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Post-structural feminism is a branch of
feminism Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
that engages with insights from post-structuralist thought. Poststructural feminism emphasizes "the contingent and discursive nature of identities", and in particular the social construction of gendered subjectivities. Like post-structuralism itself, the feminist branch is in large part a tool for literary analysis, but it also deals in psychoanalysis and socio-cultural critique, and seeks to explore relationships between language, sociology, subjectivity and power-relations as they impact upon gender in particular. Poststructural feminism also seeks to criticize the kyriarchy, while not being limited by narrow understandings of kyriarchal theory, particularly through an analysis of the pervasiveness of othering, the social exile of those people removed from the narrow concepts of normal.


Origins

Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are considered the mothers of post-structuralist feminist theory. Since the 1990s, these three together with Bracha Ettinger have considerably influenced French feminism and feminist psychoanalysis.


Hélène Cixous

In the 1970s, Cixous began writing about the relationship between sexuality and language. Like many other feminist theorists, Cixous believes that human sexuality is directly tied to how people communicate in society. In "The Laugh of the Medusa" she discusses how women have been repressed through their bodies all through history. She suggests that if women are forced to remain in their bodies as a result of male repression then they can do one of two things. The first option is to remain trapped inside their bodies, thereby perpetuating the passivity women have been a party to throughout history. The second option is to use the female body as a medium of communication, a tool through which women can speak. This is ironic given the body, the very thing women have been defined by and trapped within, can now become a vehicle in transcending the boundaries once created by the body. In the original myth Medusa was a beautiful woman who confronted endless hardships that were brought about by the actions of men. She was raped, killed, and beheaded by various gods. However even in the face of tragedy and disgrace, Medusa was still portrayed as a meaningful figure. Following the moment her head was cut off, a Pegasus flew out of her body, representing the birth of beauty. In the more popular version known by most today, Medusa is a monster with hair of a thousand snakes whose glance will turn anything she looks at into stone. Cixous claims that this monstrous image of Medusa exists only because it has been directly determined by the male gaze. Even though this version of the myth is misrepresentative of the original version, people continue to believe the modern version without question. Cixous suggests that it is important for women to expose the flaws in language that currently exist. Through the awareness of such flaws, as well as the invention of new ways of expression, women can overcome the obstacles that are constructed by what she labels a phallocentric discourse. She argues that even through attempts to expose current inadequacies, it will always be impossible to define a feminine practice of writing because this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded. "It will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by those who are breakers of automatisms."


Luce Irigaray

Born in
Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...
in 1932, Irigaray is a French feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural theorist. Best known works: ''Speculum of the Other Woman'' (1974) and ''This Sex Which is Not One'' (1977). She was inspired by the psychoanalytic theories of Jaques Lacan and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida. Her work aims to reveal a perceived masculine philosophy underlying language and gestures toward a “new” feminine language that would allow women to express themselves if it could be spoken.


Julia Kristeva

Born on June 24, 1941, in
Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...
Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic,
psychoanalyst PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: and is a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious processes and their influence on conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Based on dream interpretation, psychoanalysis is also a talk th ...
,
feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
, and (most recently) novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has become influential in today's international critical analysis, cultural theory, and feminism after publishing her first book ''Semeiotikè'' in 1969. Although Kristeva does not refer to her own writing as feminist, many feminists turn to her work in order to expand and develop various discussions and debates in feminist theory and criticism. Three elements of Kristeva's thought have been particularly important for feminist theory in Anglo-American contexts: *Her attempt to bring the body back into discourses in the human sciences; *Her focus on the significance of the maternal body and pre-oedipal in the constitution of subjectivity; and *Her notion of abjection as an explanation for oppression and discrimination.


Theory


Literary criticism and ''l’écriture féminine''

Poststructural feminist literary criticism takes post-structuralism and combines it with feminist views and looks to see if a literary work has successfully used the process of mimesis on the image of the female. If successful, then a new image of a
woman A woman is an adult female human. Before adulthood, a female child or Adolescence, adolescent is referred to as a girl. Typically, women are of the female sex and inherit a pair of X chromosomes, one from each parent, and women with functi ...
has been created by a woman for a woman, therefore it is not a biased opinion created by
men A man is an adult male human. Before adulthood, a male child or adolescent is referred to as a boy. Like most other male mammals, a man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromosome from the fa ...
. '' Écriture féminine'' literally means ''women's writing.'' It is a
philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
that promotes women's experiences and feelings to the point that it strengthens the work. It is a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the 1970s. Cixous first uses this term in her essay, ''The Laugh of the Medusa'' in which she asserts:
''Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence," the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word "impossible" and writes it as "the end."''


Critique of classical psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating fro ...
established the initial theories which would serve as a basis for some of Hélène Cixous' arguments in her writings. Freud's analysis of gender roles and sexual identity concluded with separate male ( Oedipus) and female ( Electra) theories of which Cixous was critical. For Bracha Ettinger both Oedipus and Electra are complexes that belong to the phallic paradigm. She proposes a different paradigm: the feminine-matrixial borderspace.


Abjection

Julia Kristeva developed the idea of the abject as that which is rejected by or disturbs social reasonthe communal consensus that underpins a social order. The "abject" exists accordingly somewhere between the concepts of subject and object, representing taboo elements of the self barely separated off in a liminal space. Kristeva claims that within the boundaries of what one defines as subjecta part of oneselfand objectsomething that exists independently of oneselfthere reside pieces that were once categorized as a part of oneself or one's identity that has since been rejectedthe abject.


Criticism

Poststructural feminism has been criticised for its abandonment of the humanistic female subject, and for tactical naivety in its rejection of any form of female
essentialism Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their Identity (philosophy), identity. In early Western thought, Platonic idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an Theory of forms, "idea" or "f ...
. French materialist feminists have criticized the American reduction of French feminism to its poststructuralist current. They point out that Cixous and Kristeva, among others, did not even claim to be feminists.


Leading figures

* Judith Butler – explored the constricting nature of social norms in constructing 'normal' men and women; and argued for a feminism without a feminist subject, fearing the constraining influence implicit in overt
identity politics Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, Race (human categorization), race, nationality, religion, Religious denomination, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, Socioeconomic status, social background ...
. * Hélène Cixous – argued in her best-known essay 'The Laugh of the Medusa' that writing was more important in the construction of womanhood than biology. * Bracha Ettinger * Jane Gallop * Elizabeth Grosz * Luce Irigaray – became famous for her poststructuralist work on ''The Sex Which is Not One'' (1977) and the deconstruction of the Oedipal Complex. * Julia Kristeva * Teresa de Lauretis * Joan Wallach Scott * Monique Wittig


Literary examples

*The heroine of Nice Work admits that, when younger, she "allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while"; but adds that she soon came to realise that "we aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language". *The heroine of Possession, a novel by A.S. Byatt, more ruefully acknowledges that "we live in the truth of what Freud discovered...we question everything except the centrality of sexuality - Unfortunately feminism can hardly avoid privileging such matters".A. S. Byatt, ''Possession: A Romance'' (1990) p. 254 and p. 222


See also

* Deconstruction * Feminist literary criticism * Lacanianism * Postmodern feminism * Phallogocentrism *
Queer theory Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies (formerly often known as gay and lesbian studies) and women's studies. The term "queer theory" is broadly associated with the study a ...


References


Further reading

* * * *


External links


'Poststructuralism - French Feminism'
{{Feminism Feminist movements and ideologies * Post-structuralism