A presentation from Prof Gina Wisker (University of Brighton). Presented as part of the CWWSkills programme (AHRC collaborative skills development). Liverpool, January 2014

1. CWWA AHRC postgraduate development
programme Liverpool January 2014
Gina Wisker University of Brighton
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2.  Why?
 How?
 When?
 What
with?
 What problems?
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3. The issues which first and second wave feminism
dealt with are still current - differently nuanced
 Teaching without any recognition of values
inherent in the context, texts, discussions is
dishonest and dull
 Troublesome knowledge and transformative
learning are critical for learning – students, staff
and researchers
 Theory empowers and helps articulation - you
have a right to speak and the intellectual
engagement afforded by theory clarifies enriches
and enables more complex thinking, nuanced
arguments, tolerance and engagement(William
Perry stage 9 thinking)
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4.  …storytellers
are a threat. They threaten all
champions of control, they frighten the
usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the
human spirit -in state, in church or mosque,
in party congress, in the university or
wherever.(Chinua Achebe, 1987 )
 Read it in the spirit of breaking the rules
(Nalo Hopkinson, 2000)
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5.  Going
back to Wollstonecraft and Woolf
 -if we refuse to ‗think back through our mothers‘
we shall create ghosts of our own.(Avril Horner
and Sue Zlosnik on Woolf‘s A room of one’s own)
 Woolf identified
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Economics, space, rights
The male valorised forms of expression and topics –
the novel was pliable in women's hands
 Establishing
a history , ongoing discussions- gives
our work depth
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6.  Second
wave –re reading re writing new writing
 Focus on the body, domestic, differences in
language, power imbalances
 ―Notes from the Front Line‖ (1983): ‗I am all for
putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the
pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles
explode.‘ (69) Angela Carter
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7. 
I believe that all myths are products of the human mind
and reflect only aspects of material human practice.
I‘m in the demythologising business …. How that social
fiction of my ‗femininity‘ was created by means outside
my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing ….
This investigation of the social fictions that regulate our
lives – what Blake called the ‗mind-forged manacles‘ – is
what I‘ve concerned myself with consciously since that
time.

I'm in the demythologising business
‗Notes from the Front Line‘ in, On Gender and
Writing, 1984 pp70, 71.
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9. 
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The campaign for women's liberation never went away, but this year a
new swell built up and broke through. Since the early summer, I've been
talking to feminist activists and writers for a short book, All The Rebel
Women, and as I tried to keep up with the protests, marches and talks,
my diary became a mess of clashing dates. The rush was such that in a
single weekend in October, you could have attended a feminist freshers'
fair in London, the North East Feminist Gathering in Newcastle, a Reclaim
the Night march in Edinburgh, or a discussion between different
generations of feminist activists at the British Library (this sold out in 48
hours, was moved to a room four times bigger, and sold out again).
You could have joined one of the country's 149 local grassroots groups, or
shared your experience of misogyny on the site Laura Bates, 27, started
in April 2012. Her Everyday Sexism Project has proved so successful that
it was rolled out to 17 countries on its first anniversary this year, tens of
thousands of women worldwide writing about the street harassment,
sexual harassment, workplace discrimination and body-shaming they
encounter. The project embodies that feminist phrase "the personal is
political", a consciousness-raising exercise that encourages women to see
how inequality affects them, proves these problems aren't individual but
collective, and might therefore have political solutions. This year, 6,000
stories that have been sent to the project about harassment or assault on
public transport – the majority never reported to authorities – were used
to train 2,000 police officers in London, and create a public awareness
campaign

Kira Cochrane


The Guardian, Tuesday 10 December 2013
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11. 5
Minutes Of What The Media Actually Does
To Women
 upworthy.com
 "I don't look like that, and I don't desire to
look like that." —Kate Winslet
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12.  How
would you engage students with still
topical issues?
 And make them more topical ?
 How would you do this through literature and
the media?
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Theory/Politics/Texts
Actions for Content Page
Build Content
Create Assessment
Add Interactive Tool
Content
Theory Reading for Week One
Attached Files: handout [1].docx (22.788 KB)
Attached some Woolf extracts for you to read prior to lecture - will take about 30 minutes - really
helpful to understand Deborah's lecture
K
Useful article on Ecriture Feminine
Attached
Theory/Politics/Texts
Attached Files: THEORY-POLITICS-TEXTS 2012.pptx (106.218 KB)
Kate's summary of different feminist political movements and different feminist literary theory
approaches
Useful Critical Essays on Ecriture Feminine
Purkiss, Carter, Ann Rosalind Jones
Michelle Roberts "Middle-Class Hero" on i-player
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00wx9q0
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14. WEEK ONE
THEORY/POLITICS/TEXTS
(Lecture and online ppt s by Kate Aughterson, uni
Brighton with additions by Gina Wisker uni
Brighton )
Feminism: “a doctrine or
movement that advocates
equal rights for women‖
(Collins English Dictionary)
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15. An
analysis of female exclusion
from dominant power and
political institutions (which are
masculine);
the political attempt to redress
the balance of that exclusion
by striving to provide equality
in the political, the economic
and social spheres, for women
and men.
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16. begins with an analysis of women's essential, biological, differences
from men;
 Celebrates difference as one with own culture and history, castigates
masculine culture as authoritarian, hierarchical and closed.
 seeks to introduce the "feminine" (qualities of
nurturing/openness/fluidity/ negotiation etc) to the dominant
masculine culture.
Includes Marxist feminism:
 biological difference used to justify economic subordination (family
into economic system)
 creating an ideology of masculinity and femininity ascribing certain
roles for men and women which are supposedly natural.
 political change: either the link between biology and domestic labour
has to be broken: OR, domestic labour has to be accorded its real
value in society.
The personal is political

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17.  both
masculinity and femininity are
social, linguistic and economic constructions
 as such, the constructions can be utilised by
both men and women as fluid identities to
assert differing and changing power
relationships.
.
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18. 
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Texts can perpetuate and construct women's subordinate
position in society (ideology, interpellation) AND,
Texts can also be potential places for liberating rebellion, for
both writers and readers
Texts offer examples, vehicles using language and the
imagination, opportunity to engage theory –and a space to
discuss
Why is feminism important in literary studies?
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Giving women an equal say as critics and constructors of a canon
= basic freedom of speech
Showalter: "studying a different culture‖
Different choices and perspectives
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19. 
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Avoid polemic
Offer challenges
Respect differences
Expect historical about turns (feminism was a turn off for
years)
Engage with and provoke arguments
Work through troubled transformative texts and question
promotes-if the aim is to engage with an own critical thinking
–which feminist theory and criticism intends - we need to do
this ourselves through our teaching and learning practice .
Context culture perspective differences
Reinvigorate the reasons for engaging with feminist criticism,
theories, approaches, infused topics- gender and power
imbalances, women's bodies under patriarchal control (Indian
rape, Saudi Arabian codes of behaviour, glass ceilings)
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20.  What
has worked for you as a student or
teacher in the past? To engage with ideas,
arguments, and particularly feminism in
practice through texts?
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21. I work through
 introducing ideas and issues, access to
discussed theory and important critical texts
(theorising aids articulation not just anger
and silence)
 Promotes, discussions , questions explored
through texts - often in extract
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22.  How
does this poem and these extracts and
examples engage us with
The body, women's language, gender and
power, culture and context in relation to
gender
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23. Why bluebeard? Male wealth power rights ownership
 Women's bodies and persons only to be controlled and
dominated , murder legitimated
 The enclosed room of oppression
 Violence, loss of history, silence, cultural inflected
readings
 Sexuality, energy, mother rescues (Carter) sisterhood
might not be supportive (postfeminists Hopkinson)

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24. 24

25.  And,
ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the
place; with its turrets of misty blue, its
courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay
on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds
mewing about its attics, the casements
opening on to the green and purple,
evanescent departures of the ocean (13).
 Rapt, he intoned: ―Of her apparel she
retains/Only her sonorous jewellery.‖ A
dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while
the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes
in the empty air outside.‘ (17)
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26.  ‗what
do you think of Audre Lorde‘s comment
that massa‘s tools will never dismantle massa‘s
house?‘
 ‗in my hands massa‘s tools don‘t dismantle
massa‘s house-and in fact i don‘t want to
destroy it so much as I want to undertake
massive renovations-then build me a house of
my own‘(Hopkinson/Mehan 2004 p 7)
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27. ‗Eggs are seeds, perfectly white on the outside. Who
knows what complexions their insides might reveal when
they crack open to germinate and bear fruit?‘ (Hopkinson
‗the Glass bottle trick‘ 2000)
A re write of the Bluebeard tale, spliced with Fitcher‘s
bird, mixed in with Caribbean myth and post
feminism‘s doubts about sisterhood.
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28. 
‗The duppy wives held their bellies and glared
at her, anger flaring hot behind their eyes.
Beatrice backed away from the beds. ―I didn‘t
know‖ she said to the wives, ‖don‘t vex with
me. I didn‘t know what it is Samuel do to
you‖(100), the mixed Caribbean creolised
English and received pronunciation mirrors the
newly remixed culturally inflected tales, with
her own tale. Whether she can preserve her own
egg like the song ‗Eggie Law, what a pretty
basket‘ (101), her father used to sing to her
while hurling her in the air, is to be seen.
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29. Gothic hybridity- language, myths, culture through the
Bluebeard tale
 1) Traditionally disempowerment through the
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overwhelming male power, the silencing of women ,
endangerment is disobedience - male rescue(brother)
- a tale to teach women to obey
 2) Angela Carter‘s re write as a new assertion of
female refusal of that power, sexual awakening and
further romance of equals
 3) Hopkinson‘s re write with Caribbean and post
feminist inflections- snake swallowing an egg,
duppies in glass bottles, internalised self loathing
due to racism, dubious sisterhood.
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30.  What
decisions can you make about texts to
teach ?
 Why those ones? What will they enable to be
discussed and dealt with
 How are you going to introduce theory
through the texts/before/after/in addition
to?
And why?
 What challenges might you meet? What can
you do to deal with them?
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