
Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
© Serendip® 1994 - All rights reserved. Privacy Policy
in conscious rebellion
Intriguing thought, one that got me mulling...
& remembering the literary critic Elaine Showalter, decades ago,
differentiating between three phases of women's literature:
- the "feminine" (when women writers adopted the standards of male culture),
- the "feminist" (the phase of their conscious rebellion against those standards), and
- the "female" (when they tried to establish their role/nature as genuine, viable, creative, independent, and different).
Then came the post-female phase, when policing that difference got tiring, seemed no longer productive....Using those distinctions, I'd say I thought of my poem as "A 'Feminist' If" because I wrote it in conscious reaction to/as correction of a poem that seemed to me stridently masculine/male.
Hm...now what's the masculine-equivalent of "feminist"?
"Masculinist" seems to describe the affirmation, not the critique, of masculine ways of doing-and-being....