Download Gender (Feminist, Queer) perspective

Literary Criticism = Critical theories:
Literary criticism is simply a manner of critiquing literature through a defined perspective or Critical theory. In doing so,
you are simply asking questions of the literature focus from one vantage point or theory or perspective. There are several
formal Critical theories with Marxism and Gender (feminist or queer) theories being the most commonly used and
referred to in critical theory or literary criticism. We are going to review five of them. I do not expect you to become
experts on them. When you take literature in college you’ll delve much deeper into literary criticism and theories. This is
just to introduce you to these thoughts and to a means of analyzing literature.
Gender (includes feminist and "queer" theories)
Historical/social
Psychoanalytical
Marxist
post-modernist
In all Critical theories, "power" is the key to the critique.
Gender Theory
Main focus is how genders are represented in the literature and the relationship each gender has with the other.
Historical/social theory
Main focus is the representation of social structure/cultural structure of power represented in literature. Who in society
has the power and how is it used in the community? Because it takes a historical look at the social aspects, religion,
science, government, education, -- any societal institution-- is an element of focus. The relationship of power in
accordance with the time period is also a central focus.
Pyschoanalytical theory
Main focus is the representation of the individual's power within society and within him or herself. Focusing in on
character relationships with each other and with self, focusing on feelings, thoughts, desires, influences (often sexual)
manifested through actions is key.
Marxist theory
Main focus is the representation of social structure in regards to oppression of groups of people and government power.
Utopian ideals are a controling focus.
Post-modern theory
Main focus is the representation of science, inventions, machinery vs. humanity as the power struggle represented in the
literature. Post-modern takes a critical look at society of "the future" which is anything beyond the "modern" society of
the 19th century.
Gender (Feminist, Queer) perspective
o How is gender represented/ constructed in this text?
o What are the text's assumptions regarding gender?
o What are the images of women/ men in the text (especially images of women in texts by men)?
o How and why is woman identified as "Other" (merely the negative object) to man, who is then seen as the
defining and dominating "Subject"?
o What are the covert ways in which power is manipulated in the text so as to establish and perpetuate the
dominance of men and subordination of women?
o What are the female points of view, concerns, and values presented in the text? And if absent, how so and why?
Here are a few more questions modified from Eve Sedgwick's own web-based "Heuristics for Reading NineteenthCentury Fiction" (remember that these were designed for the nineteenth-century novel but can easily be reworked for most
any literary text):
* Do the images of women and men in the text seem to function as stereotypes, warnings, models, exceptions?
* In what systems of evaluation do they seem to be embedded? In your thinking about gender, remember to include
characters who may not be invested in the novel's heterosexual plots. Remember that class, gender, sexuality, nationality,
race can each be used to offer allegorical representation of arguments about the others. And vice versa.
* What are the thematics associated with women/men; with characters of different ages, classes, nationalities,
regions, races? Look for distinctive places, distinctive words, distinctive images, objects, grammars. What are their
implications? Do they change? Are they differentiated along more than one of these axes?
* What gender and sexual values are implied in the focus and coverage of the work? What/who is included,
excluded?
* What audience is implied for the work?
* What reader expectations and assumptions about each of these dimensions seem to be embodied in it? What
possibilities of different reading relations does the work suggest for differently positioned readers? Is it an easy or a hard
book to read "against the grain"? How does it invite, repel, coopt, amplify, or otherwise deal with obliquely positioned
readings?
* What expectations about gender and sexuality/ about age/ about class/ about nation, race, region are already
embodied in the work's genre(s) or subgenre(s)? What is the relation of the work to its genre(s)/subgenre(s), and to the
expectations so entailed?
* What is the usefulness of the text for analyzing and describing gender and sexual/ class/ national/ racial, etc.
ideology? What are the relations of this text to the ideologies sketched?
* What relationships between/among women are presented? Between/among men? What are the bases of these
relationships? What are their dynamics and rules of circulation? Are they differentiated along other axes (class, age, etc.?)
How do they support, and how are they in tension with, any heterosexual presumptions that may be structuring the novel?
* Where is one to look for the historical specificity of the treatment of gender and sexuality in the work?
* What models of same-sex and other-sex attachment and desire are in play? What is their history?
* Does the novel present an implicit or explicit definition of "the sexual"? How and what? What seems to be at stake
in the answer to this question? To what is "the sexual" opposed, definitionally? How stable are the oppositions? How, and
how fully, is "the sexual" defined in terms of gender? In terms of procreation or its absence? In terms of class? In terms of
age or generation? In terms of nationality? Of race?
* Does it make sense to talk about homophobia as having a distinct function in the text? Think about this in relation
to histories of homophobia, as well as in relation to histories of same-sex desire.
* How does the term "family" play out in this text? What families are in evidence? What counts as a family-- and to
whom? When several characters reside together, what links them? Blood relations (and if so, what)? Legal relations?
Economic relations? How many different kinds of household can you find; how are they organized, and how related to
each other? To what is "family" opposed, definitionally? How stable are the oppositions? How, how fully, and how stably
is "family" defined in terms of gender and sexuality?
* What are the novel's explicit or implicit claims to present ahistorical truths of gender and/or sexuality? How do
they function?
* What relations between narrator and characters are generated? Between reader and characters? Between narrator
and reader? What sexual and gender dimensions characterize these relations? Do they change?
* What are the sex/ gender/ power implications of the novel's stylistic and formal choices?
* It's always worth trying to look at a given novel as—not just an example of a single genre—but a kind of anthology
of generic choices, often in dialogue or even at war with one another. Think about how the terms "novel," "romance,"
"history," for example, might intertwine and intersect as generic markers for a given text. It's also worth putting such
descriptions back into the historical context, eg. with the "rise of the novel": What is consolidated, what subsumed, what
marginalized, with the "rise of the novel"? How may such narratives also be treated (in the novels themselves) as
allegories of other relations (e.g. of gender, sexuality, class)?
* What images of the human body are presented? How concrete or abstract are they? To what senses do they appeal?
What are their presumptions? How much and what kinds of narrative energy are attached to them? How are these bodies-as bodies--gendered, sexed, classed, and raced?
Historical/Social perspective
o What are the relations of power suggested by the text?
o How is power operating either explicitly or secretly?
o What might threaten that operation of power?
o How do those with authority attempt to contain any subversion of that authority?
o What historical or cultural events might illuminate the text?
o What does this work reveal about the connections between language, knowledge, and power in a particular
culture?
o What model of human personality, what image of the human body, does this work imply or construct?
o How does this work reveal a historically specific model of truth and authority?
Here are a few more questions modified from Eve Sedgwick's own web-based "Heuristics for Reading NineteenthCentury Fiction" (remember that these were designed for the nineteenth-century novel but can easily be reworked for most
any literary text):
* What disciplines, professions, and discourses are shown as presiding over human subjects? How are the (perhaps
competing) claims of medicine, law, religion, science, state administration, education, etc. adjudicated in the novel and by
it?
* Don't forget how useful it can be to play the Authorial Surrogate Sweepstakes. Which characters in the novel offer
useful representations of the (complex and extremely heterogeneous) act of novel writing? Which aspects of it does each
represent, and how are they related to each other and to the novel's larger narrative, ideological, and aesthetic work? (It's a
good heuristic to make the case for as many different characters as you can in the Authorial Surrogate Sweepstakes.)
* What technologies of consciousness are described or implied in the novel? (Some examples might include alcohol,
hypnosis, opiates, meditation, sleep deprivation, coffee, rhythmic activities .... ) It's worth asking questions about how
these technologies might be related to the writing and reading activities that the book presumes. But ask also: what other
plots and relations (economic, for example, as well as sexual) cluster around them? Does a concept of addiction seem to
obtain, and if so, what does it entail? Does a concept of habit and, again if so, how is that different?
* What international, imperialist, and colonial relations are implicit or explicit in the novel's economic plot? Can you
find signs of, or images for, these relations in the novel's "domestic" plots?
Psychoanalysis perspective
# How does the work reveal the particular conflicts produced by family life in this particular historical period?
# What is the connection between the desires of the characters in the work, the desire of the author in writing the work,
and/or the desire of the reader in reading the work? In other words, what is the connection between literary language and
desire or between narrative and desire?
# Is there a psychic economy at work in this text which betrays the cathexes of the libido or perhaps fixations on earlier
moments in our psychosexual development (see Freud Module I)?
# How is the law of the father translated into a character's own psychic economy and how do such prohibitions manifest
themselves in the literary work?
# What relationship do characters have to the human body or to its desires and functions?
Marxist perspective
o Can one read into the work ways that those with less power are trying to subvert those with more power?
o How has the literary tradition constructed models of identity for oppressed groups?
o How does this literary work reflect the author's class, or the author's analysis of class relations?
o What is this work's ideological vision—how does it attempt to shore up an oppressive social order and idealize
social conflicts out of existence?
o What is this work's utopian vision (if it has one)—what alternative collective life does it propose as a solution to
these conflicts?
Here are a few more questions modified from Eve Sedgwick's own web-based "Heuristics for Reading NineteenthCentury Fiction" (remember that these were designed for the nineteenth-century novel but can easily be reworked for most
any literary text):
* How does this novel define "old" and "new" in relation to family, class relations, and/or national identity?
* What valuation is attached to the narrative of historical change?
* How does the novel's claim to present a narrative of historical change intersect with its claims to present ahistorical
truths?
* What diachronic or developmental narratives are implied by the synchronic array of characters? Could the young
characters, as presented, grow up to be the older characters? If not, what are the implications of this, and how are they
organized through class narratives?
* Is the possibility of deliberate social transformation suggested anywhere? If so, what kind of transformation? In
what light, and in what detail, is it presented? On what energies in the text does it draw?
* In what social and economic matrices is the work produced? Consumed? Circulated? What activities surround it?
What class-marked behaviors does it, or is it meant to, provoke or consolidate? Remember that the reading of novels, like
their writing and publication, and like lending and borrowing them, recommending them, etc., is a substantive material,
psychological, and social act with substantive material, psychological, and social preconditions and consequences (in
relation to time, privacy, leisure, attention, discrimination, and so forth).
* What, if any, images of vocation (of people's empowerment to produce cultural meaning) are produced? What are
the gender, sexual, class, national, racial bearings of these?
* Look at the complex ways that body size can represent and misrepresent issues of power and of economic
production, circulation, and consumption.
* Where does the money in the world of the novel come from? Are different kinds of economic activity or property
in evidence? If so, what are the most important differences among them? How is the money generated, cared for,
transmitted, accumulated, spent? For what is it exchanged, and on what basis?
* Are there economic relations that you know or assume to have been important in the historical surround of the
novel's siting or writing, that are absent from its own presentation? What do you make of that?
* What historical narratives (i.e., from "x" to "y") are embedded or dramatized in the novel's economic plot? What
choices have been made in their representation or non-presentation?
* What differences in people's economic/class placement are assumed in the novel? Which are interrogated, how. and
to what effect?
* How does the novel draw the line of what activities, etc., are to be considered economic? What does the novel
seem to exclude from the realm of the economic? Are these distinctions made along divisions between genders, between
classes, between "the family" and "the state," between "the self" and "society," between "sexual" and "political," between
production and reproduction (including procreation), between production and consumption, etc.? What are the economic
relations of the activities that are not described in economic terms?
* What are some important thematic and imagistic representations of economic production, accumulation,
consumption, etc., in the novel? From what realms are they drawn, and why? How are they related to each other? In what
ways do they raise the issue of the representational issues internal to economics?
Post-modern perspective
Some of the questions you might consider when analyzing a work by way of postmodern theory include the following:
o Is there a way in which reality is being supplanted by its representation (á là the simulacrum)?
o What is the status of the "human" as a category in the work? Are there ways in which the traditional notion of
subjectivity is being questioned or reworked?
o What is the place of the machine in this universe; has the machinic begun to threaten aspects of traditional human
society?
o In what ways has digital or media culture begun to affect such categories as subjectivity, perception, or
representation?
o Does the work play with temporal categories (eg. history, retro fashion, pastiche, future antérieur)? Have spatial
parameters or the temporal nature of visuality supplanted temporality in significant ways?
o Is the work commenting in any way on multinational or late capitalism?
o In what ways does the work decenter, disperse, subvert, or parody forms of hierarchical organization?
o Does the work disorient the reader/viewer in ways that are evocative of postmodern architecture or hyperspace?