Hello and welcome back to our lecture series
on Literary Theory. As you know for the past
few lectures we have been discussing feminism
and its impact on literary studies. We have
traced our way down from the late 18th century
writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, through the
early 20th century works of Virginia Woolf,
to the landmark 1949 publication of Simone
de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
Now, it is important to remember here that
this history of feminism that we have traced
through the life and works of Wollstonecraft,
Woolf, and de Beauvoir was accompanied by
sustained political campaigns to win more
rights for women in society. Indeed, by the
time de Beauvoir’s book was published, feminist
movements across the Western world had wrested
for women the very important political right
to vote. The developing economic scenario
in the decades immediately following the Second
World War further aided the cause of women’s
liberation in the Western world, and it did
so in two distinct ways.
So, on the one hand, there was now a growing
consumer base purchasing things like refrigerator,
vacuum cleaner, washing machine and these
household technologies freed up a significant
amount of labour time required by women, who
were expected within the patriarchal society
to perform domestic chores. This was happening
on one hand. On the other hand, complementing
this freeing up of labour time was the development
of the service sector which employed women
in ever greater numbers.
So, in a lot of ways the condition of women
within the Western society had developed much
between the time of Mary Wollstonecraft and
the decades following the Second World War.
And all of these changes are regarded as part
of the first wave of feminism. de Beauvoir’s
work The Second Sex acknowledges these positive
changes, but de Beauvoir also considers this
to be only a partial revolution.
Because when she was writing, women still
remained unequal to men within the patriarchal
society. The second wave of feminism that
gained momentum during the 1960s, and that
took its inspiration from texts like the Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex or Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique, which was published in 1963, sought
to address these inequalities, and it sought
to address these inequalities by foregrounding
issues of reproductive rights, issues of conditions
faced by women in work place that made it
difficult for them to work, more difficult
than their male counterparts, and they also
raised the issue of domestic violence.
So, these were various issues that were brought
forward by the second wave of feminism which
emerged during the 1960s. In today’s lecture,
however, we are not going to focus so much
on the political and social impact that the
post-Second World War feminism had; rather,
our focus today would be on the changes in
the field of literary studies affected by
this new wave of feminism, this new feminist
momentum.
And towards that end, I would be discussing
two very important concepts. One is gynocriticism
and the other is écriture feminine. And after
elaborating these two concepts which represent
some of the major reasons which feminist thoughts
have influenced literary studies, we will
then move on to explore the works of Judith
Butler and see how the work of Judith Butler
complicates some of the very basic notions
of gender identity, which forms the basis
not only of the patriarchal society, but which
was also at the core of the various feminist
movements. But let us start with gynocriticism.
As we know, one of the fundamental preoccupations
of feminist theorists whom we have studied
so far was the discriminatory representation
of women in literature produced by men.
This we have noticed most particularly while
discussing The Second Sex, where de Beauvoir
speaks about how celebrated male authors,
like D H Lawrence, Paul Claudel, or André
Breton, mythologizes women in their works
and reinforced the status of the woman as
the Other. The main thrust of this kind of
literary criticism was to explore and expose
the workings of patriarchal conventions and
discriminatory bias that informs texts written
by males.
But there is also another side to feminist
literary criticism which we observed while
discussing Virginia Woolf. That side deals
with the desire to formulate a history and
a canon of texts written by female authors.
With the story of Judith Shakespeare, we have
seen how the very possibility of women writers,
women authors are systematically denied within
patriarchal society.
And even if women authors are able to write
by overcoming difficulties of neither having
a room of their own or usually a disposable
income of 500 pounds that Woolf talks about,
they remain forgotten. They remain marginalized
and outside the pale of literary canons. And
in fact, it is this systematic exclusion of
women writers from the canon that makes all
“great literature” appear to be written
by men.
By the 1970s feminist literary critics were
trying to address this particular gap, and
they were trying to do so by focusing on what
is referred to as “gynotexts” or women’s
texts.
This term gynotext and the associated concept
of gynocriticism was first proposed by Elaine
Showalter a professor of English at the University
of Princeton.
So, what is gynocriticism? Well, first and
foremost gynocriticism is a mode of criticism
which seeks to build a framework of literary
analysis that is pivoted on female identity.
This would mean, at the most basic level,
foregrounding texts written by female authors
which are usually kept out of the category
of great literature, which is usually not
studied as part of the canon.
Gynocritics would use these texts written
by female authors to identify subjects that
most prominently concern the female authors,
subjects like domesticity, child rearing,
etcetera. And apart from this, the gynocritics
would focus on specific language uses that
might be peculiar to the female authors and
that might be seen as distinguishing them
from their male counterparts.
Through exploring all of this, the gynocritic
would try to lay bare in the words of Elaine
Showalter, and I am quoting her, “the psychodynamics
of female creativity; the trajectory of the
individual or collective female career; and
the evolution or laws of a female literary
tradition”.
Gynocritics during the late 20th century produced
a number of texts including Patricia Meyer
Spacks’s The Female Imagination which was
published in 1975, Ellen Meyer’s, which
was very important text, Literary Women, published
in 1976.
The Female Imagination was published in 1975,
this one is published in 1976, and then we
have Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of
their Own published in 1977.
But the most iconic text of gynocriticism
was Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber’s 1979
publication, The Mad Woman in the Attic.
The “Mad Woman” in the title is a reference
to the Jamaican character of Bertha Mason,
who appears in Charlotte Brontë’s very
famous novel Jane Eyre. In the novel, Mason
is kept locked away by her husband Edward
Rochester in an attic room in his country
house in England, and she is locked away because
her husband claims that she is mad.
The central argument that Gilbert and Gubar
puts forward by referring to this figure of
Bertha Mason is that within the patriarchal
society where writing literature is seen as
a masculine activity, female writers suffer
from a very strong sense of anxiety. This
anxiety of somehow transgressing the domain
of femininity and trespassing into a male
domain gets reflected in the fiction of 19th
century female authors, who were writing in
English through the dual depiction of women
as angels of the house and women as mad frenzied
and uncontrollable.
In Brontë’s novel this duality of female
identity is represented, on the one side,
by Jane Eyre who represents the angelic side
of femininity and, on the other side, by Bertha
Mason who is the mad woman in the attic. According
to Gilbert and Gubar the angelic figure that
we find in these texts are attempts made by
the woman author to depict female figures
in accordance to the expectations of the patriarchy,
whereas, the figures of the mad woman like
Bertha Mason, for instance, they represent
the anxiety of women writers stemming from
their transgressive roles as authors.
Now, one of the major criticism that is usually
levied against gynocritics is that they essentialize
gender identity. So, what does that mean?
Well it means that according to the gynocritics
certain perspectives, certain literary subjects,
certain ways of styling the language are unique
to women. In other words, if you are a female
author gynocritics would expect your literary
work to be of a certain kind that would be
imprinted with the essence of your womanly
identity, which would distinguish it from
texts written by male authors.
This charge of essentialism is also levied
against the concept of écriture feminine,
which was proposed by the French feminist
critique Hélène Cixous.
And she proposed this concept in her very
famous essay titled “The Laugh of Medusa”
which was published in 1975.
Now, this French term écriture feminine translates
literally into feminine writing or woman’s
writing. And the idea of écriture feminine
stresses that language within a patriarchal
society is phallocentric or centered around
the phallus. This assertion of language being
phallocentric traces back to a Lacanian theory
about language about the symbolic order and
about oedipal complex. And the Lacanian theory
in itself is rather complex and, therefore,
we will not be going into that.
But if we try to understand it in simple terms,
what Cixous is saying is that language uses
as a norm foregrounds the male. Slightly overused,
but good example of this through which we
can try and understand the concept of foregrounding
of the male is the use of the word man in
English language; where the word man is used
to stand in for the general category of human
being. In other words, man in English language,
as it is usually written and spoken, represents
the human norm, right.
So, there is a sliding of the notion of man
masculinity etcetera, and what is normal as
human being, one slides over the other, one
becomes the other. Now, Cixous points out
that a woman when writing in a language, which
normally prioritizes the male and the masculine
have to constantly struggle to manipulate
and even break down the language in order
to make it a suitable vehicle for her own
thoughts and experiences.
Écriture feminine is, therefore, marked by
according to Cixous, syntactical chaos, disruptive
gaps, unusual images, puns; and all of this
are basically attempts to break the sense
of “normality” of how language is otherwise
used within patriarchy.
Now, here again, you can see that there is
a degree of gender essentialism that is involved;
the very fact of being a female author gets
connected here with forms of language use
that would be imprinted by a womanly essence.
Now to understand why such essentializing
of the woman identity might be problematic,
let us turn to the work of Judith Butler,
who argues that gender identity is not an
inherent essence that we possess, but rather
a performative construct. According to Butler,
we do not simply belong to a gender, but rather
we do our gender.
Now, I do understand that these sentences
are somewhat cryptic, but before I elaborate
on them, let me first introduce you to Judith
Butler.
Butler was born in 1956 in Cleveland Ohio;
she was born in a Jewish family. And she received
her Bachelor’s, Master’s as well as her
Doctoral degree from the Yale University.
And right now she is a chair professor in
the Department of Comparative Literature at
the University of California Berkeley.
Apart from her academic work, Judith Butler
is also known for her activism for the lesbian
and gay rights, and also for her anti-Zionist
stand. She has authored a number of very important
books, among which the most celebrated is
her 1990 publication titled Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
And it is on this book that we are going to
focus today and, as you will see during our
discussion, that with Butler we actually start
moving beyond the boundaries of feminism,
the kind of feminism that we have discussed
so far.
So now let us come back to the statement that
gender is performative, gender is a performative
construct, we do gender, we do not belong
to one gender category or the other. So, there
is a distinction that is being drawn between
doing gender associated with the notion of
performativity and just being one particular
gender or the other. And this is, in fact,
the main thesis of Gender Trouble – that
we do gender.
So, what does Butler mean when she says gender
is performative, gender is something that
we do? Well, before we start discussing the
concept of performativity, let us start with
the more common sense understanding of gender.
And by common sense I mean the mundane, the
quotidian. Most of us live within what can
be called heteronormative patriarchal societies.
And by this I mean we live within patriarchal
societies that consider heterosexuality to
be the norm.
Now, within such a social framework the understanding
of gender is usually seen to be integrally
connected with two other terms. One is the
body and the other is sexuality. So, the assumption
is something like this. If I have a female
body, then it is expected that I would be
naturally sexually attracted towards men,
and would naturally represent feminine traits
– like being gentle, being caring, being
soft spoken, etcetera.
If I have a male body, then it is expected
that I would naturally be sexually attracted
towards women, and naturally show masculine
traits – like courage, strength, physical
strength , assertiveness, etcetera. In all
of these assumptions the stress is on the
word naturally, which signifies both a sense
of obviousness in the connection established
between body, sexuality, and gender.
And also it is naturalness; what Butler does
in Gender Trouble is that she undermines this
notion of a natural cause and effect chain,
connecting body sexuality and gender, and
argues that each of these terms body sexuality
gender are socially constructed.
So, how does body, sexuality, and gender get
socially constructed? And how do body and
sexuality affect the notion of gender? Well,
to get an answer to this question, we will
have to understand the interesting way in
which Butler appropriates Sigmund Freud’s
theory of melancholia, and makes it the core
idea of our gender theory.
In his 1917 essay titled “Mourning and Melancholia”,
Freud discusses two different ways in which
we react to any major sense of loss. Let us
assume that I have lost a person who was very
dear to me.
Now, according to Freud, such a loss usually
leads to a phase of mourning in which I will
deeply miss the person that I have lost, and
I react to it in various ways including psychologically
denying the absence of the lost person. So,
if someone is dead I simply deny the fact
that that person is no longer there. And often
one can also desperately try to get back in
touch with that person, that lost person,
and feel their presence around oneself.
So, we may even see that person, for instance,
in our dreams. That is one of the ways in
which we try and get back in touch with that
person. And this is the usual form of mourning
and some of the usual reactions. But Freud
says that this mourning gradually gets healed.
And slowly, but surely we come back to the
reality, and we accept the fact that that
person is no more.
However, Freud mentions that at times the
reaction to loss might take a more pathological
form which he refers to as melancholia, and
which he distinguishes from the usual mourning.
Now in melancholia the sense of loss is so
profound that we feel we have not only lost
a person who was close to us, but indeed we
have lost a part of our own self. In Freud’s
own words and I quote, “[I]n mourning it
is the world which has become poor and empty;
in melancholia it is the ego itself.”
One peculiarity of the psychological response
that melancholia elicits is what Freud calls
identification with the lost object.
So, in other words, the melancholic person
tries to make up for the loss that that person
has suffered by himself or herself assuming
characteristic traits of the lost person.
So, melancholic identification involves a
process of becoming like the object of loss
to compensate that loss. This theory of melancholic
identification is appropriated by Butler to
come up with a new understanding of a child’s
sexual development which deviates from the
mainstream Freudian explanation.
I should not say deviate; I should say which
reinterprets the Freudian concept of a child’s
sexual development. Again, this might appear
to be slightly tricky to understand, this
theory that Butler comes up with. So, I will
go over it slowly and step by step.
Now, from our previous discussions on psychoanalysis,
you would remember that for Freud a child
which in Freud’s writing is primarily a
male child is normally heterosexual. This
is because his sexual urges are developed
through his engagement with his mother who
is his primary caregiver and also the main
object of his desire. It is only when the
oedipal complex sets in and the taboo against
incest is realized and internalized by the
child that he starts shifting his desire from
his mother to other females, who appear as
substitutes for the original object of sexual
desire.
The process in which a girl child’s sexual
desire emerges and manifests as it is described
by Freud is much more complex. So, the female
child according to Freud like the male child
initially desires the mother, but soon passes
on that desire to the father. But realizing
that such incestuous desire is taboo, she
then transfers it to other men who become
for her the substitute for the father as the
object of sexual desire.
Now, according to Butler, this taboo of incest
which forces both the male and the female
child to project their heterosexual desires
beyond their parents actually represent a
later part of the child’s sexual development.
As per Butler, this taboo of incest is preceded
for both the male and the female child by
what she calls the taboo of homosexuality.
Butler claims that the earlier form of sexual
desire, rather I should say the earliest form
of sexual desire, in both the male child and
the female child is homosexual desire.
So, in other words for the girl child, the
earliest object of sexual desire is the mother
and for the boy child it is the father. This
is presented by Butler as an innate human
disposition. Now this original form of sexuality
within a heteronormative society is prohibited
through what Butler calls the taboo of homosexuality.
It is only in response to this taboo of homosexuality
that the little boy and the little girl slips
their object of sexual desire, which they
now direct at parents belonging to the opposite
sex. So, they initially start with desiring
parents belonging to their own sex, and then
after they encounter the taboo of homosexuality,
they flip their desire and project their desire
onto their parents belonging to the opposite
sex.
So, for the boy, the object of desire becomes
the mother and for the girl it becomes the
father. But this too is a problematic phase
of sexual development, because it soon meets
with another social prohibition which is the
taboo against incest. This then results in
the growing adolescent projecting his or her
sexual desires beyond the confines of the
family, and the usual thing that happens in
the Freudian narrative of how a child’s
sexuality is developed.
Now, this is a radical revision of Freud’s
theory, because here homosexual desires are
established as more fundamental than heterosexual
desires. And in doing so, it undermines in
a major way the central assumption of a heteronormative
society; which regards heterosexuality to
be the norm.
But then what does melancholic identification
has to do with all of this? Well, Butler points
out that the taboo of homosexuality which
forces the child to shift its desire from
the same sex parent results in a deep sense
of loss, which evokes reactions similar to
melancholia. So, to make up for this loss
each child identifies with the parent of the
same sex even while projecting a sexual desire
onto the parent of the opposite sex.
Thus, a boy child copes with the loss of the
father as a primary object of desire by trying
to emulate his characteristic features and
becoming more and more like him. Something
very similar also happens with the girl child,
who also in her attempt to cope with the loss
of the mother as a primary object of desire
tries to become more and more like her; this
is melancholic identification and this process
of identification with the same sex parents
through incorporation of their characteristic
traits results in the girl child becoming
“feminine”, and the boy child becoming
“masculine” which forms their gender identity.
And indeed this gender identity formed through
melancholic identification with the same sex
parent extends to what Butler refers to as
the stylization of the body. In other words,
one of the many ways in which a girl child
tries to become like her mother and the boy
child tries to become like his father is by
fashioning his or her body, stylizing his
or her body. And by fashioning or stylizing
the body what I mean here is marking the body,
piercing the body, dressing the body, molding
the body through certain postures, how you
sit, how you stand, how you walk, how you
lie down.
Which means that, within a society a female
body appears to be very different from a male
body not so much because it is naturally so,
but rather because it is fashioned or stylized
to be so. And the way we fashion our body
and our gender is informed by the way we are
guided by the society to repress our homosexual
desires.
Now, there are two very important things that
I want you to note here about Butler’s revision
of Freud’s theory of sexual development.
The first thing, which I have already mentioned
a few moments ago, is that it ceases to regard
homosexuality as a perversion of our “normal”
heterosexuality. In fact, homosexuality is
established as more fundamental, as preceding,
heterosexuality.
And the second important point that I want
you to note here is that, our gender which
according to Butler incorporates not only
our femininity or our masculinity, but also
our sexuality and our stylized bodies is socially
constructed, rather than being natural. So,
in other words gender along with the two other
related terms body and sexuality are understood
by Butler as responses to the ways in which
social prohibition shapes our identities.
And this constructed nature of gender identity
now leads us to the important notion of performativity.
Now, as I have mentioned that according to
Butler, gender has to do with fashioning,
stylizing, enacting, and things like that.
And this means that our gender depends on
our molding ourselves in accordance to the
social taboos and prohibitions and actively
incorporating different characteristic traits
from our same sex parents to form our identity.
So, gender is a process of doing or becoming
rather than simply being. A girl child gradually
becomes like her mother by doing what she
does and by incorporating her characteristic
traits. The same is also true for the boy
child, who gradually tries and becomes a man
just like his father. It is this process of
doing or becoming through incorporating the
characteristic traits of the same sex parent
that Butler calls gender performativity.
But why does Butler use this slightly unusual
term performativity? And why does she not
use the more mundane term performance, is
performance different from performativity?
Well, according to Butler they are different.
Performance as far as Butler is concerned
is the enactment of a certain role by a subject
who precedes that role and who is otherwise
independent of it.
So, what do I mean by this? Let us try and
understand this with the help of an example.
Example of a film, the example that I have
in mind is Francis Ford Coppola’s film The
Godfather Part1. Now, in that movie the actor
Marlon Brando enacts the role of an Italian
American mafia boss. Now Marlon Brando, the
actor, precedes this role as a subject, and
we can easily draw a distinction between this
Marlon Brando as a subject and the role of
Vito Corleone that he plays in the movie.
This is what Butler would identify as a performance.
Gender performativity, on the other hand,
is different from such kind of a performance
because there is no separate subject before
or behind the gender role. When we enact our
gender identities, we do not do that with
a sense of our identity as a subject that
is distinct and separate from this gender
role that we are enacting. Indeed, we are
socially obliged to appear as gendered individuals
right from the moment of our birth.
So, announcements like “It is a girl”
or “It is a boy” right after a child is
born already interpellates us, already calls
upon us to occupy a particular gender identity.
So, there is no subject standing beyond or
behind the enactment of gender role as our
sense of identity is always already informed
by the process of enacting gender.
So, this is very important, let me repeat
it. There is no subject standing beyond or
behind the enactment of our gender rules,
why, because our sense of identity is always
from the very beginning already informed by
the process of enacting gender. Social expectations
are already projected on us; which expects
us to belong to one particular gender, or
other, which expects us to act out to perform
gender in particular ways. Butler identifies
this peculiar form of enactment where there
is no distinct sense of subjectivity beyond
the process of enactment as performativity.
Now, I do agree that this is a slightly difficult
concept, but I think if you go over the section
of the lecture for maybe a couple of times,
you will be able to understand it quite clearly.
I would like to end this lecture today by
briefly referring to the phenomenon of cross-dressing.
Now if following Butler, we agree that gender
is constructed and not natural, then it might
be possible to construct gender differently.
In other words, it would be possible to play
around with the characteristic traits that
we incorporate to present ourselves as either
men or women.
Now, it is important to note here that going
beyond gender altogether is impossible as
far as Butler’s theoretical framework is
concerned, because we are incorporated within
the gendered social framework from the very
moment of our birth. And therefore, we do
not have access to a non-gendered subjectivity
that can just stop being a man or a woman.
The most we can do is to perform gender differently.
And one of the starkly visible ways in which
we can perform our gender differently is by
working on the ways in which we stylize our
body, including the way we dress. This brings
us to the notion of cross-dressing, where
a man might dress up in clothes that are usually
associated with the feminine gender, within
a particular socio-cultural milieu, or a woman
might dress up in what is usually regarded
as a man’s attire.
Such cross-dressings can potentially serve
two very important functions. The first is
that it can reveal gender identity as an artifice,
as a mode of self-fashioning; which can be
done differently. So, it is not natural, it
is not essential. The second thing that this
cross-dressing can bring to the foreground
is that it can help articulate one’s resistance
against the social norms and prohibitions
that shape our gender identity. A good example
of this is a self-portrait made by the remarkable
Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.
Now, though Kahlo is today known as one of
the greatest painters of our time, during
her own lifetime she was often portrayed primarily
as the wife of the well-known muralist Diego
Rivera. Indeed, a 1933 newspaper article seeking
to introduce to it is reader Kahlo as a talented
painter could not think of a better heading
than this one:
“Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully
Doubles in Works of Art”.
Now, the reason why Kahlo could only be portrayed
as a “dabbler” in art even as her husband
is described as a master mural painter is,
because of the ways in which conventional
gender stereotypes work within patriarchal
society; stereotypes in which the man is always
the master and the woman is at best a dilettante.
Now, Frida Kahlo has a painting.
This is painting that is usually known as
self-portrait with cropped hair, and this
is a painting that she completed in 1940.
And this painting presents a strong resistance
against this stereotyped gender identity,
and it does that through using cross-dressing.
So, in this self-portrait produced shortly
after her divorce with her husband Diego Rivera,
we can see Kahlo stylizing her body in ways
that deeply problematized the usual notions
of femininity within the patriarchal society.
So, in this painting, you can see Kahlo sitting
with a scissor in her hand, which she has
apparently used to crop her hair short, much
like a man, and her long “feminine traces”
are scattered all around her. The line of
music that you can see on the top part of
the painting is part of a Mexican folk song,
which if you translate it in English it reads
something like this:
“Look, if I loved you it was because of
your hair. Now that you are bald, I do not
love you anymore.”
So, the cropping of her hair comes across
as a rebellion against the patriarchal gender
norm where women are both identified and loved
as women for the long hairs, for ways in which
they stylized their body, and hair is a very
important part. But what is more important
for our purpose is the way in which Kahlo
dresses herself in this painting. Usually
her self-portraits present her in traditional
Mexican dresses. But here we see her wearing
an oversized suit, baggy pants, and a crimson
shirt; all of which represents the way her
husband Diego Rivera used to dress.
So, here Kahlo not only dresses like a man,
but more specifically she dresses like her
ex-husband. And at one level this signifies
an attempt to assert her own identity, her
own agency by going beyond the limiting category
of a woman who lives in the shadow of her
husband and only dabbles in art.
But on another level, it also represents what
we have discussed as melancholic identification,
where the object of loss which in this case
is Diego Rivera is incorporated as part of
Kahlo’s own gender identity. In this portrait
we therefore, see Kahlo literally becoming
the man Diego Rivera. With this I end today’s
lecture, as well as a section on feminism
and literature. In the next lecture we will
take up Modernism and Postmodernism.
Thank you for listening.
