Queer Theory and Feminism

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on Four Theories - Marxism, Feminism, Ecocriticism, and Queer Theory given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir.

To see my views on Marxism and Ecocriticism theory, CLICK HERE. 

Queer Theory:

As it is mentioned in A Glossary of Literary text by M.H.Abrahms,

The term “queer” was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and female same-sex love as deviant and unnatural; since the early 1990s, however, it has been adopted by gays and lesbians themselves as a noninvidious term to identify a way of life and an area for scholarly inquiry.

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Queer studies are more about identity than Gender Studies. These studies in literature come up with more insight and motivation for the next generation. The revolution is against those who do not accept such kinds of identities and reject them as being human. Certain mentalities are still in society humans Men and Women if we talk about Gender biases. But what about the others who have different identities? Gay, Lesbians, Bisexual, and Transgender - LGBTQ is come across in wilder areas through the literature. 

Feminism:

The theory of Feminism is very popular among these three. However, the discourse is wildly spreading by time and again through every discipline and discourse. It is the belief that women should have their own rights equally as men have. As it is mentioned in  M. H. Abram’s A Glossary of Literary Terms, 

The earlier twentieth century is the landmark of this theory. It emerges as a socio-political movement that shows the concerns in economics, personal, and social equality of the same sexes. As a distinctive and concerted approach to literature, feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s cultural roles and achievements, and for women’s social and political rights, marked by such books as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). 

Feminism is divided into four waves:

 

• First Wave: 19th and early 20th centuries - promoting women's right to vote
• Second Wave: 1960s -  the women's liberation movement, campaigned for legal and social equality for women.
• Third Wave:  Around 1992 - a focus on individuality and diversity.
• Fourth Wave: Starting around 2012,  which has used social media to combat sexual harassment, violence against women, and rape culture; it is best known for the Me Too movement.

Gynocriticism or gynocritics is a term coined by Elaine Showalter and it intended to construct "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature".

One concern of gynocritics is to identify distinctively feminine subject matters in literature written by women—the world of domesticity, for example, or the special experiences of gestation, giving birth and nurturing, or mother-daughter and woman-woman relations—in which personal and affectional issues, and not external activism, are the primary interest. 

Another concern is to uncover in literary history a female tradition, incorporated in subcommunities of women writers who were aware of, emulated, and found support in earlier women writers, and who in turn provide models and emotional support to their own readers and successors. 

A third undertaking is to show that there is a distinctive feminine mode of experience, or “subjectivity,” in thinking, feeling, valuing, and perceiving oneself and the outer world. Related to this is the attempt (thus far, without much agreement about details) to specify the traits of a “woman’s language,” or distinctively feminine style of speech and writing, in sentence structure, types of relations between the elements of discourse, and characteristic figures of speech and imagery. 

Example: 

Mostly in advertisements (Indian) shoes stereotyped women. They show all women happy with their household work but fewer advertisements are showing them as professionals as men are. Here above advertisement shows how females can work in men's professions. Also, the positive aspect is that only her father supported her ad by that time the entire family also support her. But in this stereotypical scene, we can see that she still doing household work along with her passion field.

It means that women can do man's professions but along with locked themselves in the cage of household work?