Feminism: Elaine Showalter and Gayatri Spivak

Gayatri Spivak 

👭The advent of feminism as a global and revolutionary ideology has brought into the field of literary criticism new critical outlooks and modes of exegesis. The practice of reading of any literary text has become a site in the struggle for change in gender relations that prevail in society. 

📕A reading that is feminist aims at asking such rudimentary questions: 

how the text defines sexual questions, what it says about gender relations and how it represents women. 

In other words, feminist reading/criticism has come to be recognized as a political discourse: a critical and theoretical practice committed to the struggle against patriarchy and sexism. 

The influential feminist critic, Elaine Showalter points out that two factors -gender and politics- which are suppressedin the dominant models of reading gain prominence with the advent of a feminist perspective. In every area of critical reflection whether it is literary representations of sexual difference or the molding/shaping of literary genres by masculine values feminist criticism has 

established gender as a fundamental category of literary analysis.

gender as a tool of literary interpretation the issue of silencing of the female voice in the institutions of literature

criticism and theory has also come to the forefront. Appreciating the widespread importance of gender, feminist philosophers resist speaking in gender-neutral voice. They value women's experiences, interest, and seek to shift the position of women from object to one of subject and agent.

🙅‍♀️Use of term Subaltern by Gayatri Spivak:-

Among all the most important figures in postcolonial feminism is Gayatri Spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon 'subaltern' or subploretarian women in the Third world. 

 Spivak subaltern Studies reveal how female subjects are silenced by the dialogue between the male dominated west and the male - dominated East offering little hope for the subaltern woman's voice to rise up amidst the global social institutions that oppress her.