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GLOSARIO BLOQUE 3

Sources:

Baym, Nina (ed.). The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2. New York
& London: W. W. Norton, 2003.

Beasley, Christine. Gender and Sexuality. Critical Theories, Critical Thinkers.


London: SAGE Publications, 2005.

Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction. Troy, New York: The Whitston
Publishing Company, 1993.

Drabble, Margaret (ed.). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford:


O.U.P., 2000.

Goodman, Lizbeth (ed.). Literature and Gender. London: The Open University,
1996.

“African-American women’s writing”: Narratives of black


women’s lives when black women no longer live their lives in
cultures dominated by a white, male “norm”, and when black
women are free to write their own stories. As male critics long
condemned women’s writing for not being, in essence, “male”, so
white critics have long castigated black authors for writing in
ways that defy white critics’ expectations about what is important.
However, many black women writers of working-class
experiences, or from “outside” the English language, are
marginalized within the already marginal category of black
women. The impact of these black women writers was largely
made by black women themselves, while black male authors
tended to deny a connection to those who came before them. So,
black women writers felt the need to challenge even the
developing male voices, as they did not represent the wide
experiences and ideas of black women.
The importance of teaching black women’s writing in the
academic curriculum is growing day by day. But problems of race
and representation, appropriation and interpretation persist. In
teaching about and studying African-American women’s fiction,
it is important that we remember the dynamics of race and class,
as well as gender in the classroom. [Goodman]
Angelou, Maya (1928): Respected writer, essayist and activist
who is now hailed as a classic of feminist and black women’s
writing. Angelou refers to the tremendous addition to the burden
of black Americans with the legacy of slavery and its impact on
the self-esteem of a race, and with associated reverberations of
repeated and continuing oppressions of a racist society, language
and educational system. Famous for her autobiographical writing,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), the first volume of her
life story, in which she highlights the image of the caged bird so
familiar in much feminist literature, the book is a clear inspiration
for Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. [Goodman]
Beecher Stowe, Harriet (1811-1896): A white woman writer
whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) brought the experience of
slaves and former slaves to the wide public attention, in and
through literature. The novel was a best seller, and her politics
influenced many white American writers such as Louisa May
Alcott. She made a major contribution to the development of a
black literary history with her novel, but the fact that she was
white and middle-class has been criticized as in part an
appropriation of black people’s experiences, reinvented and
perhaps misinterpreted by a white author. However, no one black
woman author can be seen to represent all black women either. In
later novels such as The Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of
Orr’s Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869) and Poganuc People
(1878), she developed the figure of an innocent young woman
whose religious intuitions resist the bookish theologies of male
religious authorities. [Goodman, Norton]
Black Renaissance: the First Black Renaissance (formerly called
the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ or the ‘Negro Renaissance’) can be
identified as beginning in the mid-1920s. Though it was centered
in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-
speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who
lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.
The Negro was placed, for a time, at the heart of a national myth
and dramatized a self-image at odds with that offered by
American society as an adequate account of black life. This
phenomenon appeared at a time of rapid cultural change and
literary development, much as the 1970s were for women writers.
The ‘Second Black Renaissance’ is a term used to describe a later
flowering of work by African-American writers, and other people
of colour in North America. It began with the writings of Richard
Wright, author of many key works including Uncle Tom’s
Children (1938) and Native Son (1940), and led to a rapidly
growing body of literature by people of colour, including many
women writers. [Goodman]
Chodorow, Nancy (1944) and Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923-
1992): “Women-centred”, Gender Difference Freudian
(psychoanalytic) feminists who propose that the organization of
the family within patriarchal society produces different kinds of
self for men and women, and in particular induces women’s
nurturing qualities. Such positive qualities could be used to
reform society by spreading them to men.
Alongside with most psychoanalytic feminists, Chodorow
argues that women’s supposedly negative identity as constituted
by lack –lack of a penis– must be reassessed. She accuses Freud
of assuming that people’s selfhood depends only on separating
from others (from the mother). In her view, girls partially reject
their mothers not for a penis/father/baby, but rather out of
disappointed love for their mothers. Chodorow does not mean that
girls remain incomplete, but show greater relational potential
which impels women to become mothers. Women contribute to
develop connections to manhood in boys and, thus, encourage the
perpetuation of their own oppression. She recommends that men
should be more involved in parenting. In a period of concern for
others, Chodorow suggests that women can offer a model for
reforming neo-liberal individualism and masculinity. [Beasley]
Daly, Mary (1928-2010): A radical feminist concerned with
“Women-centred” Gender Difference who insists that women are
intrinsically different from men. She identifies women with the
creative and life affirming. [Beasley]
Feminism and Modernist thinking: Feminism has widely been
associated with Modernist thinking, if those types of feminism
that began in the second wave of the 1960s and 1970s offer a
weaker Modernism. Liberal and Marxist feminisms, which began
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continue to the
present day, are strongly attached to Modernism. Liberal
feminism is often seen as synonymous with feminism per se.
Modernism in the West has involved two major traditions:
the individualist tradition, which followed Hobbes, Locke, Kant,
Mill and Wollstonecraft, has become the mainstream “ideology”
of Western capitalist societies, and the collectivist tradition that
may be linked to Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Goldman, Kollontai and
Said, which has had a greater impact in Socialist societies.
[Beasley]
Friedan, Betty (1921-2006): Together with Gloria Steinem
(1934), also in the USA, and Beatrice Faust (1939) in Australia,
this thinker exemplified the new Liberal feminism. Born in the
1960s and 1970s, she can be inserted in the second wave of
Liberal feminism, which denounced that women remained
confined to the domestic sphere and continued to be discriminated
against, not only on the basis of merit but also on the basis of
their sex. [Beasley]
Freud (1856-1939) and Feminism: Sigmund Freud, the well-
known Austrian neurologist, has been considered ‘the father’ of
modern psychoanalysis. Some of his most relevant theories have
been widely adopted by feminists because of its extraordinary
account of the development of the self. Freud is interested in how
we become human, in how we develop a self. He asks not what is
a woman, but how is a woman made. Freud remarks the
importance of our early years and sees children and people with
psychological problems as offering us insights into what we are
and how we came into being. For him the self is multifaceted, full
of tensions and fragmented. In his view, we are not fixed
creatures and, although the construction of the gendered self is
difficult to alter consciously, changing social assumptions about
the centrality of men/the masculine is possible yet difficult. That
is why psychoanalytic feminists assert that Freud’s approach is
helpful to provide a space for change in gendered society.
Nevertheless, most feminists are critical of aspects of
Freud’s work because, for him, social relations appear to flow
from an innate biological sexual hierarchy. They criticize him on
the grounds that he is not simply describing how male-dominated
societies come into being, but is accepting and prescribing male
dominance as the basis of all human culture and human selfhood.
[Beasley]
Gender Difference feminism: Developed from the 1980s
onwards, Gender Difference feminism is somewhat more
sympathetic to Marxism. However, Gender difference feminists
also challenged Marxism’s universal claims regarding the one
struggle, a singular political agenda based on a universal co-
operative nature. For them, equality means sameness between
men and women. They give value to women’s group identity as
women. Gender difference theorists accept and celebrate
difference and re-value women and the feminine, the latter
appearing as a positive reassessment of the socially marginal.
Gender Difference feminism offers a turning point for women and
the feminine, highlighting a specific sense of the self and
increasing an affirmation of women and woman-to woman
relationships.
Freud’s work is seen as useful by feminists concentrating on
gender difference because psychoanalysis argues that gender
(sexual) difference is what makes the self and indeed underpins
social life. Gender difference feminists contend that sexual
identities are not simply the result of social imitation or modeling,
but are far more deeply internalized into the very structure of
one’s identity. Feminists of difference stress the role of the
mother in the development of the self, in contrast to Freud himself
who highlighted the father. However, all psychoanalytic feminists
suggest that Freud’s analysis can be employed to support a
positive re-evaluation of women/femininity, despite its male focus
and bias. [Beasley]
Gilligan, Carol, (1936), Sara Ruddick (1935) and Virginia
Held (1929): “Women-centred”, Gender Difference theorists
concerned with promoting a “care ethic” in society. They argue
that women’s intimate connection with others, especially as
experienced in their social responsibility for children, suggests a
better model of self and of social relations than Liberal
competitive individualism. [Beasley]
Hartsock, Nancy (1943): A theorist concerned with “Women-
centred” Gender Difference, Hartsock argues a position marked
by its socialist feminist commitments. For her, women are not
biologically different from men, yet patriarchal power relations
produce different experiences and senses of self. As women are
not powerful, they develop a different and useful “take” on social
life. Hartsock distinguishes her work from that of radical and
psychoanalytic accounts of gender difference and women’s selves
by arguing that she focuses on social positioning and not upon a
universal gendered sense of self/identity. Critics on Gender
Difference feminism suggest that Hartsock has employed a
similar macro understanding of women as positively different, as
constituting a socially differential group identity that must claim
self-definition to resist continuous subjugation. [Beasley]
Lacan, Jacques (1901-1981): French psychoanalyst and
psychiatrist, and a contemporary interpreter of Freud’s approach.
His work becomes important in Postmodern feminist
psychoanalytic accounts because he replaces his biological stance
with a more thoroughly cultural perspective. Lacan sees gender
difference as a psycho-social construction, based on language
rather than on responses to literal bodily forms. [Beasley]
Liberalism and Liberal feminism: Possibly the only widespread
and “popular” platform for feminist thinking today because of its
willingness to celebrate the virtues of mainstream capitalist
democracies. Liberal feminism is a response to the development
of Liberalism, obviously based on Liberal thought. Born in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Liberalism offered a form of
thought in which “the individual” is an autonomous rational
being. According to Enlightenment thinking, all those who can
reason are capable of independent thought and action and should
participate in society. Liberal feminism pointed out that the
Liberal, supposedly universal standards of humanity, equality and
reason were not in fact universal because women were denied full
social participation, public life and education. Still today, Liberal
feminists argue that mainstream Liberalism’s all-embracing
pretensions are built upon the assumption that only Western men
matter, that men’s equality in the West is equivalent to equality
for all fully human beings. Liberal feminism, from its earliest
forms to now, may be understood as focusing upon the
elimination of constraints facing women and gaining equal civil
rights for women as public citizens. The main orientation is to
assimilate women more comfortably into a basically masculine
model of social life without much altering the discrepancies
between the existing differential roles of men and women.
[Beasley]
Modernism: Among many other things, Modernism is
preoccupied with what is universal about society and power
relations within that society. [Beasley]
Modernist thinking: It is concerned with what is universal to
human beings. Typically associated with them, it defends the
notion that they possess an essence which sets them apart from
other animals and nature. Modernist thinking is optimistic about
the opportunities for change and sustains that everything gets
better over time. [Beasley]
Modernist “Women-centred” feminism: Predominant version
of western feminism of the 1980s that rejects the stress on the
universal human of Liberalism/Marxism, but remains committed
to Modernist accounts of power and society. Its political project
aims mainly at discovering women’s uncontaminated, authentic
differences, and perceives the world through the lens of a decisive
division between male and female experience. There is a
concomitant concern with women’s commonality as a group,
rather than with Human commonality. “Women-centred”
feminists assert the positive value of women’s difference from
men and commonality with each other. [Beasley]
Morrison, Toni and The Bluest Eye: Morrison, the 1993 Nobel
Laureate in Literature, is the central figure in putting fiction by
and about African American women at the forefront of the late-
twentieth-century literary canon. Whereas the legacy of slavery
had effaced a usable tradition and critical stereotypes at times
restricted such writers’ range, Morrison’s fiction serves as a
model for reconstructing a culturally empowering past. She joins
the great American tradition of self-invention: her own example
and her editorial work have figured importantly in the careers of
other writers, such as Toni Bambara and Gayl Jones.
Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), is uncommonly
mature for its confident use of a variety of narrative voices.
Throughout her career, Morrison has been dedicated to
constructing a practical cultural identity of both a race and a
gender whose self-images have been obscured or denied by
dominating forces, and in The Bluest Eye she already shows that
narrative strategy is an important element in such construction. It
is a girl’s need to be loved that generates the novel’s action,
inserted in a plot that involves displacement and alienated
affections (and, eventually, incestuous rape). It is the family’s
inability to produce as style of existence in which love can be
born and thrive that leads to such a devastating fate for
Morrison’s protagonist. Pecola Breedlove –the protagonist–
escapes her sense of ugliness into madness, convinced that she
has magically been given blue eyes. These, she believes, will
reverse the bleak circumstances of her life, making her pretty and
thus valued by others. Morrison’s vision is not merely limited to
the black community, though Pecola clearly represents the social,
economic, and political position of African-Americans. More
universally, though, Pecola might be seen as the innocent set upon
by the world. [Norton, Carmean]
Nussbaum, Martha (1947): An internationally regarded and
highly influential academic from the USA who worked for six
years as a research advisor at the United Nations University
World’s Institute for Development Economics Research. Like
Mary Wollstonecraft, she is against convention and habit, and for
reason. Nussbaum sees reason as the truth opposing convention
and habit, in particular those conventions/habits which
disempower or oppress us. Thus, reason enables us to throw off
power, to throw off oppression. She is particularly antagonistic to
Postmodern feminists, the most skeptical theorists regarding the
claims of reason, because they refute any notion of any objective
position outside a social context, outside social life, or which can
escape power.
Nussbaum is an example of how theoretical waves are not
confined to particular historical periods and can co-exist today.
She identifies her work with second-wave Liberal feminism. She
follows many of Mary Wollstonecraft concerns and talks
specifically about the works of John Stuart Mill. The connections
between Wollstonecraft and Nussbaum show the features of
contemporary Liberal feminism (the notion of reason; women as
the “test case” enabling assessment of a just society in Liberal
terms, that is, assessment of its claims regarding equality and
democracy; and the focus on social reform). Nussbaum argues
that women’s rights must be answered before referring to cultural
conventions/customs. Thus, gender equity must precede the
claims of multiculturalism. Nussbaum campaigns to eliminate
some cultural/religious protocols by means of a range of
interventions, even including armed ones, on the basis of human
rights for women, being this a practical approach for some
feminists and a return to a frankly imperialist tone of earlier
Liberal thinkers like Mill.
Nussbaum adopts a strong Modernist perspective, a “grand
theory” approach which offers to explain and solve global
problems according to a singular conception of the truth. She is
antagonistic to those who do not share her certainty and accuses
Postmodern writers like Jacques Derrida (1930) and Judith
Butler (1956) of “political quietism.” She even asserts that Butler
offers nothing to the poor and disadvantaged. [Beasley]
People-of-colour writing: A general term that includes First
Nations people (Native Americans), as well as Aboriginal people
and Asian, Hispanic, Caribbean, and many others. [Goodman]
Postmodernism: Roughly speaking, postmodernism is skeptical
about any universalizing foundational account, and wary of any
notions of any founding explanatory centre that is eternal or fixed
in human life. Postmodernists declare that there is no essential
truth to the human, social power, the self or history. [Beasley]
Psychoanalysis and Modernist “Women-centred”
writers/feminists of difference: Employing psychoanalysis
(gender/sexual difference is what makes the self and indeed
underpins social life), feminists of difference valued positively
the fact that women have a different self/identity which is a
source for social reform. Gender Difference feminists stress the
role of the mother in the development of the self, in contrast to
Freud himself, who highlighted the role of the father/the
masculine. All psychoanalytic feminists suggest that Freud’s
analysis can be used to support a positive re-evaluation of
women/femininity, despite its male focus and bias. They also
assert that changing social assumptions about the centrality of
men/ the masculine is possible yet difficult. [Beasley]
Reason and Feminism: First-wave feminists employ reason as a
means to persuade men in power to grant women equal rights. On
the other hand, second-wave feminists (beginning in the 1960s
and 1970s) began to argue that, supposedly, genderless universal
standards like reason were not merely in practice only granted to
men, but actually about men. Rather than arguing, as first-wave
feminists did, second-wave feminists increasingly drew attention
to the status of reason as a thoroughly social term. If it was part of
the social world, it might be about power, and power is male
biased. Reason is a way of reaching the truth. Postmodern
feminisms are even skeptical because, ironically, they are sure
that claims to reason promoted universalist authoritarian
absolutism –the belief that one is absolutely right. [Beasley]
Rich, Adrienne (1929): “Women-centred” Gender Difference
theorist and poet who sees lesbians as having more in common
with other women than with men. She outlines what she called a
“lesbian continuum” which suggests that the experiences of
heterosexual women and lesbians are not as distinct as
heterosexist and patriarchal society presumes. In her work she
focuses upon what is common to women, what is shared between
women, and how this is different from men.
“Women-centred” Gender Difference feminism has been
strongly contested, because it is viewed as reflecting conservative
popular ideas about the immutable and unitary nature of men and
women. Social constructionists asserted that the point was not
whether men and women are different, or whether common
positive features of womanhood may be discovered, but the main
emphasis is put on power. Difference is not the cause of social
discrimination but rather arises from it.
Rich has written directly and overtly as a woman, out of a
woman’s body and experience, for to take women’s existence
seriously as theme and source of art was something she had been
hungering to do, needing to do, all her writing life. [Beasley,
Norton]
Rushin, Kate and “The Bridge Poem” with “gender/race on
the agenda”: Rushin laments the need of some white feminists to
use individual black women as a bridge to black experience. It is
just this representative role which Rushin rejects in no uncertain
terms, claiming instead her right to be the bridge only to her own
true self. [Goodman]
Second-wave Liberal feminism: is the most “welfarist” version
of mainstream Liberalism which advances a sense of collective or
social responsibility and a marked attention to social justice. It
pays attention to repealing or reforming social obstacles to
women’s public participation, and enables them to achieve the
status of autonomous “individuals” in public life as equals of
men. However, second-wave Liberal feminists are less focused
upon individual self-realization, self-expression and self-
fulfillment as a way to alter social hierarchy. Such thinkers as
Gloria Steinem and Beatrice Faust outline a more collective
political method to achieve the individualized goal of equality
among individuals. Faust describes Naomi Wolf (third-wave
feminism) as narrowly individualistic, as she provides an inferior
model of political practice by comparison with Australian Liberal
feminists, because Wolf fails to take into consideration political
and policy institutions, like governments. [Beasley]
Socialist feminisms: They include Marxist, Socialist and Radical
feminisms, and are more inclined to question an unthinking
assumption that a single viewpoint can give access to
foundational truth, because this may amount to little more than
support for the status quo of the Liberal capitalist society. Notions
of the universal human are typically undercut in these feminisms
by recognition of specific social differences like class, race and
gender. [Beasley]
Third-wave Liberal feminists: Often called “post-feminists”,
they argue that the 1960s and 1970s women’s movement and
those which continue to adhere to its agenda are inclined to
overestimate social obstacles and are disinclined to admit
women’s own responsibility for their lives and status. They are
sometimes described as “anti-feminists” and contend that women
must take individual responsibility and not hide behind a group
status as “victims”. They still assume and advocate the equality of
men and women, but their explanation for women’s inequality
resides more in individuals, and in particular in individual women
than in social discrimination. [Beasley]
Walker, Alice (1944) and The Colour Purple: Many of Walker’s
characters become adept in the new cultural language of Black
Arts and black power to which the author herself contributed as a
young writer. The Color Purple (1982), her famous third novel,
centres on a strong woman with a need to write and a love of
creative work; a woman who comes to know herself better as she
learns to use language on her own advantage. She makes her
strongest narrative statement, formulated as it is from what she
calls a “womanist” (as opposed to a strictly feminist) perspective.
This approach draws on the black folk expression “womanish”,
which in a mother-to-daughter context signifies a call to adult,
mature, responsible (and courageous) behaviour. Such behaviour
is beneficial to both women and men, and is necessary, in
Walker’s words, for the survival of all African Americans by
keeping creativity alive. In the novel, the protagonist’s ability to
write letters gives her the possibility to express herself and act
successfully in order to obtain the status of an individual in the
world.
Throughout her career, Walker speaks for the need for
strength from African American women, and her writing is ever
conscious of providing workable models for such strength to be
achieved. In The Color Purple she represents more prosperous
black women than were usually represented in fiction. [Norton,
Goodman]
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-97): As the pioneer of Liberal
feminism, Wollstonecraft (the mother of Mary Shelley) argued for
women to be included in the masculine project. Her aim was for
women to be given access to education, to the Liberal model of
knowledge and rationality and to enter public life. Wollstonecraft
did not ignore women’s differences from men but asserted that
these did not exclude them from reason or rights. Her influential
work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (published in 1792),
applies Enlightenment ideas to the situation of women and states
that Liberal feminism is based upon the idea that women are
individuals possessed of reason, that as such they are entitled to
full human rights and have the freedom to do what they choose to
do. She points out that women’s dependency has a negative
impact upon the future training of boys and men, and proposes
that those responsible for this training (women) must be able to
exercise reason in order to better train children and thus improve
the whole of society. [Beasley]

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