Where I am right now

I think I used to be if not the worst nightmare, at least a bad daydream of feminist trailblazers. I reaped the benefits of their labors and never truly felt oppressed as a female, but was relatively ambivalent to the feminist cause. My high school assigned a fair amount of books by women, not just the Brontes, Austen, and Shelley, but Cisnero, Angelou, Hurston, Tan and more. For me, feminism was inapplicable to my immediate life, and almost historical, at least in America and other “enlightened” countries; I never applied feminism with the urgency of activism to my life, because I couldn’t see how or if I was being oppressed.

Now, a semester into the course, I see that feminism is more pertinent to my life than I could’ve imagined then, and pertinent to the world right now. Schweickart’s article was the little trickle that precipitated the flood. From an egocentric perspective, had I been immasculated and psychically traumatized without even realizing it? I thought all books were good for you. What an unsettling concept. Just how different would I be if the western canon weren’t so androcentric? How different would the world be? I think feminist literary theory attempts to address and amend those questions, as well as more noble and urgent ones, and it also fights to restore woman’s voice.

Looking back over our readings, I’ve noticed some issues that seem to never have answers, or rather to have a different answer from each scholar: Defining what it means to be a feminist, whether there is a fundamental difference between how men and women, whether the debate should be personal, if it is about justice or happiness, and where the boundaries of politics lies. Some of these oppositions may not even exist or be relevant to various forms of feminist criticism. It’s like some over the top, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome type free-for-all: the first rule of feminism is that there are no rules. This is exciting. Who wouldn’t like feminist critical theory?

In future readings, I want to keep being challenged by different theories, and keep finding reasons for everyone why feminism matters. More specifically, the issues that seem most critical to me concern the difference issue, like the idea of whether it is feasible to institutionalize the “feminine” (as generally termed by Sosnoski, Cixous, Allen, and Schweickart,) perspective of the world in literary criticism. Is there an inherent feminine style of thinking, acting, and writing? What exactly do Woolf and Cixous mean when they talk about woman’s voice being drowned out by man’s? It’s clearly not about the number of female protagonists in books, or the number of female authors, since they might be subscribing to “masculine” values. Are values, perception, upbringing, or genetics what forms woman’s voice? Does it have to have “intuition and the confession of error”, generosity, creativity, or be non-conflict based, loving in order to qualify? Where is the volume level of woman’s voice at now?

I believe in limiting personal input in intellectual discussions, I try to be a member of Woolf’s society of outsiders, and I think it’s worth the effort to be a vigilant feminist reader ever wary of immasculization. I’m very intrigued about what would happen if every woman took Cixous’ advice to heart and painted their side of the world. However, I am open to learning otherwise, and want to learn more.