feminist criticism
Patriarchy-challenging literary theory
Feminist criticism is a mode of literary and cultural analysis that examines how gender shapes texts—how women are represented, how female authors have been marginalized, and how assumptions about masculinity and femininity operate within works and their reception.
The approach emerged in the 1960s and 1970s alongside second-wave feminism: Her feminist criticism of the novel revealed patterns of silencing female characters.
It has since expanded to include intersections with race, class, and sexuality.
- standpoint theoryKnowledge rooted in social location
- phallogocentrismDerrida's term for masculine-linguistic dominance
- feminine mystiqueGlorified female domesticity ideology
- patriarchyMale-dominated social order
- ecofeminismTheory linking female oppression, ecological destruction
Simone de Beauvoir · gender theory · deconstruction · gender representation · gendered language · male gaze · subversion · Virginia Woolf · women's writing · queer theory · reproductive rights · intertextuality · voice · gender equity · sisterhood · marginalized · gaze · canon
- gender mediagender representation, gender stereotypes, gender bias, media portrayal, media stereotypes
- literary criticismliterary theory, literary analysis, close reading, formalism, literary essays
- women's writingVirginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath
- literary theorystructuralism, deconstruction, formalism, post-structuralism, poetics
- poetry criticismmeter, rhyme scheme, scansion, prosody, close reading
- Hispanic criticism
feminist criticismformalism
Privileging structure over substance
New Criticism · structuralism · art for art's sake · close reading · technical analysis