Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of major shifts in feminist theory from the latter part of the twentieth century to the present day, highlighting the recuperative power of critical approaches that have sometimes been treated as obsolete, incoherent, or even embattled. If scholars of gender often claim to have surpassed the work of their forebears, it is worth remembering that we all work within a critical tradition that we have created and imbued with the theoretical investments of the present. Tracking the development of literary approaches to gender from ‘recovery’ feminism to more recent innovations in digital and transgender studies, Stern argues for a recursive approach to the history of feminism and gender, one that acknowledges a less linear and more variegated field of concerns.
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Notes
- 1.
The conversation described occurred in my Fall 2016 course ‘Literature and Gender.’ Of necessity, I have reconstructed the students’ remarks from memory, but I have done my best to give them a faithful rendering here. Thanks especially to Cecelia Beard, Elizabeth Bonesteel, Alexander Buckley, Sarah Burk, Erin Flood, Marley Grosskopf, Kristen Hefner, Izzie Hirschy, Lena Jones, Kaelin Kennedy, Stewart Kingdon, Connor Kirkpatrick, Kent McDonald, Katie Otto, Shirley Pu, Madison Schaper, Isabelle Smith, Sierra Smith, Bennett Steidinger, Kacey Thigpen, Lydia Trogdon, and Eldon Zacek.
- 2.
I am not here speaking of ‘feminist epistemology,’ which reflects intersections of epistemological and gender issues. Rather than merely engaging with what it means to know the world through a feminist lens, I am suggesting that all feminist thought constitutes an inquiry into the way our world is constructed—and known—through gender.
- 3.
Millet (1970). Millet’s work is often considered alongside that of Mary Ellmann, whose book Thinking about Women (1968) tracks female stereotypes and their psychosocial repercussions in British and American literature, reflecting especially upon how some male critics respond to and sometimes reproduce those stereotypes.
- 4.
Patricia Meyer Spacks asks, in The Female Imagination (1975), why the plot of the female heroine is so often predicated upon reacting to or rejecting existing female tropes, hence pointing to the absence of an affirmative model of female experience in the literary canon. Focusing on the trope of the female heroine in British literature, Ellen Moers provided one of the earlier attempts at outlining a female tradition in Literary Women (1976). Nina Baym’s work has pursued similar questions in the American literary tradition, perhaps most notably in Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (1978).
- 5.
Virginia Woolf (2015, 45).
- 6.
Showalter (1978).
- 7.
Showalter herself reflects on the misprision in ‘Twenty Years on: “A Literature of Their Own” Revisited’ (1998, 99–413). In her account, Showalter especially singles out two critics for commentary. Toril Moi wrote: ‘A distinguished a subtle feminist critic like Elaine Showalter, for example, signals her subtle swerve away from Virginia Woolf by taking over, yet changing, Woolf’s title’ (Moi 1985, 1). Janet Todd additionally noted: ‘In A Literature of Their Own, already a snub, many thought, to the original Woolfian text, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf was trounced for evading the problem of femaleness in her projection of the disturbing and dark aspects of a woman’s psyche onto men’ (Todd 1988, 36).
- 8.
Mill (1989 [1859], 187).
- 9.
Bloom (1978).
- 10.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (2000, 51).
- 11.
Gilbert and Gubar (2000, 73).
- 12.
Psychoanalytic feminism has proven to be a productive field for reexamining the nature of female agency, as experienced by authors and subjects alike. Theorists like Karen Horney and Simon de Beauvoir are notable for challenging Freud’s privileging of the male libido, which ostensibly cultivates in women feelings of envy and anxiety. In Beauvoir’s view, women aspire to the social and political power, not the physical condition, of masculinity. If Gilbert and Gubar frame female authorial anxiety in terms of perceived lack, then, it is by no means clear that they align this anxiety with ‘penis envy’ as such. Beauvoir constitutes a powerful presence throughout The Madwoman in the Attic. See Beauvoir (2014 [1949]). See also Horney (1967 [1922–37]).
- 13.
Kurian (2004, 54) .
- 14.
- 15.
Janet Todd (1988, 1).
- 16.
- 17.
Ezell (1996, 4) .
- 18.
Ezell (1996, 13).
- 19.
- 20.
Guillory (1993, 16).
- 21.
Guillory (1993, 15–16).
- 22.
See also Winders (1991).
- 23.
Harris (2009, 298).
- 24.
McKay (2015, 172).
- 25.
Chapman (2015, 84) .
- 26.
Brown et al. (2016).
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
See also Klein (2014).
- 29.
- 30.
Penley (1986, 143–44).
- 31.
Lee (1902, 72).
- 32.
Woolf (2015 [1929], 109).
- 33.
See, for instance, Auerbach (1978).
- 34.
bell hooks (1982).
- 35.
Donovan (2015, ix).
- 36.
Donovan (2015, xii).
- 37.
- 38.
Butler (1990, xiv–xv).
- 39.
Robyn Wiegman (2002).
- 40.
Wiegman (2002, 33).
- 41.
Stryker (2008, 125).
- 42.
See Butler (1990).
- 43.
- 44.
Susan Stryker (2006, 3).
- 45.
- 46.
Stryker (2006, 9).
- 47.
Stryker (2006, 12).
- 48.
See Haraway (1991).
- 49.
Halberstam (2005, 2).
- 50.
Halberstam (2012, xiii).
- 51.
Halberstam (2012, xiv).
- 52.
Peterson (2009).
- 53.
Kolodny (1976, 420).
- 54.
Fetterley (1978, viii).
- 55.
Thank you to Sarah Burke, Kaelin Kennedy, and Stewart Kingdon, respectively, for providing these insightful responses to the question.
- 56.
Goodman (2016, 1).
- 57.
Goodman (2016, 2).
- 58.
Wollstonecraft (1995 [1792], 124).
- 59.
Grand (1898, 379).
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Stern, K.J. (2018). Feminism and Gender. In: Stocker, B., Mack, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_22
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