Hello Readers,
Today, I am going to write about four theories as part of my studies. So for that I am going to write on Feminism,Marxism,Queer Theory and Eco Criticism.
Essential Meaning of feminism
The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities
organized activity in support of women's rights and interests
Feminism
Feminism can be called an awakening ideology which socially, culturally, politically as well as morally attempts to highlight the inequalities that discriminate against women. It focuses on the equality of both genders. Right from the eighteenth century to the present day, there has been a need for feminism in one or the other way. The idealization of women became heavily domestic in the nineteenth century. The 20th century allowed women to play a role in the political scenario and the 21st century is again witnessing the issue of gender discrimination. Radical Feminism highlights that the male-based authority and power structure are responsible for oppression and inequality. Socialist Feminism explores the Marxist ideas on exploitation, oppression, and labor. Ecofeminism demonstrates the power dynamics behind a gynocentric connection with the natural environment.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century Virginia Woolf, who, in addition to her fiction, wrote A Room of One’s Own (1929) an
Phallocentrism And Gynocentrism
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism enlightened by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. Feminist literary criticism was born on the debates of second-wave feminism. Feminists brought to literature a suspicion of established ideas which made the approach truly revolutionary. They were interested in Literature as a powerful means of creating and perpetuating belief systems.
Phallocentrism
Phallocentric criticism worked to establish a recurring pattern of imagery and language use that would demonstrate concealed attitudes to femininity, and it effectively created a new understanding of seemingly coincidental motifs. Popular feminist writers such as Germaine Greer illustrated the male chauvinism. In her polemical text, The Female Eunuch, she examined literature as a product of its patriarchal culture and was particularly innovative in its reverent juxtaposition of high and low art.
Gynocentrism
Phallocentric criticism opened up the literary canon to a new and revolutionary field of literary criticism, exposing the sexual politics informing all the text and paving the way for psychoanalysis to enter the literary field. As alternative female-centered criticism was developed to address this need, and because of its preoccupation with the female voice, it came to be known as 'gynocriticism'. It examined how female experience was reflected in literature by women, and sought to place women's literature in the context of female experience.
Marxism
Marxism, a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program. There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements, particularly before 1914. Then there is Soviet Marxism as worked out by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and modified by Joseph Stalin, which under the name of Marxism-Leninism (see Leninism) became the doctrine of the communist parties set up after the Russian Revolution (1917). Offshoots of this included Marxism as interpreted by the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and his followers, Mao Zedong’s Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and various Marxisms in the developing world. There were also the post-World War II non dogmatic Marxisms that have modified Marx’s thought with borrowings from modern philosophies, principally from those of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also from Sigmund Freud and others.
The Thought of Karl Marx
The written work of Marx cannot be reduced to a philosophy, much less to a philosophical system. The whole of his work is a radical critique of philosophy, especially of G.W.F. Hegel’s idealist system and of the philosophies of the left and right post-Hegelians. It is not, however, a mere denial of those philosophies. Marx declared that philosophy must become reality. One could no longer be content with interpreting the world; one must be concerned with transforming it, which meant transforming both the world itself and human consciousness of it. This, in turn, required a critique of experience together with a critique of ideas. In fact, Marx believed that all knowledge involves a critique of ideas. He was not an empiricist. Rather, his work teems with concepts (appropriation, alienation, praxis, creative labour, value, and so on) that he had inherited from earlier philosophers and economists, including Hegel, Johann Fichte, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. What uniquely characterizes the thought of Marx is that, instead of making abstract affirmations about a whole group of problems such as human nature, knowledge, and matter, he examines each problem in its dynamic relation to the others and, above all, tries to relate them to historical, social, political, and economic realities.
Queer Theory
The basics of queer theory Queer theory’s origins are in LGBT studies – which focus on sexuality and gender. It soon distanced itself from those approaches due to disagreements with the stable identities that LGBT studies suggest. Queer theory emphasises the fluid and humanly performed nature of sexuality – or better, sexualities. It questions socially established norms and dualistic categories with a special focus on challenging sexual (heterosexual/homosexual), gender (male/female), class (rich/poor), racial (white/non-white) classifications. It goes beyond these so-called ‘binaries’ to contest general political (private/public) as well as international binary orders (democratic/ authoritarian). These are viewed as overgeneralization theoretical constructs that produce an either/or mode of analysis that hides more than it clarifies and is unable to detect nuanced differences and contradictions. But queer theory also analyses and critiques societal and political norms in particular as they relate to the experience of sexuality and gender. These are not viewed as private affairs. Just as feminists perceive of gender as a socially constructed public and political affair, so queer theorists argue with regards to sexuality and gender expression. As the word ‘queer’ was used to describe homosexuals in the nineteenth century, queer theory traces its lineage from the study of sexuality in its private and public forms. A commonplace meaning attributed to the term revolves around being non-conforming in terms of sexuality and gender, thus adding an ambiguous notion to being or acting queer. Hence a queer approach towards sexual equality complicates identity-based LGBT advocacy, as queer thinking expresses a more challenging, fluid perspective. This split has become even more pronounced as the international politics of sexual orientation and gender identity receives an ever-increasing degree of public attention. Some states have implemented substantial equality provisions in order to prove that they are ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ enough, while others have responded with pushback in the form of homophobic legislation and persecution. Sexual orientation and gender identity rights, which themselves are questioned by queer theorists as overly reliant on Western liberal norms of human rights and democracy, have become points of political contention, eliciting domestic culture wars as well. Consider the debate in the United States over whether transgender individuals should be free to use the toilet of their personal choice. The status of sexuality and gender politics in IR has clearly been elevated via cases such as this which can quickly transcend domestic politics and enter the international realm. In addition, it has also impacted E-International Relations ISSN 2053-8626 Page 1/5 Introducing Queer Theory in International Relations Written by Markus Thiel apparently unrelated policies such as defence policies, health care and labour market regulations and thus created new avenues for the re-construction of conventional IR concepts. As a result, new perspectives are needed to explain this inherent part of the social and political world. Queer theory does not assume a uniform access to reality, but rather acknowledges that subjective knowledge(s) about sexuality, gender and other social aspects are constructed rather than pre- existent, fluid rather than stable, and not always in line with societal norms. In this sense, queer theory has moved beyond focusing simply on the experience of sexuality and gender. Sexuality politics and the queer scholarship connected to it arrived late on the theoretical scene in part because sexuality and gender initially were anchored in the private, rather than the public, spheres. Scholars advanced critical and feminist viewpoints emerging from the writings of Michel Foucault (1976), Judith Butler (1990) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) among others. Foucault’s groundbreaking linking of sexuality and knowledge to political power, and Butler’s rejection of stable sexual orientation and gender identities in favour of everyday performed ones remain foundational notions. Kosofsky Sedgwick’s calling attention to the discursive definition of homo/ heterosexuality in society further defined queer thinking. These scholarly statements were hardly accepted in mainstream political science because they rejected objectivity and highlighted the conditional and unstable human nature of social and political orders, including IR questions of security and governance. Hence queer theory evolved largely in literature, philosophy, sociology and queer studies programmes without making substantial inroads into IR theorising. Despite the distinct emergence of queer theory from these wider origins, some questions remain. One of the major issues is to what extent ‘queer’ should be adopted as a label for transgressive (socially unacceptable) forms of thinking and acting – as this would in turn create a queer/mainstream binary. This is something that queer scholars argue against. Another issue lies in the vague definition of queer theoretical tenets and terms, leading to uncertainty about how a queer theoretical lens can best be deployed in various disciplines by a wide range of individuals. In its application to IR, queer theory challenges many assumptions about world politics unrelated to sexuality and gender. It aims to deconstruct established simplistic binaries – such as insecurity/security or war/peace – and recognises the inherent instability of political and social orders. Instead, it embraces the fluid, performative and ambiguous aspects of world politics. Hence, it criticises those approaches to politics and society that assume natural and moral hierarchies. It problematises, for instance, the way in which non-traditional sexualities have become normalised according to ‘hetero-normative’ standards, including the aspiration towards marriage and child rearing. Queer theorists argue that this results in a societal integration of sexual minorities into mainstream consumer society – making them less willing (or able) to contest deeper political inequalities. Queer theory perceives sexuality and gender as social constructs that shape the way sexual orientation and gender identity are displayed in public – and thereby often reduced to black-and-white issues that can be manipulated or distorted. With regard to more classical IR topics, it critically assesses the assumption that all societies find themselves at different points along a linear path of political and economic development or adhere to a universal set of norms. Hence it embraces ambiguity, failure and conflict as a counterpoint to a dominant progressive thinking evident in many foreign or development policies. As a scholarly undertaking, queer theory research constitutes of ‘any form of research positioned within conceptual frameworks that highlight the instability of taken-for-granted meanings and resulting power relations’ (Nash and Browne 2012, 4). Weber (2014) highlights a lack of attention to queer theory by decrying the closed-mindedness of standard IR theories, arguing that queer scholarship in IR exists but is not recognised. The invisibility of queer theory is slowly changing, with case-study work on state homophobia (Weiss and Bosia 2013) or collective identity politics (Ayoub and Paternotte 2014) and the increasing relevance of transnational LGBT rights discourses for IR scholarship. But if empirical work in this area concentrates mainly on the agency of groups in their surrounding political structure, what is ‘queer’ about LGBT advocacy perspectives? click Here it's an article
Eco criticism
Definition
Ecocriticism is the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyse texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature .
In simple words ecocriticism means study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment . Lawrence buell is the pioneer of ecocriticism and how nature is represented in literature. eco criticism reconsiders neglected genre of nature writing.eco critics includes examining the symbolic construction of species.
What do eco critics do ?
ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture .Most of the ecocritics is anthropocentric idea. and luc ferry suggests that nature “ should be disciplined ,polished , and cultivated in short humanized.”they think nature as controllable by humans .
Example: The poem The Gift Out Right By Robert Frost
“The land was ours before we were the land’s
she was our land for more than a hundred years.”
In this poem some lines we see that frost sees nature as ‘the other hand’ or as a commodity, which can be given ,taken , bought, sold or won .
Let's take a familiar Example from our epic: how criticism uses the textual content of any literary piece of art , then the ecocriticism can apply on that particular work . We know the Ramayana as an epic of Indian mythology . Most of us read Ramayana as a holy book and related to our religion . but in this book we also applied the ecocriticism in this book in some scenes of Ramayana . We all know about this story that Ramayana is the story of a prince who fought against a monster and brought his wife back to his kingdom . but here in this example of the Ramayana we see the perspective of criticism we can see so we also evaluate the story of Ramayana where ecocriticism is made in this story . We know that in the Ramayana in the forest they lived happily . during their residential time, one day sita saw a golden deer. She asked for that golden deer . Rama went on to hunt golden deer ,. now we see the works of eco criticism . What was the description of the golden deer ? What was it looking like ? What kind of other animals were there ? how nature described and what was the effect on that animal ? So we can see this example as suitable as an example of eco criticism .
Thanks 😊
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