It is kind of sad that people that are in college, or out of college (when I think about certain men at our family Christmas parties) still define strong, intelligent women that follow a feminist theology as "scary feminist bitches" or "fem-Nazis" or a number of crude names. What is even sadder is that I am afraid to call myself a Feminist or Poststructuralist-Feminist, because I do not want to be associated with their bad connotations.
I remember my freshman year at school, I was eating dinner with some friends, and one asked me "What do you want to do when you get out of college?" I said, (half jokingly, half completely serious) "I want to be a mom." Her reaction blew me away. She started her rant by yelling across the table "Were you born in the 1800's?!" Ever since then, I have refused to call myself a Feminist, because my dear friend calls herself one. It was not until I was talking to a professor recently that she said "being a feminist is supporting the idea to make choices."
I am in college right now because my dad made me go. Of course, I love it now that I am here. But it took one pretty swift kick to get me out the door after high school. Its not that I don't enjoy learning, it’s actually my favorite thing to do, but I did not want to have to go to college to do so. I wanted to be a mom. Not it that, lets get drunk and knock me up kind of way, but rather I want to possibly get married, have kids, teach them things, be there for them, make them lots of cookies. I know that may sound incredibly lame, but I really enjoy that kind of stuff as well as being a strong woman that does not enjoy being objectified or held to the standards of a patriarchal society. I realized you can be both, a mom and a feminist. You can be an intelligent independent female English professor and not be a bitch.
I suppose I should speak to Tonya Krouse's guest lecture, as that is what this blog post is indirectly about. I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Krouse's lecture on Feminist theology and criticism. It was a very easy read, and I was pleased that she cited Virginia Woolf, because I am actually taking a class on Woolf next semester while I am in England and had really no idea what that was going to be about. I found her discussion on "Masculinist discourses" to be very helpful in understanding the beginnings of the feminist criticism.
I think I am starting to understand poststructuralist-feminism, because the decentering of the "feminine-gendered subject" makes a lot of sense to me. But I am still a little confused on l’ecriture feminine, well not just a little confused, a lot confused. I don't understand how someone can write through the body; or rather I don't know what it means to do that. Can only women write through the body? I know Dr. Krouse was talking about the split of mind and body, and disrupting it by saying that gender is constructed by the individual. Which I get, I think Butler makes the most sense to me, but every thing else, especially Cixous gets really confusing. The Feminist theory is so much more intense than I thought it would be (I thought we wer just going to talk about Barbies and using the word "mankind"). Maybe someone can help me?
