Feminist writing?

[Albus Dumbledore]

What characterizes feminist writing?

[JBI]

The female author. Though there are exceptions, but only if you have a deliberately progressive male author writing.

[Louis Red]

What characterizes feminist writing?

mediocrity

[JBI]

mediocrity

You are a fool my friend. Name one feminist author you have read who is highly regarded. Jane Austen, The Brontes, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Munro, all excellent writers in their respective fields, thrown in with poets such as Moore, Bishop, H.D., Dove, Moss, Sexton, all great accomplishers. To dismiss anything written by a woman is not only idiotic, it is plain offensive.

Lately I have been drawn to even feminist criticism as a means of aesthetic experience. Some of their essayists offer quite a brilliant touch of irony, wisdom, and even truth to create some brilliant essays. Much better than the ramblers who ponder about trivial things, like autobiographical aspects (though they have their merit too, if they are good essayists). Perhaps you should read some Feminist criticism, since you tend to be the type who they rightfully criticize.


Just out of curiosity, which major female writers have you read?

[EricP]

I would characterize writing as feminist if the author challenges the dominant view of gender roles in their specific context. For example, a work that might have challenged the way in which gender is perceived in 19th century England may seem pretty tame in contemporary America. In some religious fundamentalist nations today, a moderate view of gender in secular countries would be seen as radical and blasphemous.

[tractatus]

What elements(in your novels) make you feminist?

[_Shannon_]

LOl my first thought? -That it's awful.....

To me there is a vast difference between something being written by a female author and writing which is feminist. FTR I have read all the authors you've mentioned JB--plus many more like Eudora Welty, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, Daphne DuMaurier, and Wharton, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein...one of my favorite poets is Denise Levertov.

[JBI]

It's the same with construction workers. If they are female, they are feminist, unless when they write they write against women, but I can't think of any good ones that fit that category. The fact remains, that up until the 1970s female writing was not even close to as big as male writing, meaning it was less "acceptable" to be a female writer than it is today. Thereby, to be a female writer, was, in a sense, to be going against female norm, I.E. feminist.

Elaine Showalter, the feminist critic, divides female literature chronologically into three categories:

1. Feminine: In the Feminine phase (1840–1880), “women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture, and internalized its assumptions about female nature” (New, 137).
2. Feminist: The Feminist phase (1880–1920) was characterized by women’s writing that protested against male standards and values, and advocated women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy.
3. Female: The Female phase (1920— ) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says, “women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature” (New, 139).

(copied notes from Wikipedia, but I have the original essay in front of me).

It seems that the bulk of female authors fit into that grid, especially the good ones. As it happens, there are females who write about the male experience, as there are males who write about the female experience. Those females, if they are good however, tend to push a more female perspective.

[Kafka's Crow]

Jane Austen, George Eliot, Djuna Barnes (queer), Joyce Carol Oates, Gertrude Stein are some of the female writers I admire. Louis Red's one-liner (above) sounds blunt but is not very far from truth.