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9 - Feminist Theory, Feminist Criticism, and the Sex/Gender Distinction

from Part II - Critical Methodologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2022

Travis M. Foster
Affiliation:
Villanova University, Pennsylvania
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Summary

“In literature I sensed the possibility of the integration of feeling/knowledge, rather than the split between the abstract and the emotional in which Western philosophy inevitably indulged,” writes Barbara Christian in her foundational discussion about Black feminist literary theory.1 While she critiques the veneration of theoretical abstraction, Christian, too, pushes against the biologically reductive, eurocentric preoccupation of white French feminist theorists who fixate on “the female body as the means to creating a female language.”2 Wary of producing a monolithic feminist literary theory herself, she draws our attention to the intertwined problems that emerge when we ask whose bodies, writings, theories, labors, experiences are centered. As Christian’s essay illustrates, feminist theory provides multitudinous convergent and divergent ways to understand bodies and their relations to and through the world via what has been variously termed “gender” and “sex.” To only define feminist theory as by women and for women ignores traditions from manifold configurations of histories, cultures, and politics that place different weight on the term “women” as they seek to comprehend, to critique, to survive, and to reimagine the world.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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