[Tyr Zalo Hawk]: 712.Essays.Response Papers.Oh Feminism, You Dog You

And now, a Forward by the Author:
So, I think I already know what I’m going to say without having read much more than the title, but, to save you the trouble of thinking I’m a bigot, I’ll read it anyways.


So, I must admit that I was wrong. Feminist criticism isn’t what I thought it was. It’s not just a bunch of women complaining that ‘men are men’ and that the only way to get their voices heard is to kill off the lot of us in favor of the much more acceptable notion of a female-only society. It’s not just about rebellion, about empowerment, about equal rights, about casting off the facades forced upon the female gender by facetious men who don’t understand the first thing about what it takes to be a woman. No, no, not feminist criticism. Feminist criticism is also about being unable to agree on any major point of their own movement, about invalidating their own arguments and then painfully throwing them back into the courtroom for a verdict I’m surprised hasn’t been supplied yet. It’s about using words with at least one hyphen. Yeah, that’s feminist criticism.
If you can’t tell by now, I’m a little bit against feminist criticism. Don’t get me wrong, please don’t. I really do support empowering women, equal rights for everyone and getting the female voice ‘out there’ in the world. It’s all nice to do, just like it’s nice to do it for every other people who were ever subjugated, mistreated, neglected, forgotten, abused, enslaved, and generally just plain wronged. However, nothing quite says annoying-as-hell like hearing the same thing for all eternity (you know what I’m talking about Catholicism. Don’t you pretend you don’t).
First off, I don’t see why we need separate canons just because we have separate bathrooms. I believe in unity, something which'll probably get me mugged one day but, hey, that’s life. Yes, there are plenty of female writers that were overlooked because they had breasts and lacked a penis; that was the way the world worked. It doesn’t work like that anymore. Nowadays, you can publish a book about a pedophilic vampire competing with a savage wolf-man for the attentions of an unpopular teenage girl and make millions on it. If you want to bring these forgotten females into the canon, then I say do it. If you want to form your own canon instead, then expect me to treat you, and it, differently because, well, that’s what you want, right?
Wrong. The real problem here is that there’s no truly distinct way of looking at feminist criticism. The list that Barry gives on pages 128-129 is nice and all, but considering the other 14 pages of text which compare and contrast the differing viewpoints on every major contention within feminist criticism, I’m not so convinced. Take, for example, the notion that there is a female way of writing. One the one hand, there are the feminists, like Hélène Cixous, who believe that there is a specific way that females write that is 115% different than the way that males write. They think of themselves as above social construction, above outside influences, and that they are able, somehow and someway, to write through their bodies in such a way as men never truly can. Barry himself then poses the counterarguments against this very notion, “Who, we might ask, are these women who ‘must’ write through their bodies? Who imposes this coercive ‘must upon them, and (above all) why?” (Barry 123). For him, as well as other feminists, the notion that they’re intrinsically separate tears down the notion of a concrete philosophy since there’s no way to pin down something that’s free-floating inside women’s bodies. Not only that, but other feminists such as Julia Kristeva, would have us believe very nearly the same thing, and then use male writers for her examples of the female style (Barry 123). This isn’t even beginning to mention the dichotomy between French, English, and American feminists, as well as the presence of Virginia Woolf in the literary camp. It’s all just too much to handle.
In the end, feminism itself is portrayed as a most terrible thing which exemplifies decay, “Hence the inevitable descent into self-rejection … self-starvation, madness, and death” (Barry 130). I mean, if that’s what a feminist heroine is striving for, then please leave me out of it. I’m not really sure what anyone can do with feminist criticism besides ask the resounding question: ‘Will you please just make up your own mind and buy the pair you want?’


And now, an Afterward by the Author:
Even though I disagree with pretty much everything else in this section, I must say that I do quite enjoy the following notion on feminist criticism which I plan to use as a basis for my final paper: “10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author, asking whether there are only ‘subject positions … constructed in discourse’, or whether, on the contrary, the experience (e.g. of a black or lesbian writer) is central” (Barry 129). Because that, my friend, is winsauce.