No Fear Woolf-speare

A movie I haven't seen asked me "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and my response was "what is there to fear?" After all, a different movie told me that Neo was the One; with him around we shouldn't fear anything. But then I realized that "Neo" was just the word "one" all scrambled up,  so I turned to Beauvoir for a better understanding of "the One."

It seems as though the One can't be defined without the Other. According to Beauvoir, "no group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself." So everybody is either One or the Other, and members of the One group degrade the Others. I don't want this to turn into some Alejandro Amenábar moment, so instead I'll turn to the good doctor Theodor Geisel. In his world, the One group is defined as sneetches with stars upon thars, and the Other group is defined as the sneetches without any stars. I tried painting a star on my stomach but it didn't make me any more accepted, so I read the rest of the book and found out why. Oddly enough, the U.S. doesn't have a machine that can mix up our genders so randomly the dichotomy breaks down. If it did exist, I feel like the name should include Queer Theory somehow, but I'm not clever enough to give it a catchy title. Instead I think I'll look back to Woolf and see if I can find a space in between One and the Other.

In "A Room of One's Own" Woolf talked of a fusion between the masculine brain and the feminine brain to create something great, an androgynous brain. The androgynous brain isn't limited by either side, and has the ability blur the lines of men and women. Woolf brings up Shakespeare as an example. William puts women in positions of power and gives those characters enough intelligence to know how to use it. Also, his Seuss-like ability to queer notions of gender identity are apparent in stories in which women dress as men, or men dress as women. While cross dressing isn't extreme, the audience is seeing a boy, acting like a woman who is acting like a man. Perhaps our old friend William could have helped with my gender machine, or at least given it a good name. But what about his sister, Judith?

Woolf creates a supposition in which one Judith Shakespeare has all of the same talents as her more famous brother, but is not able to pursue writing because of the treatment of women at the time. While William had the great androgynous mind, the only reason we know about it is because he was a man. How many great androgynous minds have gone to waste simply because they existed in the skull of a woman? The thought of it is sad, but Woolf encourages her audience to keep writing anyway, even if it only exists in obscurity. I take this as a sign of hope. Even if a woman's work is in obscurity, the hipsters will embrace it and eventually it will become too mainstream for them as it becomes embraced by society as a whole.

What is Really Ailing Feminist Criticism? Yet Another Opinion

After diving into Susan Gubar's "What Ails Feminist Criticism" then swimming through Robyn Wiegman's "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion" I've decided that I don't like being in the water. The juxtaposition of these two articles is comparable to a college-aged girl criticizing her mother for not liking her new friends. That's not to say the articles should be reduced to the rantings of an old woman and the overzealous rebuttal  of a college freshman. In fact they are far from it. Wiegman's piece addresses Gubar's  argument point by point and aptly addresses shortcomings and hypocrisy. The problem I see with the works as a whole is a failure to convey feminism in a positive light.

As a fresh-on-the-scene student into the world of feminist literature and criticism, I have become my own prime example for illustrating the issues with Gubar and Wiegman's articles. Basically, my exposure to feminist criticism has been limited to a negative public view and these two internal attack and defense dialogues. While I admit some internal checks and criticism can be healthy, you can't expect much outward productivity when you can't even handle the battle from within. So what is feminism all about?

From what I've learned through Gubar, Feminism is a body being infected by bacteria (or factions of feminism) that don't sit well with the white blood cells (emphasis on white); and that feminism grows weaker by attempts to "slim down" the word woman or make it "disappear altogether." While my brain works to cram feminism into framework regarding postcolonial and poststructuralist ideas, I can't help but realize one of my few preconceived notions of feminism was that it delt with women. Now I have a feminist telling me that other feminists are compromising the word woman... it seems like I should get a second opinion.

Enter Wiegman's piece with talk of murder - a nifty attention grabber, but it doesn't sound like the diagnosis I was looking for. Sure enough, Weigman tells me that "Gubar is not alone in lamenting the course of contemporary feminism" and that she had a hope to not "lend fuel to the popular fire that feeds on the rhetorical battles among feminists." So what I gather is that there are plenty more people lamenting contemporary feminism, and there is a popular habit of forming battles among feminists. Sounds like an ailment to me, so what does the doctor order? A healthy dose of rhetorical fighting, despite Gubar's hope. While Weigman's piece addresses points that need to be brought up in retaliation to Gubar's piece, I can't help but notice a viscous cycle. An attack from within, a retaliation, a rebuttal on the retaliation, a criticism of the rebuttal on the retaliation, and so on.

Basically I'm just left to wonder, not where can feminism go from here, but how can feminism go from here?