University of Louisville -- English 601: Literature Studies

Chris Carter and Steve Wexler

How do feminism and gender studies differ?
Can men be feminists?
What is essentialism?
Who are some influentia gender critics and what are their theoretical positions?
If language is patriarchally-privileged, how can women establish an unadulterated, authentic voice?

To understand the differences between feminism and gender studies, one must first consider the distinction between sex and gender. While sex is the physical manifestation of femaleness or maleness (the bodily characteristics which determine whether one is woman or man), gender is, according to Joan Scott, "a social category placed on a sexed body" (32). Gender concerns masculinity and femininity, and cultural definitions of these terms. Society imposes gender on an individual, but that person’s sex is seemingly innate.

Both feminism and gender studies rely on these distinctions in their critical approaches; although, feminism began as a political movement interested in empowering the female sex, while early gender critics developed their theories in response to previous gender-blind studies of literature. Feminism emerged in the late 1960’s, just as multiple subjectivities were gaining recognition and support in universities, and it achieved considerable respectability by the late 1970’s. Since academic arenas no longer expected readers to work as neutered beings, bound by the impersonal rhetoric of New Criticism and Structuralism, feminists began reading texts in light of their own values and assumptions, and they began seeking out writers who seemed to further feminist agendas. Gender studies evolved from feminism, but also reconfigured feminist insights by drawing attention to the often-ignored social machinery which arbitrarily creates gender labels. Though gender studies might be seen as an umbrella for feminism, it might also assume the form of male studies, which knowingly replicates women’s studies, or it might appear as gay and lesbian studies, which increasingly question sex and gender as distinct categories.

The differences, then, between feminism and gender studies, and between sex and gender, are not absolute. Judith Butler, for example, claims that "sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along" (8). Feminism is a form of gender studies, and gender theory extends feminist arguments, so the "distinction" between the two may only be a strategic one. Since feminists wish to foreground women’s issues and facilitate female empowerment, and since theirs is a relatively new field, they don’t welcome the idea of being subsumed by another critical school.

For further information concerning the histories and critical perspectives of both schools, consult these works:

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Case, Sue-Ellen. "Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic." Discourse 11.1 (1988-89): 55-73.

Lauret, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America. London, Routledge, 1994.

Scott, Joan. "Gender: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis." Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. 28-50.

Can men be feminists?

Since feminists oppose male domination, and language itself appears to be "patriarchally-privileged," it seems unlikely -- even impossible --that a man might successfully adopt feminist theories. Still, many men have tried. Terry Eagleton, for example, performed a feminist study of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, which he suggests is "arguably the major feminist text of the language," because it is "the true story of women’s oppression at the hands of eighteenth-century patriarchy" (17).

The Rape of Clarissa sparked both high praise and aggressive counter-arguments. Respected critic Naomi Schor seems to support Eagleton’s theories, but William Warner, another Clarissa scholar, accuses Eagleton of reenacting, with his masculine-coded writing, the very rape he seeks to condemn. Warner’s theory suggests that writing a woman corresponds to raping her. If such a notion is true, then Warner himself rapes Clarissa, as does the novelist, Richardson. Male writers cannot help but rape female characters, which renders the notion of male feminism self-defeating.

University of Louisville professors Julia Dietrich and Suzette Henke find Warner’s theories unconvincing, and both claim that men can be successful feminists. Dr. Dietrich and Dr. Henke agree that men’s feminism differs from women’s, because it cannot be as genuinely oppositional, and because it comes from a more culturally-privileged viewpoint. Dr. Henke claims that male feminists must understand psychoanalytic reading techniques -- such as Julia Kristeva’s search for the "semiotic" -- in order to be truly effective. Dr. Dietrich believes that such men must be dedicated to social change.

Suggestions for further reading:

What is essentialism?

Essentialism argues that women write from their bodies; that to be born female is to write with a difference. Biology, then, is seen as a woman’s way out of a social -- male-dominated -- construction of Self. According to Naomi Schor, essentialism defines the relation between women’s language and women’s bodies as both transhistorical and cross-cultural, so that women’s writing is more fluid and multivoiced by nature not nurture.

According to Professor Julia Dietrich, one finds varieties of essentialism. "You get someone such as Helene Cixous and the 80’s essentialists who argued that it really is biology," she says. "Cixous said women wrote the body, that women are writing with ‘white ink’; they are writing with mother’s milk."

Dietrich said there have been arguments made to locate women’s language, art, etc. with something like maternal practice, and then as soon as someone makes that argument, the fight is on; is it an essentialist argument -- something biological -- or is maternal practice learned, or culturally determined?

Suggestions for further reading:

Who are some influential gender critics and what are their theoretical positions?

Though gender studies is an undertheorized critical field, writers like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Smith, and Judith Butler have helped energize it with their innovative work on homosexuality and identity subversion.

Sedgwick, in her book Between Men, attempts to affirm the existence of a specifically homosexual imagination, and to uncover evidence of homosexuality in works already in the canon (such as Melville’s Billy Budd).

Barbara Smith demonstrates a similar agenda in "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," an essay in which she claims that Toni Morrison’s Sula is an "exceedingly lesbian" novel. She argues that Sula provides an extensive critique of the institutions of heterosexuality (marriage and family).

Judith Butler examines the ways that surface features of bodies can disguise internal motivations in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. She further argues that the essence of a person can never be apprehended, and that gender itself is an insufficient means of social ordering.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Smith, Barbara. "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism." Showalter, New Feminist

Criticism 168-85.

If language is patriarchally-privileged, how can women establish an unadulterated, authentic voice?

According to Professor Julia Dietrich, the answer lies in language’s dialogic, open-ended nature and/or through deconstruction. If, indeed, language is patriarchally-privileged then both men and women are predisposed to perceive the "male" signifier as being more significant than the "female." When one says the word "she," for example, they are unconsciously biasing its binary pair "he" by subordinating -- conceptually -- the former to the latter. Even though "he" is absent from what is actually said, it is present in the conceptualization of "she." This idea of meaning being constructed through binary pairs goes back to the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who suggested that we only recognize a word’s meaning by what it isn’t, through difference. We only understand the word "cat" because we know it is not "dog." Therefore, when one reads "cat" they have with them "dog." By deconstructing a text, one may unveil these binary pairs and reveal any intentional or, more likely, unintentional patriarchal-privileging.

Because language is dialogic in nature, there is never any isolated, finalized utterance. When one writes a sentence, for example, that sentence, though ostensibly the voice of the author, is theoretically the product of myriad voices -- familial, political, and cultural shapings that M. M. Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia" -- or more simply, the voice of the Other. As Professor Dietrich notes, since a text is always dialogic, it can never foreclose on any possibilities. Therefore, the text’s meaning arises only through the many subjectivities involved in its interpretation. The seemingly infinite voicing, then, behind any one utterance transgresses power structures, in this case male-determining discourse, and allows feminists to argue that what is presumably patriarchal is at the very same time matriarchal.

There is another way in which feminists attempt to subvert patriarchal discourse. Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has argued that in certain literature one finds examples of pre-language, or what she calls the Semiotic. This is important for feminists because as a manifestation of pre-language, the Semiotic is free of any male-constructing. For Kristeva and others, avant-garde artists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, through their streams of consciousness and rhythmical breaks, return to pre-Oedipal territories and transcend patriarchy.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Bartkowski, Fran. "Feminism and Deconstruction: A Union Forever Deferred." Enclitic 4.2 (1980): 70-77.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

Oliver, Kelly, ed. The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.