Feminism

It is become a disgrace, last week I attended my firend's thesis test or presentation. She used Feminist psychoanalysis as her thesis approach. Unfortunately, she only serves the variant of sexual abuse. In my oppinion, its only a background of the analysis. There is no background of the society or women strugle in that case, evenless the victim's psychology. So, what is feminism?

Genre difference becomes an interesting topic in the past time until now, many writers talks about genre in their work. A feminist writer used literary work to against the structure of man and women, which women always become sub ordinate, and the patriarchy system.

Then they show the perspective that seeks to eliminate the subordination, oppression, inequalities and injustices women suffer because of their sex.  They used it to deconstruct the way of thinking, that women became subordinate of men. There are many example of hard working against genre differences through literary work in the 1980-1900 eras, for example: Can-Can by Arturo Vivante, Story of an Hour and Desire Baby by Kate Chopin, The Legacy by Virginia Woolf, Cat in the Rain by Ernest Hemingway and A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. They hope it can change the paradox and plant feminism to the reader. 

According to Potter, 1991: feminism is a perspective that seeks to eliminate the subordination, oppression, inequalities and injustices, woman suffers because of their sex. Then, it is a doctrine suggesting that women are systematically disadvantaged in modern society and advocating equal opportunities for men and women, (the Penguin Dictionary, 1988). Feminism beliefs that our civilization is ruled by the father, male centered, controlled, organized and women to man all cultural domains, religious, political, economical, social, legal and artistic. It also beliefs that female tend to be defined by negative reference to the male as the human norm. A Doll House in my opinion is adopted the patriarchal ideology, male always become protagonist, female character are marginal, subordinate and complementary. Generally feminism is a female movement that refuse anything marginalized, subordinate and underestimated by the dominant culture. We applied it in literary with the purpose to comprehend literary work better in its relationship with production and reception process.

Psychoanalytic feminism is that body of writing which uses psychoanalysis to further feminist theory and, in principle, feminist practice. The myth of the origin of psychoanalysis for feminism goes like this. A long time ago in the early 1970s, our feminist mothers were bewildered. They found that despite their intellectual and political commitment to feminism, they still indulged in bad old masculinist practices, like loving men too much and being relational rather than thinking consequentially. According to the first book on the subject, Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), the unconscious, rather than biology, explained the repetition of roles. It explained why stereotypical masculinity and femininity persisted, even when one wanted to change. This was the beginning of the way in which much of the subsequent debate in and on psychoanalysis and feminism has been organized around the bifurcation between the biological and the social. The debate gives birth to a third category, the psychical, as we shall see.

Feminist psychoanalysis is based on Freud and his psychoanalytic theories. It maintains that gender is not biological but is based on the psycho-sexual development of the individual. Psychoanalytical feminists believe that gender inequality comes from early childhood experiences, which lead men to believe themselves to be masculine, and women to believe themselves feminine. It is further maintained that gender leads to a social system that is dominated by males, which in turn influences the individual psycho-sexual development. As a solution it was suggested to avoid the gender-specific structuring of the society by male-female coeducation.

Freud writes that “psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is—that would be a task it could scarcely perform—but sets about enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition.” In using the term ‘bisexual,’ Freud refers to a quality of the sexual instinct, not a relation to a sexual object (which would be denoted by the term ‘inversion’); the bisexual child is one who psychically is not yet either a man or a woman, whose instinctual life functions prior to sexual difference. Freud here portrays femininity as one trajectory, indicates that sexed identity is a fragile achievement rather than a natural given or essence. By circumscribing the terrain on which the psychoanalytic account of sexual difference moves, and by seeing unresolved, even unresolvable, riddles where others might see the work of nature or culture, Freud problematizes any causal, seamless, or direct tie between sex, sexuality, and sexual difference. Psychoanalytic inquiry does not fit comfortably with, and even unsettles, biological theories of sex and sociological theories of gender, thus also complicating the sex/gender distinction as it has often been formulated in feminist debates. While sex and gender are sometimes construed in feminist theory in terms of the contrast between biology and culture, or nature and nurture.

Freud's theory, as discussed below, challenges these dualisms, developing an account of the sexual drive that traverses the mental and the physical, and undergoes idiosyncratic vicissitudes rather than assuming a uniform anatomical or social shape. Whatever the hazards of Freud's writings on women, then, his work explores in new ways the meaning and possibilities of sexed identity. Likewise, as I will argue below, psychoanalytic feminism interrupts many assumptions about what feminism is and the conceptual and material objects it theorizes, including especially the very concept of woman. In unsettling our understanding of this concept, psychoanalysis also poses questions to feminism about the value of difference and the quest for equality, and the unresolved tensions between these divergent pursuits.

While there is no doubt a vast ouvre of disparate positions that might fall within the framework of psychoanalytic feminism, what is shared in common is a descent from, respect for, and some minimal borrowing of Freudian accounts of the unconscious, even while criticizing and/or revising his theoretical apparatus. Any properly psychoanalytic theory must at the least offer an account of the unconscious and its bond with sexuality and, arguably, death. Precisely this descent, however, has also provided a barrier to feminist deployment since Freud is sometimes read, at least superficially, as proffering misogynist, and perhaps. Procrustean, elaborations of psychic structuration, curtailing and diminishing the diversity of individual women's experiences into a restricted and unvarying formula that will fit within its own theoretical parameters.