Feminism is understood, according to Nicole Hämmerle, as the theory of women's social movement against the dominance of men. It is a movement for women's equality. Feminism became a broad social movement in the late sixties. By feminism, a broader sense of freedom, equality and aspirations of women, and the representation of their interests and rights are understood. The term was in German dictionaries up to the 70s only to show the idea of "effeminate" or "effeminacy of man." The word feminism is originally derived from the Latin femina and French Feminisme (woman).
Feminism is a collective term used for all concepts that address the social equality between men and women. This term was coined by the social philosopher Charles Fourier (1772-1837). Charles Fourrier measured social progress on the degree of freedom of women. In his book The Theory of the Four Movements and General Provisions, 1966 (1808): 190, he affirms:, Social progress is due to the advances in women's liberation ", not to mention the fact that women's emancipation during the French Revolution was a topic already associated with the name Olympe de Gouges. Thus it gave France
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the impetus for change. Feminist theory is an integral part of women's studies and gender studies in the humanities. The English term Gender Studies is also used in the German speaking community. There is a preference for the Latin word genus ( generare: create, generate, now a linguistic term) dates back to the term gender ( German: Geschlecht) even to sexus (gender). This development and metamorphosis of the original terminus came to the fore because the humanities inter alia play on gender images and assigned roles of male and female. In the biological sciences gender appurtenances belong the natural sciences. Conceptual distinction between biological sex and the social and cultural gender that is between gender and sex has since the 80's paved way to the dissemination and the contextualization of approach in all traditional subjects.
To be explored here are, what connection social, cultural and historical perceptions and images have between masculinity and femininity. Since these ideas are conveyed in texts, literature has to come into play. Feminist aesthetics has evolved since the 70s and their questions, methods and responses have been extensively studied. Jessing and Köhnen (2007:360) have stated this idea in their History of Methodology as follows:
It was a North American scientific movement espiecially in the 1970s, which took the first images of women in male-authored literature and the 'patriarchal' configuration of the female figures and developed them analytically. The North American Kate Millet read literature mainly from the 19th and 20th century programmatically <against the grain>, i.e. she analyzed the male perspective of those who write and read the images of women from a feminist perspective in terms of how much they were generated from a male perspective of power.
This view of Jeßings and Köhnens in Einführung in die Neuere Deutsche Literatur (Introduction to German Literature (revised and expanded edition 2007) was in 2006 supported by Petersen and Wagner-Egelhaaf (2006:249):
When one posits the question: what does it mean for example, whether a literary text was written by a woman or a man, or which men or women images are highlighted in a novel, then one is in the area of linguistics, or as cultural and literary theories would formulate it - in the area of the symbolic.
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The forerunners of the feminist movement recognized earlier on the role of the Mass Media. Therefore, they first of all fought male dominance of the traditional literary canon. All these pioneers were writers: Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929, A Room of One Alone). Simone de Beauvoir published in 1949 Le deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex). While Wollstonecraft fought to improve the situation of women and their rights, Beauvoir was trying to encourage women to throw all sexist and stereotypical attitudes over board. Woolf wrote about conditions under which women could publish real literature (écriture feminine). These include rest and a steady income. Woolf's fictional tale of Shakespeare's sister, Judith, cf.Peterson and Wagner-Egelhaaf (2006:251) illustrates the sexism of the era:
Woolf tells the fictional story of Shakespeare's sister, Judith, who was just as talented as he was, but who received no education and had no way to get Grammar and Logic lessons. As a teenager, she was to be married. She resisted being beaten by her father.
Judith pulled out from home, went to London to become an actress, but there she was visited by only ridicule and scorn. Finally, an actor-and her manager made her pregnant. She got despaired and committed suicide on a winter night.
Also worth noting is Alice Schwarzer (born 1942), who founded the feminist magazine Emma. The invasion of the women in the male-dominated literature with the second wave of the women's movement came to the men unexpectedly, very rapidly and surprisingly. Therefore, there was little resistance, apart from the delay and denial of women's manuscripts by the publishers. Some texts of women were simply had no chance at all to be included in the existing literary canon. In the 1980s, the political current of masculinism began. Masculinism is a derivation of the term Feminism.
These men's movement (Men’s Rights Movement) came up with counter accusations and the philosophy that men are oppressed and exploited by women. Women are only shedding crocodile tears. An early predecessor was Ernest Belfort Bax, who in 1913 published his book: Der Schwindel des Feminismus (The Fraud of Feminism). In the recent past Chinweizu had published another masculinist book called Anatomy of Female Power (London, Sundoor, 1990), in which he denounced the women as lazy and internal exploiters, posing as the exploited. There (Chinweizu 1990: 125), he claims:
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If men have not yet revolted in the works of feminism, it is because there are still too few masculinists around.
However among the feminists there were male sympathizers who have written works and analyzed these literary works with the appropriate and positive images of women. Generally in life people tend to conform to the status quo that is evil, unjust and discriminatory so long as they in the majority or they are feeding fat from the unjust situation. This can be termed as the sin of conformity. These people lack the courage to dissent.
So finding male scholars who presented the great refusal to the obvious oppression of women is encouraging to the feminist activists. These authors who are known as Male feminists are among others: Francophone African authors: Camara Laye, who wrote The African Child, published as The Dark Child (1954) / L'enfant noir (1953), Sembene Ousmane Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu (1960, German edition Holzstücke Gottes (Lembeck, Frankfurt / M, 1988). Similarly there are today many male literary critics viz Orjinta, Ikechukwu, Aloysius who have poured a lot of ink on paper in the above direction with the call for a global reform on the way women are perceived and treated. Ezeigbo T. confirmed these tendencies "in The Dynamics of African Womanhood in Ayi Kwei Armah's novels" (in Chukwuma H. (ed.) Feminism in African Literature, Enugu, New Generation Books, 53-71) as follows:
However, there has been a category of male authors who have always had a consistent positive attitude towards women in their works. These writers tend to empathize with their female characters, and this manifests in their tendency to attack sexist and social injustices that have been nurtured in society to the detriment of women (1994:54)
Similarly, many women have distinguished themselves as followers of masculinism. For example, in 1972 a book by Esther Vilar was published in London by Abelard-Schuman with the title The Manipulated Man. On page 10 of this book, the author notes:
Women let men work for them, think for them and take on their responsibilities; in fact they exploit them.
In their majority, however female literati seek to deconstruct the imagined injustice and femininity, which filled men’s literature. The binary opposition: femme fragile versus femme fatale was now unacceptable. The portrait of the woman as a saint or a whore, Eve or Mary, light or darkness,
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good Mother or witch, was violently denounced by feminists. Allkemper and Otto Eke (Literaturwissenschaft 2006:173) have shown this fact in the following:
An analysis of literary images of women in literature or historical and contemporary literature by women, then Questions arise again as regards the way woman images are constructed literary and in content and whether it is possible to describe or define one or more women’s writing. The examination of the images of women will very quickly show that there are historically and culturally different assignments of gender roles, so that one has to distinguish the biological sex (sex) from the culturally ascribed gender identity (gender).
Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième Sexe, dt. Das andere Geschlecht. Sitte und Sexus der Frau, Hamburg 2004.) and Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1989, German translation: Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter, 1991) have devoted to work collectively for the reflection and self-criticism of feminism. Beauvoir wrote: 'one did not come into the world as a woman’. ‘One is made so’. She needs however to explain further what the woman was before venturing into the world. One may proffer that she tends to say that patriarchal culture and civilization, in assigning roles to the sexes upstaged women. Yet ideas have been developed as to why the female majority, with so many links to the supernatural as earlier noted, could have allowed herself for so long to be so mistreated. How could the male minority have acted so powerfully if both sexes were equal à la Judith Butler? Similar experiences of oppression, injustice, racism etc. In the history of humanity succeeded where the oppressor has superior weaponry or greater population and power of coercion.
This aside, Simone de Beauvoir developed the mental concept that share the same male and female gender identity, das mitsein(the being-with).This idea is quoted in detail (The Second Sex (1949 (1972):... Intr.):
The division of the Sexes is a biological fact, not an Event in human history. Male and Female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in
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a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another.
Simone de Beauvoir argues that the cultural and social product of the binary nomenclature is a patriarchal oriented, fraudulent attempt to banish the selfish goal of the woman in the immanence of the male and the female:
Now what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she - a free and autonomous being like all human creatures nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) - who always regards the self as the essential and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential.
Consequently Beauvoir began to follow certain fundamental goals: how can a human being attain Fulfillment in woman's situation? What roads are open to her? Which roads are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman's liberty and how can they be overcome? "These questions are answered in the course of this work by the theory of womanism. In furtherance, Judith Butler, taking her bearing from Beauvoir, tried to put the gender identity issues in her work Gender Trouble, Feminism and the subversion of identity. 1989, (German translation by Katharina Menke under the title Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter, 1991) She generally stated the following: Butler's work should be based on the French theory, making it French-centered in connections with the ideas of Levi-Strauss , Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva and Wittig. They outlined what they meant by normative and descriptive (descriptive) representation of gender. Normative gender representation is accompanied by subterranean threat of violence, which is characterized by certain trends in gender ideals. Therefore to examine this, the feminist always ask which expressions of gender are acceptable and which are unacceptable, secondly, descriptive representation of gender research pursues questions such as:
“What makes gender intelligible?” In other words, should the gender activist first examine what conditions are promising and which have no chance?
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These aspects of self-criticism, reflection and gender construction came relatively late because the extreme feminists have already broken loose and run amok. Feminism had already split into several directions. What a medicine after death? No one was talking any longer of feminism but of feminisms and feminists. Currently, a kind of rebirth or revival of feminism is urgently needed and expected. It was high time one got urshered into Beyond feminism. Here comes the philosophy of womanism to the rescue.
3.3. Womanism