Feminist Criticism and Poststructuralism

Abstract

Literature would therefore be neither a reflection nor a distortion of reality but a crucial component in the recreation of conditions of consciousness. The "unhappy marriage" that had existed between Marxism and feminism, which had tried to explain women’s condition on the basis of the division of labour, could now give way to forms of feminism attentive to the images, figures, metaphors and myths through which both men and women live their reality. If structuralism had insisted on the ways in which thought and subjectivity were already determined by systems not decided by, or present to, consciousness, poststructuralism demonstrated that such systems were intrinsically unstable. Literature would play a crucial role in iterating the binaries through which gender had been constituted and would allow for a critical reflection on those very binaries. The text was neither an historical document that might disclose. Women’s real social conditions nor a simple representation of false consciousness or stereotypes; literature could be read as creative of differences, as productive of systems.