect and examine how values and presuppositions play into the ways that we interpret argumentation (1988: 185). Rooney adds that cooperative and collaborative inclinations may involve a tendency to defer, a reluctance to take responsibility for a position, or a lack of confidence in one’s ideas (2010: 213–214). The need to appease those with greater power may explain why an open-ended and tentative quality sometimes distinguishes women’s style of arguing and practices of communication associated with femininity. Sylvia Burrow suggests that women may give others’ interests priority over their own in order to secure cooperation and connection (2010). This may characterize subordinate roles more generally, sometimes extending to marginalized races and ethnicities.

While styles of “femininity” and “masculinity” are neither wholly good nor bad, they both have inherent dangers. A danger for masculinity arises from its association with activity and aggression as apparently natural features of maleness. As a result, these masculine ideals constrain women’s communication, as has often been noted by feminist theorists, while feminine modes tend to be dismissed. Because masculine characteristics also operate as ideals of humanity or personhood (Hundleby 2016), men can over-identify with them and have no motivation to reflect on or problematize their gender identity (Bruner 1996).

The strategy of transgressing gender by adopting an aggressive masculine mode for arguing can seem useful to women and the temptation may be strongest in “masculine” discourses such as philosophical discussion, or wherever listeners treat an authoritative manner as valuable. Yet, when women adopt masculine discursive styles and adversarial techniques, they can garner criticism for being selfish, cold, and mean, which is criticism that men would not receive (Burrow 2010). Furthermore, such character challenges weaken women’s authority and their ability to participate in argumentation (Burrow 2010; Hundleby 2013a). Even when those challenges are not interpreted as a character fault, the effect may be to present women as merely requesting permission to participate, whereas men are not taken to need permission (Kukla 2014; Olberding 2014). When women decline to offer explanations, they are considered incompetent, whereas the same behavior reads as strength in men. Women’s attempts to defend their authority can easily backfire because the very nature of authority depends on not always having to defend what one says (Hanrahan & Antony 2005).

The consideration that women may have a “different voice” in moral reasoning (Gilligan 1982) gave rise to care ethics as a feminist alternative to traditional accounts of morality. Ayim (1988) suggests that metaphors of nurturing could also replace violent ones describing arguing, especially because arguing can help to foster community (Makau & Marty 2013). Approaches to reasoning that presume interest in the flourishing of other people and that consider the needs of others may be common among girls and women in cultures that press them into practices of motherhood and related caring labor, such as teaching, nursing, and food service.

Attention to the unique audience and the speakers involved in a particular discussion forces consideration of its detailed situation. In one sense, this attention exhibits a bias toward certain sorts of evidence. That bias does not pretend to value-neutrality. Yet, Karen Warren argues that attention to detail provides a feminist sense of “open-mindedness” that enriches feminist reasoning with data in a way that entails a type of impartiality (1988: 38). Reasoners operate from specific locations that cannot be adequately addressed by an epistemology of generic or uniform knowers, as feminist epistemologist Lorraine Code argues (1991). And feminist communications scholars Josina M. Makau and Debian L. Marty note that “taking other people’s perspectives seriously is a basic requirement in peaceful coexistence” (2001: 11; 2013: 51).

Accounting for reasoners’ social situations in the way that Warren and Code advise provides part of the goal for Maureen Linker’s model of “intellectual empathy” (2015). This involves working to understand the history of social inequality and how it affects the reasoning and arguing of ourselves and others. Linker argues that

reason and understanding must be supplemented with emotion and experience so that we can know in the fullest possible sense. (2015: 13)

Attention to specific personal experiences that historically have been ignored provides a feminist standpoint with particular empirical and scientific value, and marks a place where the two general feminist epistemologies of science, feminist standpoint theory and feminist empiricism, coincide (Intemann 2010).

The same feminist epistemological concerns motivate Michael Gilbert’s model of “coalescent argumentation”, which treats arguing as communication that involves much more than a generic expression of a premise-conclusion complex. In coalescent argumentation, the views of speakers stand in opposition to each other without the people speaking being opposed to each other. Arguers’ orientation to other people requires that they account for their interconnection with those in conversation and how their decisions affect others. In this collaborative model, the defeat neither of ideas nor of an opponent provides the goal; instead the goal is to find mutual ground among people, which requires a broad view of relevant considerations (1994; 1997). The processes of coalescent argumentation demand more information than required simply to find fault with others’ arguments. The premise-conclusion complexes that logicians recognize as arguments become understood in coalescent arguing as standing in for “a position-cluster of attitudes, beliefs, feelings and intuitions” belonging to the arguer (Gilbert 1994: 96, original emphasis). Arguers’ motivations offer a basis for interpretation that provides greater room for recognizing middle ground among people who seem to disagree. Exploring this common territory also suggests ways in which alternative solutions may be developed. By emphasizing how divergent positions involve agreement among the proponents’ views and desires, points of disagreement can be distinguished from points of agreement and minimized. On Gilbert’s model, “one asks not, ‘What can I disagree with?’ but, ‘What must I disagree with?’” (1994: 109).

In light of the general feminist interest in collaborative and coalescent models of argumentation, Tempest M. Henning (2018) warns they may reflect certain cultural assumptions, and presumptions of universal culture. The norms recommended by what she identifies as “non-adversarial feminist argumentation models”, and attributes especially to Ayim, may run contrary to the cultures and needs of U.S. Black women. More generally, argumentation theory tends to prescribe a pleasantness of tone and directness of speech that connotes respect in some cultures but not others (Henning 2021; see Section 2.4 on Politeness and civility ). Some feminist philosophers also value adversarial arguing or even identify personally as adversarial arguers. So, the resistance to forms of adversarial arguing that appears to provide a valuable commonality between some feminist concerns and accepted views in argumentation theory may reflect only the interests of certain white women. It may actually work against the interests of other groups of women and risk reinforcing racial marginalization.

Even feminists with concerns about adversarial reasoning recognize that it promotes criticism that may advance the goal of attaining knowledge and understanding. Knowledge is an important purpose among those that arguing serves and different styles of arguing can serve different purposes. Some efforts to build knowledge may benefit from the adversarial styles and models, especially if arguers can avoid automatically slipping into hostile, “ancillary” modes of aggression (Govier 1999). Arguers may also need to avoid reinforcing other epistemic cultures and subcultures that prioritize men’s interaction with each other (Rooney 2012). So feminists need norms for arguing that support criticism of such androcentric cultures and practices and the development of knowledge about how such systems function.

Non-adversarial models of reasoning such as coalescent argumentation may aid people’s understanding too, especially about others and their positions. Mutual understanding develops from coalescent arguing because it demands finding common ground. The remaining opposition among people and their beliefs constitutes a minimally adversarial orientation that Trudy Govier (1999) and Rooney (2010) argue may be valuable for both the development of arguments and the role of arguing in the processes that generate knowledge. Arguers can aid each other in achieving knowledge, which is the main goal in academic arguing, despite the fact that academics sometimes can be side-tracked by mundane power play.

Because of overarching epistemic purposes, Cohen suggests that the people whose ideas lose in eristic debate thus may benefit the most because they learn the most (1995: 182). People may also share an inquiry (Dutilh Novaes 2015: 598–599), and epistemic benefit may accrue to communities. The discursive practices in which individual scientists work together by testing each other’s claims may exhibit certain characteristics that Helen Longino’s (1990) model of scientific reasoning sees as supporting a form of objectivity. Longino’s account of objectivity addresses feminist concerns with about gender bias in scientific theories and involves both collaborative and adversarial elements.

Such shared epistemic projects among people might be understood as “arguing with” rather than “against” other reasoners (Rooney 2003). Rooney argues that readily available logical terms such as “contradictory” and “contrary” can adequately describe differing opinions without implicating opposition among the people holding divergent views (2003; 2010: 222). Such language may help reasoners move away from both the Adversary Method’s dominance as a Paradigm and eristic arguing that may be otherwise dysfunctional. The negative connotations of “argument” and “arguing” in the English language may be part of the problem. [ 4 ] Related words in other Indo-European languages carry no such implication of verbal fighting (Hitchcock 2017: 449). Avoiding the English-language connotations is part of the reason theorists often speak instead of “argumentation” even though that terminology can be unclear or unnecessarily abstract.

Yet, criticism must be part of feminism, especially to direct it at sexism, and feminists may be no more skilled than anyone else at avoiding the pitfalls of arguing such as its tendency to aggravate conflict. Feminist models of arguing avoid levelling criticism against people and direct it toward the views they hold so as to better serve everyone’s understanding. Feminist models of arguing and some ways of arguing used by feminists and non-feminists alike exhibit a benevolent attentiveness to other arguers in the processes of arguing and yet they may also subject what other people say to extensive criticism and opposition.

According to Govier, the characteristic explicitness of reasoning when people argue enables them to learn from disagreement and doubt (1999). Explicitness also promotes honesty with ourselves and each other and respect for interpersonal differences:

an arguer, in actually or potentially addressing those who differ, is committed to the recognition that people may think differently and that what they think and why they think it matters. (1999: 8, 50)

Feminist criticism often involves anger, an emotion also regularly associated with arguing. Anger can be a distracting or even destructive influence on reasoning and it can signify harmful arrogance (Tanesini 2018). Moira Howes and Catherine Hundleby make a case that arguing can help derive cognitive benefit from anger because arguing encourages reasoners to express and to articulate their reasons (2018). It can reveal aspects of reasoning that otherwise would remain unconscious, a feature of arguing processes that Douglas Walton identifies as the “maieutic effect” (1992).

Styles for communicating and sharing reasons often distinguished as “feminine” also play roles in feminist epistemologies of argumentation: Gilbert assigns a fundamental role in coalescent argumentation to the values of attention to the speaker and seeking agreement, while Linker characterizes empathetic intellectuals as having the skills of cooperation and accepting vulnerability. Feminist ethical goals of accountability to women thus can benefit from the pursuit of knowledge. Not only for feminists but for all reasoners, the ethical value of understanding other people can enhance the standard philosophical treatment of arguments as logical premise-conclusion complexes. Coalescent and intellectually empathic reasoning complement critical analysis once we distinguish criticism from the eristic culture of aggressive fault-finding (Miller 1995).

As a remedy for some of the problems that women and other arguers face, some feminists champion politeness, while others stress that expecting etiquette to address abuses of power belies the realities of women and others who are socially marginalized. Norms of politeness function to minimize conflict and so can hold people in subordinate positions (Mayo 2001). Like “ideal theory” in philosophy (Mills 2005), politeness can exacerbate the oppression it ignores—in this case, discursive marginalization.

Govier argues that the discursive norm of politeness limits the problem of overt interpersonal aggression in arguing (1999). Respect for other people and careful consideration of their views ought to be part of persuasion , including rational persuasion, which scholars often take to be the central or even the sole purpose for arguing (1999: 58–59). On this view, aggressive styles of communication or “ancillary adversariality” can be dismissed as simple rudeness or hostility. These ought not to be tolerated in any context and may not impact much on the beliefs and attitudes of the audience (Govier 1999; Miller 1995).

The main difficulty with this ideal arises because norms of politeness tend to be gendered in ways that undermine women’s authority when people argue, affirming power and status for men but not for women. This dynamic can receive reinforcement when women adopt cooperative strategies that play into norms of “femininity”, according to Burrow (2010) and Hundleby (2013a). Securing cooperation and connection with other people provides the very purpose for politeness. Both “masculine” and “feminine” forms of politeness can reflect this purpose. However, the gendered dynamics of politeness in many cultures may entail that cooperative or collaborative argumentation serves women poorly. It contributes to their subordination and perhaps also the subordination of other people with marginalized social identities. For women, cooperating and connecting with others may entail deferring one’s interests and promoting dialogue through hedging, questioning intonation, and use of tag questions, for example, “You know?” “Right?” “Don’t you think?” These strategies generally imply powerlessness or conflict avoidance. In contrast, masculine norms of polite connection facilitate shared competition and encourage joint autonomy along with regard for each other’s needs (Burrow 2010).

Burrow argues that women often have no easy options for conforming with the etiquette demands that reinforce power differences among speakers. Deferential styles of dialogue are part of most subordinate positions and, for women, other aspects of social rank do not mitigate this much. Therefore, to negotiate politeness and to argue effectively, women need complex strategies tailored to their circumstances (2010).

Henning (2021) observes that what many feminist and not-specifically-feminist argumentation theorists count as rudeness may actually belong to politeness strategies in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). In particular, “signifying” or “signification” within AAVE “utilizes exaggeration, irony, and indirection to partake in coded messages, riddled with insults”. To refuse to participate in signification is rude and politeness demands participation in speech that on the surface suggests disrespect. In some cultures, arguing not only performs pro-social functions, it provides such an important form of sociability that superficial or even insincere arguing may be an essential part of interaction and social bonding (Schiffrin 1984).

Because of the range of conflicting politeness strategies across different communities, it may serve better to seek an alternative to politeness as a norm and that may lie in an inclusive practice and ethic of civility in dialogue. Civility tends to be understood as deeper than politeness, sometimes considered itself to be a virtue or as involving such virtues as respect for other people (Calhoun 2000: 253; Bone et al. 2008; Laverty 2009; Reiheld 2013). Respecting others requires trying to understand them “as they wish to be known and understood” in the cooperative argumentation model developed by Makau and Marty (2013: 69). Others suggest that civil respect be parsed in ethical frameworks, such as deontology or consequentialism, because simple deference to existing social standards may be oppressive in assigning more restrictive practices to certain groups of people. Practices of respect may involve people’s adherence to oppressive social roles, just as they do for politeness, if common practice determines them. Ethically rich interpretations of civility must be shared among interlocutors in order that civility can fulfill its function to regulate disagreement. Such shared norms of civility not only aid the articulation of understandings that prejudiced and oppressive behavior are intolerable, they also aid people’s ability to challenge broader social problems (Calhoun 2000).

Civility may be distinguished from other virtues as “an essentially communicative form of moral conduct”, a display and expression of how one regards others (Calhoun 2000: 260). However, this virtue has limits and incivility can also perform important argumentative functions. Uncivil communication can create space for new forms of meaning and value:

The disruption entailed by incivility provides room for concerted reconstruction of social practices, identities, and spaces. (Mayo 2001: 79)

Uncivil communication and arguing may even be necessary for some social change (Lozano-Reich & Cloud 2009: 223–224). Because certain practices viewed as “civil” may depoliticize disagreement, incivility that highlights these political problems can prove to be as necessary as civility is to democratic decision-making (Mayo 2001). Which moral and political demands justify incivility remains, however, a complicated question that demands analysis of the discursive norms in operation in a particular context for their ability to sustain interpersonal respect.

3. Informal Logic and Argument Interpretation

Feminist philosophical work on argumentation as it emerged in the early 1980s coincides with the rise of informal logic, an approach that encompasses much of contemporary philosophical work done in argumentation theory (Johnson 1996 [2014: 12]). Many feminists and informal logicians share both a resistance to the idealization by some philosophers of formal deductive methods for reasoning and a desire to provide better tools for addressing real world contexts of reasoning and arguing (Govier 1999: 52).

Any interpretation or analysis of an argument omits some aspects of the reasoning involved in the surrounding discourse while it attends to others, and different forms of abstraction suit different purposes (Rooney 2001). Interpretations become problematic for feminists when they leave out salient details that would make possible other interpretations that account for social bias. For instance, interpreting an argument as a deductive inference may not allow for the sorts of analysis of social situation that a standard informal logic interpretation of ad hominem makes possible.

Even informal logicians may assume an equality among arguers that is more ideal than real and that may obstruct political progress. The problems that feminists find with assumed equality may be most visible in accounts of ad hominem arguing. Both feminist (Janack & Adams 1999; Yap 2013, 2015) and not-specifically feminist (Walton 1995) argumentation theorists recognize that appeals to the person may or may not be fallacious. The difference is that while the informal logic analysis informs an audience about the irrelevance of a personal attack, a feminist analysis also maintains that the line of reasoning may still succeed because of unconscious biases such as implicit sexism and racism that feminists find unacceptable. For this reason, feminist critiques of ad hominem arguments require more than logical analysis and also consider the epistemology of testimony (Yap 2013).

Addressing women’s more general concerns about arguing and assessing feminist arguments about women’s marginalization requires a richer and more diverse analysis than a logical analysis of inferences provides. Andrea Nye (1990) suggests ways that the language of logic, including both the artificial language of abstract ideals and the surrounding discourse of logicians, might convey the interests and purposes of people who hold social power. Logical models for argument, especially formal ones, are developed, according to Nye, to prioritize some people’s interests over others and to hide that prioritization by claiming generality and the dominance of such models can lead to systematic misinterpretations of women’s arguments.

Other feminists maintain that abstract interpretation causes trouble only when reasoners mistake it for a uniform authority. The trouble with abstract analysis, Ayim suggests, lies not in the models themselves, but in how people use them (1995: 806). Logical or argumentative ideals that involve abstract models may be partial in representing some people’s preferred inference forms without these models having an intrinsically universalizing character that makes them false. Ayim believes that any such problems in the disciplines of logic result from the practitioners’ failure to be realistic and humble. She says that

It is only when logic is seen as the exclusive avenue to truth and reason that problems arise—not when it is seen as an avenue to truth and reason. (Ayim 1995: 810, emphasis added)

Gilbert suggests that the practical concerns and interdisciplinary considerations of informal logic must be expanded and become more attuned to the specific social situations from which arguments arise (2007). Neglected aspects of argumentation may include the identities of speakers (Code 1991), the power relationships between speakers (Bondy 2010; Linker 2011, 2015; Rooney 2012), the emotions involved (Nye 1990; Gilbert 1994; Linker 2015), the social consequences of argumentation (Code 1991; Rooney 2012), and intersectional identities (Henning 2018, 2021). When feminine speech and writing styles are poorly received and misinterpreted, women will encounter difficulties getting their arguments heard or to taken seriously, let alone recognized as good reasoning. The demand from feminist philosophers to situate argumentative reasoning and to evaluate it in the larger discursive contexts (Burrow 2010; Lang 2010) can be met at least in part by the recent revival of rhetorical accounts of argumentation that address the role of audience (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958 [1969]; Perelman 1977 [1982]; Tindale 1999, 2007).

Formal logic employs artificial abstract languages generally understood to address particular types of inference. Formal symbolism is also used to interpret arguments from natural language so as to assess the strength of an argument’s inference, in particular, whether the argument has deductive validity. So, the argument, “It is icy outside and therefore I will not travel today” might fail to be translatable into a deductively valid form, although people easily recognize its good reasoning. (“Missing premises” might be added to make the argument deductive but that requires more than formal interpretation.)

Nye’s work on formal logic, especially Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (1990), provides the point of departure for many of the initial feminist philosophical discussions of argument and arguing. Nye considers certain historical points when deductive logic’s operation as the default interpretive mechanism for arguments may have had an oppressive influence. Rather than arguing for this interpretation, she adopts a practice of “reading” that includes attention, listening, understanding, and responding (1990, 183), approaches that are traditionally associated with rhetoric (Keith 1993). Her feminist “reading” of episodes in the history of Euro-American logic suggests ways in which abstract logical systems may have helped to justify social dominance at different moments in time. Her “reading” purposefully aims to consider the personal and political desires behind logic that might motivate its prescription of rules for thought (Nye 1990: 9).

Nye begins her study with Parmenides’ logic of “what is”, what exists beyond sensuous existence and human communities. The ensuing silence among the ancient Greeks was broken by Plato who addressed “what is not” through using rational discussion to reveal the existence of differences. For Aristotle, this dialectic involved only men from the upper classes, making the exclusive nature of the logic most explicit. As a result, in Nye’s view, a silence regarding a lot of reasoning surrounds logic. Nye notes that

once rationality is defined as what is not emotional, and emotionality established as the characteristic of women understood as what is only a body, there could be no discussion of institutions of slavery and sexism. (1990: 50)

She traces through medieval formulations of logic ways in which the claims of logic’s universal application may have discouraged criticism of social institutions that authorized those accounts of logic. These institutions include patriarchy in general, sometimes underwritten by God, the Roman Empire, and the Catholic Church.

Logical restriction on what counts as reasoning culminates, on Nye’s reading, when Gottlob Frege moves logic out of human discourse to formulate it in a symbolic language. Frege’s functionalist notation promises to express all forms of truth with the aim, Nye suggests, “that thought will be unified and logical errors in science, mathematics, and philosophy exposed” (1990: 131). Using Frege’s approach, how a concept refers to the world becomes “an objective fact:…one cannot invent its value” (1990: 135). As a result, the institutions that render concepts meaningful, including the social institution of language, stand beyond question, creating a new form of muteness that harkens back to Parmenides. The surrounding silence breaks again when the Vienna Circle adds empirical input in place of the concepts on which the Fregean functions work. Nye indicates that this theoretical development places science above meaningful criticism, and so allows scientific reasoning to be co-opted by authoritarian regimes (1990: 163–171).

As an alternative to logic, Nye suggests building confidence for women and developing new concepts aided by a concrete (natural, not artificial) “women’s language”. Discourse that is for or about women might provide inclusion, bonding, and ways to share power. Women have relied historically on the skills needed for reading:

We have listened and read to survive, we have read to predict the maneuvers of those in power over us, to seduce those who might help us, to pacify bullies, to care for children, to nurse the sick and the wounded. (1990: 184)

The next step lies in developing the language to respond.

Nye’s experiment in avoiding argument falters in two ways observed by feminists and other scholars who have not been convinced by her socio-historical reading. Some cite errors in her historical interpretation (Keith 1993; Weiner 1994). Others find that in Words of Power, Nye does argue, but fails to persuade and so fails to provide the alternative to logic she seeks (Gilbert 1994; Ayim 1995).

Gilbert offers a related but distinct criticism of formal logic for its role in the “Critical-Logical” approach that he characterizes as extracting text from utterances for the purposes of applying a competitive or eristic process to the stylized text (1994). He suggests, like Moulton (1983), that such abstraction serves the competitive functions and standard practice of Euro-American academic philosophy. Because arguing need not adhere to the Critical-Logical model, it remains possible that feminine styles of reasoning may ground effective interpretive practices for arguers. Arguing also may find natural corollaries in other styles of communication and other values that operate within communication.

Reasoners appeal to logic and to other abstract accounts of what other arguers say partly so they might avoid bias as they interpret natural language. Yet such abstract interpretation may favor forms of argument evaluation unsuited to the context of utterance. For instance, if the Critical-Logical model of argument evaluation provides the basis for legal procedures, then it may compromise access to justice for people who are socially marginalized based on gender, race, class, and education. Gilbert echoes Nye’s concern that logical systems can reflect the lingua franca of the ruling class that captures their own interests (1994: 105). Applying it to other contexts risks distorting and disenfranchising other people and their modes of communication.

Nye concedes that a women’s language cannot stand up to the power and authority of logic but believes that perhaps reasoners may gain something different from a replacement for logic. It may be that

her notion of reading teaches that the circumstances in which something is said and the person who says it are relevant considerations. (Tindale 1999: 196)

The appeal of Nye’s “reading” may be that

currently popular theories of reading, unlike traditional logic, highlight rather than diminish the interests, personality, and motives that the reader brings to the task of reading. (Ayim 1995: 807)

Arguers can emphasize the moral goals behind an argument through their emotional language. Likewise, an explanatory purpose for an argument would mean that the speaker offers it up as a truthful description rather than as a subject for debate (Gilbert 1994). Such purposes and values can fall away with the abstraction of a premise-conclusion complex from its context of utterance. When the Critical-Logical model grounds decision-making processes, the authority it carries creates problems for anyone using other styles of reasoning and communication.

Note that Nye is the only feminist philosopher to date suggesting a substitute for arguing and logic. Ayim (1995) and Gilbert (1994) stress that different styles of communication and value-systems can be natural corollaries for each other. Govier (1993) further suggests that the power of universal logic may be indispensable, and that feminist concerns can be addressed through a better understanding of the interpretation and application of logical norms.

Rhetorical studies attend to argument audiences in a way that can help to address feminist concerns about the emotional and gendered aspects of argument (Tindale 1999: 201). They may also help to resolve a dilemma of feminist arguing practice by demonstrating how the advancement of feminist affirmative projects, such as acknowledging the significance of women’s experience, may require adversarial forms of argumentation often associated with masculinity. Communication styles identified as rhetoric create both problematic and constructive aspects of social identity, including feminine identity. Rhetorical analysis of the situational specifics can reveal how communication helps to produce social identities and can suggest ways to address particular power differences among reasoners (Bruner 1996; Palczewski 2016).

M. Lane Bruner argues that some aspects of gender stereotypes make it harder to argue, while other aspects make it easier (1996). Distinguishing the empowering from the disempowering aspects of social identity depends on examining the ways in which “masculine” identity is tied up with ideals of arguing and the ways in which identity politics can counteract the power of dominant identities. Although speakers must suppress each of their unique differences from others in order to communicate explicitly in regard to their own social positions, the resulting feminine and masculine identifications do not become fixed. Because identities are created, they must be maintained and they remain subject to transformation. That flux in identity gives feminists strategic opportunities for developing women’s argumentation and giving credit to it.

Rooney notes that an artificial severing of arguing from narrative and rhetorical practices helps to dissociate arguments from femininity and frustrates feminist practices of philosophical arguing (2010; Le Doeuff 1980 [1989]). Research that attends to rhetoric and its influences may go under the name of “rhetorical studies” (often in English or literature departments) but may also be found in communications studies, psychology, and interdisciplinary fields such as women’s and gender studies or argumentation studies. Rhetorical studies give attention to the perspective of a particular audience and that concern with the audience and the various interests audiences may have challenges the view—especially in the discipline of philosophy—that reasoning and argumentation must be a constant battle. Rooney argues that philosophical practice itself involves rhetoric and narrative through myths, thought experiments, and metaphors. These rhetorical practices make theories more attractive to specific audiences. Philosophers commonly portray reason as in battle against feminine forces which “primarily makes sense to men among men in cultural contexts where sexism or misogyny is a cultural given” (2010: 227).

Rhetorical studies of speakers, audiences, their purposes, and their social contexts were revived in twentieth century argumentation theory by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1958 [1969]). Perelman, writing on his own, advocates that instead of appealing to “the rational” as a standard for argumentation, scholars should consider a “reasonable” person in terms of the standards of a particular community (1977 [1982]).

The discipline of rhetorical studies typically takes persuasion to be the goal of arguing. Some feminists resist this assumption. Concern that persuasion may be intrinsically an act of domination of one person over another and even an act of violence (Gearhart 1979) led feminist rhetoricians to develop an alternative in “invitational rhetoric” that makes understanding the goal of arguing (Foss & Griffin 1995; Bone et al. 2008). This approach resonates with rhetoric’s Aristotelian history, Christopher Tindale observes, which does not involve intentions to change another person that some feminists consider violent, because Aristotle conceives change as an internal process. On Tindale’s model of “rhetorical argumentation”,

the audience, when persuaded, is persuaded by its own deliberations, after reflection on reasoning that it has understood in its own terms and may even have had a hand in completing. (1999: 191)

However, at the same time, invitational rhetoric demands a civility that may presume social equality (Lozano-Reich & Cloud 2009) and thus it faces the same problems as politeness (addressed in Section 2 ).

Linker suggests that reasoning across power differences can be aided by speakers employing a process of “intellectual empathy”; other people’s claims, especially if these people are relatively disadvantaged, can help reflect on one’s own interpretive assumptions in order to move past unreflective bias (2011; 2015). Relatedly, an attitude of playfulness may facilitate consideration of another’s perspective, that is, “travelling” to the person’s “world” as described by Maria Lugones (1987). Perhaps this attitude will help philosophers appreciate the viewpoints presented in feminist epistemology (Lang 2010). However, Mariana Ortega (2006) warns that the radical potential of playfulness demands a deep engagement with work by women of color. Superficial citation of women of color by white feminists only replicates oppressive gatekeeping in philosophical argumentation.

Assuming the goal of arguing to be persuasion invokes a limited context and one that poses problems for some feminists, especially regarding power differences among speakers. Nevertheless, rhetorical analysis offers many resources for feminist analysis because its attention to the audience provides valuable details about the situations in which people argue. As we will see next, recent work in philosophy concerning credibility and developing the concept of “argumentative injustice” articulates persistent concerns for feminists about arguing, as does both regular and feminist philosophical scholarship about fallacies and critical thinking education.

Credibility granted to speakers and their testimony affects processes of arguing and may adhere to social categories following lines of gender and other axes of oppression (Govier 1993). Miranda Fricker (2007) describes the case of testimonial injustice, which is a species of epistemic injustice, and identifies when a listener gives diminished credibility or epistemic authority to a speaker based on that speaker’s social identity. Patrick Bondy (2010) defines analogous “argumentative injustice” as consisting in a related harm done to the processes of arguing when people wrongly assess an arguer’s credibility. We can underestimate or overestimate an arguer’s credibility by using social stereotypes to assess it (2010). Bondy explains that both overestimation and underestimation can result from viewing testifiers through social stereotypes—typically men’s credibility becomes overestimated whereas women’s becomes underestimated. Additionally, testimony from people with social identities different from our own may be difficult to accept simply because their experiences contrast with our own and those experiences with which we identify. This second problem when considered as a fallacy goes by the name of “provincialism” (Kahane & Cavender 2001) and is sometimes attributed to the psychology of in-group bias (Brewer 1979; Rudman & Goodman 2004). Whether due to stereotypes or to in-group bias, being discounted as a participant in discussion amounts to an epistemic injustice that Christopher Hookway (2010) describes as “participant injustice”.

Bondy argues that an underestimated testifier loses at least some capacity for critical engagement with other people. This capacity might progressively deteriorate, or the person might internalize its diminished form. Underestimating a testifier undermines the rationality of arguing processes with the result that the audience tends to lose potentially valuable information and insight. On the other hand, an overestimated testifier also can fail to gain valuable information from others, derailing the argumentative exchange by preventing the success of the better line of reasoning. After the particular discussion, the overestimated person can come to be viewed as beyond scrutiny, thus losing (at least on occasion) the benefits of engaging in discursive argumentation. By contrast, Fricker’s original conception of testimonial injustice accounts for the harmful effects on knowers only when their testimony is underestimated, and she argues that epistemic injustice does not accrue from overestimating credibility.

The solution to argumentative injustice might be simply for the listener to take care to treat arguers on their own terms. This would avoid viewing people in terms of group membership, a practice that leaves reasoners vulnerable to stereotype-thinking (Govier 1993, 1999). However, sometimes people’s social identities are relevant to the credibility of what they say, when, for instance, it concerns their personal experience of discrimination. Also, social stereotypes influence our thinking unconsciously, in a way that earns the label “implicit bias”. This bias differs from in-group bias but works alongside it, sometimes reinforcing it and sometimes conflicting with it. As a result, women often hold prejudices against other women (and even themselves) just as men do, and people of color may hold unconscious biases against their own ethnicity. When such bias persists despite conscious beliefs to the contrary, psychologists describe it as “aversive bias” (Greenwald & Banaji 1995; Jost, Banaji, & Nosek 2004; Kay & Zanna 2009).

Implicit social biases work like other cognitive biases, such as those that encourage us to generalize from small samples and personal experience and can affect many of our best intentions in reasoning and argumentation. Insofar as these biases undermine our ability to manage our own confidence, they frustrate the virtue of intellectual humility that otherwise might offset adversarial inclinations and momentum when people argue (Kidd 2016; Aberdein 2016). Ian James Kidd considers ways in which arguing can foster humility, and suggests that ideally, arguing

is also a route to other intellectual and ethical goods such as truth, knowledge, and enlightenment, as the ancient philosophers maintained. (2016: 399)

The challenge remains to bridge the real and the ideal.

Bondy argues that because social bias may be inevitable in people’s perception of speakers’ credibility, we need to counteract it actively. He recommends that we adopt a general attitude of “metadistrust” in which we exercise skepticism about our credibility judgments regarding testimony from people belonging to marginalized social groups.

Alternatively, we might try “intellectual empathy” based on mutual compassion, which is the approach that Linker develops. She argues that compassion must involve consciousness of how oppression operates through specific intersecting social matrices, including social privileges that can be very difficult to recognize. Such intersectional intellectual empathy may especially help us realize that it is our own biases or limited experiences that lead us to dismiss others’ testimony by interpreting them as whining, complaining, or “playing the gender (or race, etc.) card” (Linker 2011, 2015).

Achieving epistemic justice when we argue requires some sort of accounting for the identities of arguers, and might include appeal to the “epistemic privilege” described in feminist standpoint epistemology. Some standpoint theorists maintain that epistemic privilege can accrue to people who oppose oppression. Their engagement with the lives of oppressed people and their resistance to the oppression structuring those lives provides a unique and valuable awareness of the social structures of power. Thus a “feminist standpoint” and those who achieve it may gain epistemic advantage from fighting the oppressed condition of women’s lives. Although it is not necessary to be a woman to achieve this standpoint and its advantage, women themselves may most easily achieve it (Harding 1991; Intemann 2010).

One way that arguers might try to address the effects of social position on arguing is through meta-debate—a background argument may address arguers’ biases operating in the central discussion (Kotzee 2010). However, Linker (2014) argues that regardless of what the meta-debate yields, the person with social privilege will continue to benefit from debates that are adversarial. Arguers have difficulty recognizing when their biases reflect their own social privilege at any level of debate because social identity frequently affects testimonial authority unconsciously.

Linker suggests that we treat epistemic privilege as a form of expertise about arguing. This allows feminists and other anti-oppression advocates to set the bounds for ending inquiry (2014). Such advocates operate as the authority and determine the place where explanation stops (Hanrahan & Antony 2005). Rooney argues that this kind of expertise should be accorded to women philosophers whose lived experience tends to ground their feminist philosophy. Arguers should recognize expertise in situations

where A ’s minority status relative to B (with respect to some locally salient status or power differential) makes it likely that A has insights and understandings relating to P that are less available to B . (2012: 322)

Rooney says that speaking from personal experience becomes important for arguing because of the “hermeneutical injustices” (Fricker 2007) facing women. Hermeneutical injustice, according to Fricker, means that women’s experiences may not receive adequate consideration because the language to describe them is underdeveloped. Men may therefore have trouble recognizing evidence that women provide, and they

are not in the same position as women to confidently assert whether they find it plausible or not because they do not have access to the evidence in the way women are likely to have. (Rooney 2012: 328)

Argumentation theory has a tradition of taking fallacies as an operational concept for identifying problems with arguments. The types of deficiency identified as fallacies emerge from disparate points in the history of philosophy, and, as Charles Hamblin (1970) first recognized, the fallacies approach to argument evaluation tends to lack consensus regarding what constitutes a fallacy. Further, many theorists find that “fallacy” fails as both an analytic category (Massey 1995) and a pedagogical tool (Hitchcock 1995), and yet the scholarly controversy has not put a stop to the regular use of fallacies for evaluating arguments and for teaching reasoning. Feminists share the ambivalence of other philosophers regarding fallacies, adding their own criticisms and developments, but a specific controversy emerges in regard to the adversarial nature of fallacies.

Some feminists decry the inadequacy of traditional fallacies for addressing problems women face in argument exchanges (Al Tamimi 2011) and others point out how some philosophers use fallacy labels to dismiss and silence feminist philosophers. [ 5 ] In particular, when feminist philosophers employ arguments concerning the history of philosophy, they have been charged with committing the genetic fallacy (e.g., Levin 1988). That fallacy results from taking the significance of a claim or theory to depend on its origin and history—its genesis—and thereby dismissing that view without attention to its current meaning and context. Feminist philosophers consider how the fact that mostly men developed certain theories, including many philosophical theories, may undermine the justification for applying these theories to women. In doing so, feminists also attend to how those theories currently operate.

The difficulty some philosophers have in recognizing the sophistication of feminist historical criticism regarding philosophical theories may be due, first, to feminist use of certain theories that were the target for philosophers who developed the category “genetic fallacy”. Margaret Crouch explains that the concept of the genetic fallacy was developed only in the early twentieth century by some philosophers in the analytic tradition with the explicit intention of discounting the scientific status of Marxist and Freudian accounts. Given that Marxist and Freudian accounts from the continental European tradition have influenced a good deal of feminist theory, Crouch argues that it is unsurprising that feminist analysis might seem at first glance to commit the genetic fallacy (1991; 1993).

Moreover, Crouch argues, employing the label of “genetic fallacy” against feminist criticisms of the historically masculine sources for popular views in the discipline of philosophy relies on a misunderstanding of what constitutes a fallacy at a point where reasonable consensus has emerged: not every instance of a pattern of reasoning associated with a fallacy label—here genetic appeals—constitutes that fallacy; there may be exceptions and even highly reasonable practices that employ the same pattern. So, some appeals to personal characteristics are relevant and do not commit the ad hominem fallacy and some appeals to authority are perfectly reasonable and not cases of the ad verecundiam fallacy (Walton 1995). Scholarship on the genetic fallacy likewise recognizes that the way a theory developed historically only sometimes affects the value of the reasoning now supporting it. In particular, Crouch explains that the genesis of a claim affects its justification when testimony provides its only support, or when a claim involves the speaker as a subject, and whenever the source of information has an objective connection supporting the statement’s truth or falsity (1991; 1993).

The charge that feminist epistemology commits the genetic fallacy in asking such questions about the origins of the canon not only depends on a misunderstanding of that fallacy, the criticism itself also commits the fallacy of begging the question. Critics of some feminist philosophy make the epistemological assumption that the origins of a belief are irrelevant to its justification, which is the very claim that these feminists reject (see Crouch 1991). For instance, standpoint theorists argue that women’s material situation affects and can advantage the types of understanding that women and feminists have (Harding 1991). Critics of feminist epistemology cannot simply assume that the use of a certain type of premise makes a line of reasoning unjustified.

This kind of exchange between feminists and their critics—one that involves each party accusing the other of committing fallacies—illustrates how arguers may use fallacy labels to characterize their disagreements. Some feminists advocate fallacy analysis as a contextualized form of epistemology (Janack & Adams 1999) and some suggest the development of new fallacy labels to help address feminist epistemological concerns. Code suggests a counterpart for ad hominem be known as ad feminam to address how listeners and audiences discount women’s testimony (1995: 58–82). Also, androcentrism, the assumption of a masculine standard, can be named as a typical problem arising in argumentation by using the fallacies approach. More generally, Hundleby (2016) argues that assuming the desirability of stereotypic qualities of people who tend to be systematically granted social authority, such as men and white people, may be identified as the “status quo fallacy”. Better education about fallacies in argumentation may help to address the implicit bias that can underlie the “status quo fallacy”. The proposal of new fallacy labels, for example, ad stuprum or the appeal to sex (Anger & Hundleby 2016), is by no means unique to feminism, but it offers special power for social justice projects in providing language to account for socially marginalized experience, thus addressing hermeneutical injustices.

Proficiency with the fallacies approach can be empowering even though any claim that a fallacy has been committed makes disagreement explicit and that involves an adversarial quality which can make it difficult for socially marginalized people to use. It entails at least a minimal level of adversariality of the sort described by Govier (1999): “minimal adversariality” is opposition to another person’s view but not to the person. The involvement of even this minimal level of adversariality may make the fallacies approach a form of argument analysis difficult for members of subordinated classes to employ in contexts where socialization and norms of politeness discourage subordinates from expressing dissent (Rooney 2003). Yet, some individual women find success in adversarial engagement, some take pleasure in the heightened opposition of debate, and adversarial conversation is key to some women’s culture and identity (Schiffrin 1984; Henning 2018, 2021). Moreover, opposition is necessary for feminist resistance, struggle, and change. In these ways, women, feminists, and others with related liberatory projects can find unique resources in the adversariality of the fallacies approach.

Fallacies remain a popular way to teach reasoning, as does argument analysis more generally. Both play central roles in the content of Canadian, US, and UK post-secondary education as part of the set of skills regularly taught under the name “critical thinking” in philosophy departments. Education allows cultures of reasoning to reinforce and reproduce themselves and these cultures affect the prospects for feminist transformation of the larger society. Educational institutions have authority and grant authority to systems of thought and to individuals and in this way critical thinking education provides opportunities for conformity or for social transformation, starting at the level of individual reasoning and interpersonal discourse. In many ways, the ideal and practice of critical thinking serves social progress but in other ways it needs reform.

The way that argument education works its way from the academy into ordinary reasoning practices may be rather indirect and slow but academic philosophy is not merely one discourse among others and it has a central role in validating or authorizing other discourses (Alcoff 1993), especially in the epistemological assumptions conveyed through critical thinking pedagogy. Courses in critical thinking became stock components of the undergraduate curriculum during the late twentieth century and so the standards for reasoning implicit in “critical thinking” as an educational goal for students directly impact on countless students every year. Critical thinking operates as a specifically Western practice and ideal that provides alternatives to patterns of reasoning that enforce male dominance in various cultures, Western culture included (Norris 1995). The appeals to individual rationality and independent reasoning in the critical thinking curriculum contrast with appeals to tradition and with prioritizing community and personal relationships.

Systems of thinking, such as theories or logics, and speech acts, such as arguments, can hold authority that is not attached to a specific speaker or type of speaker, even though people may be paradigmatic holders of authority. The authority of social institutions, especially in their claims to be objective, Code argues (1995: 21, 181), may be likewise justified or not justified. Granting the justification of depersonalized authorities that include institutions of postsecondary education becomes second nature in a technological society, while those who lack social status and expertise have heightened dependence on the authority of expertise. This authority actually lies in the hands of people who have social privilege and yet people who are socially marginalized have a serious stake in the institutions that develop knowledge, from the legal system and the media to the pedagogy of argumentation in the form of “critical thinking” education (Hundleby 2013b).

Hundleby makes a case that critical thinking courses provided by philosophy departments currently tend to reinforce disciplinary biases because they invoke an authority that lacks the monitoring and evaluation that justifies authority (Hanrahan & Antony 2005). The typical way that textbooks present fallacies exhibits ignorance of the current informal logic scholarship, which would provide the appropriate source of expertise. There are few textbooks written by scholars who have published even one article in argumentation or logic and these same textbooks written by non-specialists are most likely to evince the Adversary Method described by Moulton (1983). The unreflective nature of dependence on that Method suggests that it remains authoritative—as well as “paradigmatic”—in philosophy (Hundleby 2010).

Gilbert argues that critical thinking education ought to affirm a range of considerations that do not enter into traditional logic (Gilbert 1994: 111). Contemporary philosophical theorizing tends to treat arguments as premise-conclusion complexes, merely as “products” of the discourse that generates them (Wenzel 1980 [1992]), without considering the processes that give rise to them. The focus on premise-conclusion complexes obscures factors relevant to the feminist goal of preventing harm (Lang 2010) and such a lack of appropriate “rhetorical spaces” or conceptual frameworks in philosophy impedes the education of people about the problems that women face (Code 1995). The standard Euro-American philosophical practices of the Adversary Paradigm or the Critical-Logical model sideline important aspects of arguing that indicate the significance and cogency of feminist claims about things like the social identities of arguers. Argument has a testimonial dimension, as Audrey Yap explains (2013; 2015). Consciousness of such situational aspects of reasoning and philosophical argumentation facilitates the appreciation of feminist perspectives. It also provides for more rigorous analysis and more thoroughly critical thinking.

Bucking the large trend of textbooks that fail to reflect the argumentation scholarship, Linker (2015) follows in a minor tradition of textbooks by expert authors that also advance scholarly theorizing about argumentation (e.g., Govier 1985; Johnson & Blair 1977; Makau & Marty 2001, 2013). Her Intellectual Empathy aims to provide reasoners with skills for understanding how social inequalities affect people’s lives and how those structures are maintained. The first three skills involved in “intellectual empathy” are: (i) understanding the invisibility of privilege; (ii) knowing that social identity is intersectional; [ 6 ] and (iii) using models of cooperative reasoning. Linker argues that social identity lies at the center of what Quine calls the “web of belief”, [ 7 ] which is to say it is deeply connected with many of a person’s beliefs; and for Linker that involves it in their self-esteem. The personal stake people have in their social identities means that discussion that engages our identities can be emotionally fraught. We “take it personally”. When people are arguing about aspects of social identity, they often fall into feelings of blame or guilt. Linker suggests that reasoners can find alternatives to such destructive responses by consideration of the complexities of everyone’s individual situation regarding social privilege. Attending to the specificities of each other’s perspectives allows us to better understand each other and set up reasoners for more cooperative and less adversarial arguing (Linker 2015: 98).

According to Linker, intellectual empathy also requires that when encountering a view that seems biased or stereotypical reasoners (iv) apply a principle of conditional trust, treating the person holding the view as reasonable and well-intentioned. This assumption allows us better to learn about the real reasons the person holds the view, and generally improves the audience’s ability to gather and share evidence (2015: 156–158).

Finally, Linker advises (v) recognizing our mutual vulnerability to bias and stereotype, while at the same time allowing ourselves to be responsive and accommodating to new information. This demands courage and strength. Linker’s five skills thus provide a way to address the testimonial dimensions of arguing with special attention to their operation when people argue from very different social locations. This vision of critical thinking steps forward in addressing feminist concerns with the cultures and practices of argumentation.

In conclusion, as we see especially in the discussions of fallacies and argument pedagogy as well as in the dominance of the Adversary Method, feminist philosophical work on argumentation reveals a need for philosophers to attend to argumentation scholarship. Outdated or unscholarly conceptions of how different modes and styles of arguing serve the advancement of knowledge can undermine the value of philosophical reasoning and specifically how philosophers respond to feminist philosophy. Yet, the work by interdisciplinary argumentation scholars and feminist philosophers to explore these tensions receives little uptake in the discipline of philosophy.

Among the feminist topics in argumentation scholarship that remain in need of philosophical attention are: the range and complexity of values that arguing can serve, including social justice, social bonding, dispute resolution, and knowledge; and more thorough representations of arguing practices that account for how discursive norms code power and privilege, such as through politeness and testimonial authority. Feminist research on these topics will be important for scholarship on argumentation and also for the discipline of philosophy, given the centrality of arguing to its practice. Interdisciplinary vantage points on argumentation provide resources useful for feminist purposes and promise a broader perspective that might unify different feminist concerns; at the same time, other disciplines can face their own challenges from a feminist perspective, as rhetorical studies does for taking persuasion to provide the only purpose for arguing.

Feminist concerns about argumentation pull in different directions and create a great deal of room for further research. Feminists regularly oppose practices and theories central to the discipline of philosophy and some such form of opposition is intrinsic to feminist work. Yet feminists criticize overemphasis on the opposition that occurs in the default adoption of adversarial styles of reasoning in philosophy and in the assumption that arguers must oppose each other or that they must have contrary beliefs. Appeals to politeness do not provide the easy resolution to these concerns that some argumentation theorists often presume. In addition, although some of the worst tendencies in argumentation scholarship may be passed on generation to generation in critical thinking classes taught by philosophers, these classes have potential to create progress toward social justice. Let us note that, overall, feminist perspectives on argumentation challenge broad social and epistemological norms as well as attend to the ways the norms play out in the culture of critical thinking, academic philosophy, and other accepted standards for shared reasoning.

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Aberdein, Andrew, 2019–, Virtues and Arguments; A Bibliography , Regularly updated.
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NPR Editor Who Accused Broadcaster of Liberal Bias Resigns

Uri Berliner, who has worked at NPR for 25 years, said in an essay last week that the nonprofit had allowed progressive bias to taint its coverage.

Uri Berliner sits in a room surrounded by greenery.

By Benjamin Mullin

Uri Berliner, the NPR editor who accused the broadcaster of liberal bias in an online essay last week, prompting criticism from conservatives and recrimination from many of his co-workers, has resigned from the nonprofit.

Mr. Berliner said in a social media post on Wednesday that he was resigning because of criticism from the network’s chief executive, Katherine Maher.

“I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new C.E.O. whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay,” Mr. Berliner wrote.

In his brief resignation letter, addressed to Ms. Maher, Mr. Berliner said he loved NPR, calling it a “great American institution” and adding that he respects “the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism.”

An NPR spokeswoman, Isabel Lara, said the nonprofit does not comment on personnel matters.

In an interview, Mr. Berliner said his decision to resign from NPR coalesced early this week after an email exchange with Ms. Maher. He said in the interview that he could infer from one of her emails that a memo she had sent to employees last week about workplace integrity was referring to him even though he had not been mentioned by name. In the email, which was sent to Mr. Berliner on Monday, Ms. Maher said her memo “stands for itself in reflecting my perspective on our organization.”

“Everything completely changed for me on Monday afternoon,” Mr. Berliner said.

Mr. Berliner’s essay stirred up a hornet’s nest of criticism of NPR and made Mr. Berliner something of a pariah within the network. Several employees told The New York Times that they no longer wished to work with him, and his essay was denounced by Edith Chapin, the network’s top editor.

Many journalists at NPR pushed back against the essay, including the “Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep, who said on the newsletter platform Substack that Mr. Berliner failed to “engage anyone who had a different point of view.”

“This article needed a better editor,” Mr. Inskeep wrote. “I don’t know who, if anyone, edited Uri’s story, but they let him publish an article that discredited itself.”

Mr. Berliner’s essay found some defenders among the ranks of former NPR employees. Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, a former ombudsman, said on social media that Mr. Berliner was “not wrong.” Chuck Holmes, a former managing editor at NPR, called Mr. Berliner’s essay “brave” on Facebook.

Critics of NPR, including conservative activists, used Mr. Berliner’s essay in The Free Press to impugn the network’s journalism and its leadership. One of them, Christopher Rufo, began resurfacing social media posts from Ms. Maher that were critical of President Donald J. Trump and embraced progressive causes. Mr. Rufo has a history of pressuring media organizations to cover critical stories of well-known figures, including the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president.

NPR said in a statement earlier this week that Ms. Maher’s social media posts predated her term as chief executive, adding that she was not working in news at the time.

Before he resigned from NPR, Mr. Berliner was on a five-day suspension from the network for violating company policy against working for outside organizations without securing permission.

Mr. Berliner said he did not have any immediate plans after leaving NPR, adding that he was looking forward to getting more sleep and spending time with his family.

Benjamin Mullin reports on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact Ben securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or email at [email protected] . More about Benjamin Mullin

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Search for: 'feminist criticism' in Oxford Reference ». A modern tradition of literary commentary and polemic devoted to the defence of women's writing or of fictional female characters against the condescensions of a predominantly male literary establishment.The beginnings of this movement are to be found in the journalism of R. West from ...
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"The New Feminist Criticism" brings together for the first time the most influential and controversial essays on the feminist approach to literature. These groundbreaking essays by well-known critics offer a much-needed overview of feminist critical theory, and illustrate its practice. In "The New Feminist Criticism" the authors take up a variety of topics.
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