November 24, 2012
Feminist Criticism and the oversimplification of roles.
ecriture feminine is defined by the Bedford Glossary as a way of writing that is purely feminine. That is an oversimplification but it means that women tend to write in a style that is entirely their own. "According to Kristeva, feminine language is derived from the preoedipal period of fusion between mother and child, the period during which children do not recognize that they are separate from their mothers." (172) This was interesting for me because I have trouble understanding how they could simply put "feminine" and "masculine" writing into two different categories. I thought this was troublesome for our time now because our understanding of human sexuality is very different now. We have transgendered people and even those who are male/ female physically but feel they were born into the wrong body. This would seem to throw the entire idea of feminine writing into chaos. How would people who prescribe to other labels find their writing? Is there a way to track the differences?
2 comments:
to be honest I never even thought of how gender roles today have changed massively, and how the lines between man and woman have been blurred. I am not sure how people who prescribe to other labels would be any different from the way they are exposed to other labels they differ from. I think it could easily be related to how a man comes across a woman's literature. For the people of today who are transgendered i'm sure if it is not obvious to us a society yet, they will form there own categories of writing just how women did. There may not be a way tot rack the differences but there should be a way to track how the othering of categories came about or evolved over periods of time.
I guess this big question is, How important is gender really/how should gender be defined? Being defined a certain gender comes with its certain roles and expectations, which reminded me of a piece I read about a child who was being raised genderless. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/baby-storm-raised-genderless-gender-dangerous-experiment-child/story?id=13693760#.ULL90ofAcb0 Apparently the child will be able to choose whichever gender he or she wants to be when he or she is old enough. "People are calling the parents crackpot liberals indulging in crude social engineering that are going to set up their child to be a social pariah." But really, why is it such a big deal? Obviously, probably because gender has been defined since the beginning of time, but it will be interesting to see how this child grows up.
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