Gayatri Spivak's "Feminism and Critical Theory" (Summary)

 Spivak's Analysis of Feminism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Deconstruction in Literary Criticism

Definition of Feminism
• Spivak questions the definitive definition of a woman as a "man" in literary texts.
• They argue that no rigorous definition is possible but definitions are necessary to keep us going.

The Role of Textuality in Human Sciences
• Textuality is a part of discourse within human sciences where the problem of the discourse is made available.
• Human textuality is the representation of a world in terms of a self at play with other selves and generating this representation.

Marxist or Psychoanalytic Criticism
• The discourse of the literary text is part of a general configuration of textuality.
• The solution is the unavailability of a unified solution to a homogeneous, generating or receiving, consciousness.

Alienation and Normality in Freud
• Freud's ideas of alienation and normality and health are often seen as reductive models in the literary critical establishment.
• The traditional social situation of women producing more than they receive raises questions about the use-value of a woman's unremunerated work.

Externalization and Alienation in Capitalist System
• The labor process externalizes itself and the worker as commodities, fracturing the human relationship to himself and his work as commodities.
• The legal possession of the child is an inalienable fact of the property right of the man who "produces" the child.

Rewriting Freud's Text
• The task of rewriting Freud's text is to make available the idea of a womb envy as something that interacts with the idea of penis envy to determine human sexuality and the production of society.

Feminist Enterprise and Redefining Literature
• The feminist enterprise should provide evidence to prevent the great male texts from becoming great adversaries or models for revising or reassessing ideas.
• The development of a reading method that is sensitive to gender, race, and class is crucial for this change.

The Relationship between Wage Theory and "Women's Work"
• Spivak discusses the subversive power of "women's work" in models for the construction of a "revolutionary subject."

Spivak's Analysis of Psychoanalytic Feminism and Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall

• Spivak discusses the role of psychoanalytic feminism in colonialism and Marxist feminism in examining economic text and operations of new imperialism.
• She argues that deconstruction, reversing and displacing historical events, is crucial in understanding the asymmetry of interest and the hidden ethico-political agenda of differentiations constitutive of knowledge and judgment.
• She suggests that deconstruction will not allow the establishment of a hegemonic "global theory" of feminism.

Drabble's The Waterfall
• Drabble's work explores concerns of race and class in a nonexpository way.
• The author suggests that Drabble is taking up the challenge of feminine "passivity" and making it the tool of analytic strength.
• The author discusses the concept of love and the reasons behind it, and the idea of making women rivals in terms of the man who possesses them.
• The author doubts the irony in Drabble's creation of such a classbound and yet analytical Jane, as it must come from "outside the book."

The Role of Jane as a Narrator
• The author explores the conditions of production and determination of microstructural heterosexual attitudes within her chosen enclosure.
• The author emphasizes the need for different forms of understanding and change rather than relying on self-identical categories of truth.
• The author suggests that the desire to "understand" and "change" is both symptomatic and revolutionary, and that a taxonomy of different forms of understanding and change is necessary.

The Complex Relationship between Women and the Prileging of Essence in Literature and Fiction
• Spivak points out the complex relationship between women and the privileging of essence in literature and fiction.
• She discusses the discontinuities and contradictions in assumptions about women's freedom to work outside the house and the sustaining virtues of the working-class family.
• The author suggests that the nuclear family does not have a transcendent ennobling power, and the rise of meritocratic individualism has a relationship to the development of ideology and marriage in the West.

Socialized Capital and the Killing of Women
• The author criticizes socialized capital for its remote control and the killing of women, as seen in the case of Control Data.
• Derrida's work becomes solipsistic and marginal when he writes under the sign of woman, critiquing proprietion and the tyranny of the text of the proper.