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TEACHING FEMINISM THROUGH

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING

CWWA AHRC postgraduate development programme Liverpool

January 2014

Gina Wisker University of Brighton

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Why? How? When? What with? What problems?

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WHY? The issues which first and second wave feminism

dealt with are still current - differently nuanced Teaching without any recognition of values

inherent in the context, texts, discussions is dishonest and dull

Troublesome knowledge and transformative learning are critical for learning – students, staff and researchers

Theory empowers and helps articulation - you have a right to speak and the intellectual engagement afforded by theory clarifies enriches and enables more complex thinking, nuanced arguments, tolerance and engagement(William Perry stage 9 thinking)

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THROUGH WRITING? …storytellers are a threat. They

threaten all champions of control, they frighten the usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.(Chinua Achebe, 1987 )

 Read it in the spirit of breaking the rules (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000)

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HOW AND WHERE TO START?

Going back to Wollstonecraft and Woolf -if we refuse to ‘think back through our

mothers’ we shall create ghosts of our own.(Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik on Woolf’s A room of one’s own)

Woolf identified Economics, space, rightsThe male valorised forms of expression and

topics – the novel was pliable in women's hands Establishing a history , ongoing discussions-

gives our work depth

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Second wave –re reading re writing new writing

Focus on the body, domestic, differences in language, power imbalances

“Notes from the Front Line” (1983): ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’ (69) Angela Carter

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I believe that all myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of material human practice. I’m in the demythologising business …. How that social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing …. This investigation of the social fictions that regulate our lives – what Blake called the ‘mind-forged manacles’ – is what I’ve concerned myself with consciously since that time.

I'm in the demythologising business ‘Notes from the Front Line’ in, On Gender and Writing, 1984 pp70, 71.

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TOPICALITY ITALIAN WOMEN DANCING DANCE DURING THE ONE BILLION RISING CAMPAIGN ON VALENTINE'S DAY IN ROME , THIS YEAR.

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SOME TOPICAL TEXT ON THE TOPICAL The campaign for women's liberation never went away, but this year a new

swell built up and broke through. Since the early summer, I've been talking to feminist activists and writers for a short book, All The Rebel Women, and as I tried to keep up with the protests, marches and talks, my diary became a mess of clashing dates. The rush was such that in a single weekend in October, you could have attended a feminist freshers' fair in London, the North East Feminist Gathering in Newcastle, a Reclaim the Night march in Edinburgh, or a discussion between different generations of feminist activists at the British Library (this sold out in 48 hours, was moved to a room four times bigger, and sold out again).

You could have joined one of the country's 149 local grassroots groups, or shared your experience of misogyny on the site Laura Bates, 27, started in April 2012. Her Everyday Sexism Project has proved so successful that it was rolled out to 17 countries on its first anniversary this year, tens of thousands of women worldwide writing about the street harassment, sexual harassment, workplace discrimination and body-shaming they encounter. The project embodies that feminist phrase "the personal is political", a consciousness-raising exercise that encourages women to see how inequality affects them, proves these problems aren't individual but collective, and might therefore have political solutions. This year, 6,000 stories that have been sent to the project about harassment or assault on public transport – the majority never reported to authorities – were used to train 2,000 police officers in London, and create a public awareness campaign Kira Cochrane  

The Guardian, Tuesday 10 December 2013

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IS SHOWING THE CONTEMPORARY IMAGES AND FOCUS ON RACE, MISOGYNY ETC USEFUL ?

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BODY IMAGE, SEXUALISATION, WOMEN INTERNALISING NEGATIVE SELF IMAGE 5 Minutes Of What The Media Actua

lly Does To Women upworthy.com "I don't look like that, and I don't desire t

o look like that." —Kate Winslet

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How would you engage students with still topical issues?

And make them more topical ? How would you do this through

literature and the media?

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WOMEN’S WRITING AND FEMINIST THEORY COURSE 3RD YR UNI BRIGHTON (FIRST FEW

WEEKS) Theory/Politics/Texts Actions for Content Page Build Content  Create Assessment  Add Interactive Tool  Content Theory Reading for Week One  Attached Files: handout [1].docx (22.788 KB) Attached some Woolf extracts for you to read prior to lecture  - will take about

30 minutes - really helpful to understand Deborah's lecture K Useful article on Ecriture Feminine  Attached Theory/Politics/Texts  Attached Files: THEORY-POLITICS-TEXTS 2012.pptx  (106.218 KB) Kate's summary of different feminist political movements and different feminist

literary theory approaches Useful Critical Essays on Ecriture Feminine  Purkiss, Carter, Ann Rosalind Jones Michelle Roberts "Middle-Class Hero" on i-player  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00wx9q0

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WOMEN’S WRITING AND FEMINIST THEORY

WEEK ONE

THEORY/POLITICS/TEXTS

(Lecture and online ppt s by Kate Aughterson, uni Brighton with additions by Gina Wisker

uni Brighton )

Feminism: “a doctrine or movement that advocates equal rights for women” (Collins English Dictionary)

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POLITICAL FEMINISM(S): 1 (“FIRST WAVE FEMINISM”) An analysis of female exclusion from dominant power and political institutions (which are masculine);

the political attempt to redress the balance of that exclusion by striving to provide equality in the political, the economic and social spheres, for women and men.

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POLITICAL FEMINISM(S): 2(“SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM”)

begins with an analysis of women's essential, biological, differences from men;

Celebrates difference as one with own culture and history, castigates masculine culture as authoritarian, hierarchical and closed.

seeks to introduce the "feminine" (qualities of nurturing/openness/fluidity/ negotiation etc) to the dominant masculine culture.

Includes Marxist feminism: biological difference used to justify economic subordination

(family into economic system) creating an ideology of masculinity and femininity ascribing

certain roles for men and women which are supposedly natural.

political change: either the link between biology and domestic labour has to be broken: OR, domestic labour has to be accorded its real value in society.

The personal is political

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POLITICAL FEMINISM(S) 3(“THIRD WAVE FEMINISM”) both masculinity and femininity are

social, linguistic and economic constructions

as such, the constructions can be utilised by both men and women as fluid identities to assert differing and changing power relationships.

.

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WHY ARE LITERARY STUDIES IMPORTANT TO FEMINISTS?

Texts can perpetuate and construct women's subordinate position in society (ideology, interpellation) AND,

Texts can also be potential places for liberating rebellion, for both writers and readers

Texts offer examples, vehicles using language and the imagination, opportunity to engage theory –and a space to discuss

Why is feminism important in literary studies? Giving women an equal say as critics and constructors of a

canon = basic freedom of speech Showalter: "studying a different culture” Different choices and perspectives

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Avoid polemic Offer challenges Respect differences Expect historical about turns (feminism was a turn off for

years) Engage with and provoke arguments Work through troubled transformative texts and question

promotes-if the aim is to engage with an own critical thinking –which feminist theory and criticism intends - we need to do this ourselves through our teaching and learning practice .

Context culture perspective differences Reinvigorate the reasons for engaging with feminist criticism,

theories, approaches, infused topics- gender and power imbalances, women's bodies under patriarchal control (Indian rape, Saudi Arabian codes of behaviour, glass ceilings)

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What has worked for you as a student or teacher in the past? To engage with ideas, arguments, and particularly feminism in practice through texts?

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I work through introducing ideas and issues, access to

discussed theory and important critical texts (theorising aids articulation not just anger and silence)

Promotes, discussions , questions explored through texts - often in extract

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How does this poem and these extracts and examples engage us with

The body, women's language, gender and power, culture and context in relation to gender

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RE WRITING BLUEBEARD ‘THE BLOODY CHAMBER’ ANGELA CARTER (1967?) AND THE GLASS BOTTLE TRICK NALO HOPKINSON (2001) Why bluebeard? Male wealth power rights ownership Women's bodies and persons only to be controlled

and dominated , murder legitimated The enclosed room of oppression Violence, loss of history, silence, cultural inflected

readings Sexuality, energy, mother rescues (Carter) sisterhood

might not be supportive (postfeminists Hopkinson)

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IF YOU WERE TO OPEN THE DOOR, I SHOULD BE VERY ANGRYPERRAULT’S BLUEBEARD ILLUSTRATED B Y GUSTAVE DORE C19TH

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And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean (13).

Rapt, he intoned: “Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery.” A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside.’ (17)

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BRINGING ETHNICITY AND CULTURE INTO THE GENDER DISCUSSION

‘what do you think of Audre Lorde’s comment that massa’s tools will never dismantle massa’s house?’

‘in my hands massa’s tools don’t dismantle massa’s house-and in fact i don’t want to destroy it so much as I want to undertake massive renovations-then build me a house of my own’(Hopkinson/Mehan 2004 p 7)

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THE GLASS BOTTLE TRICK: GOTHIC HYBRIDITY-

‘Eggs are seeds, perfectly white on the outside. Who knows what complexions their insides might reveal when they crack open to germinate and bear fruit?’ (Hopkinson ‘the Glass bottle trick’ 2000)

A re write of the Bluebeard tale, spliced with Fitcher’s bird, mixed in with Caribbean myth and post feminism’s doubts about sisterhood.

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‘The duppy wives held their bellies and glared at her, anger flaring hot behind their eyes. Beatrice backed away from the beds. “I didn’t know” she said to the wives, ”don’t vex with me. I didn’t know what it is Samuel do to you”(100), the mixed Caribbean creolised English and received pronunciation mirrors the newly remixed culturally inflected tales, with her own tale. Whether she can preserve her own egg like the song ‘Eggie Law, what a pretty basket’ (101), her father used to sing to her while hurling her in the air, is to be seen.

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Gothic hybridity- language, myths, culture through the Bluebeard tale

1) Traditionally disempowerment through the overwhelming male power, the silencing of women , endangerment is disobedience - male rescue(brother) - a tale to teach women to obey

2) Angela Carter’s re write as a new assertion of female refusal of that power, sexual awakening and further romance of equals

3) Hopkinson’s re write with Caribbean and post feminist inflections- snake swallowing an egg, duppies in glass bottles, internalised self loathing due to racism, dubious sisterhood.

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What decisions can you make about texts to teach ?

Why those ones? What will they enable to be discussed and dealt with

How are you going to introduce theory through the texts/before/after/in addition to?And why?

What challenges might you meet? What can you do to deal with them?