DECONSTRUCTION AND FEMINISM
Introduction
Deconstruction is a process which is used to derive meaning from texts. Such terminology was coined in 1960s by a French philosopher named . Deconstruction is used in modern humanities and social sciences to signify a philosophy of meaning which deals with the manners that meaning is being constructed and comprehend by texts, writers and readers. There are many ways in which deconstruction can be viewed. This includes discovering, understanding the underlying assumptions, frameworks, ideas, that form the foundations for thought and belief and recognizing. Deconstruction has different shades of definition in various aspects of study and discussion.
An early translator of states deconstruction as a term that signifies a task of critical thought whose purpose is to position and takes apart those ideas which serve as the rules or axioms for a period of thought. In addition, it also separates those concepts which instruct the unfolding of a whole epoch of metaphysics (). According to in Moynihan (156), deconstruction is plausible within text to scaffold a question or to undo assumptions made in the text, thru different elements which are in the text, that is frequently would be precisely structures that function off the rhetorical against grammatical aspects.
Hence, deconstruction is viewed in the first instance to the manner in which accidental features of a certain text or ideas can be seen as subverting, betraying its purposely important message or notions (). On the other hand, in the religious aspects, deconstruction is defined as a way of uncovering the questions that lies behind the answers of a tradition or text ().
As mentioned, the definition of deconstruction varies on the ideas presented or available. In this report, deconstruction will be used in the idea of feminism and the feministic theories. The main goal of this paper is to determine how the concept of deconstruction can be used as a tool for feminism.
Feminism
In the mid-1800s the term feminism was used to refer to the
qualities of females, and it was not until after the First International Women’s Conference in Paris in 1892 that the term, following the French term, was used regularly in English for a belief in and advocacy of equal rights for women, based on the idea of the equality of the sexes. Although the term feminism in English is rooted in the mobilization for woman suffrage in Europe and the US during the late 19th and early 20th century efforts to obtain justice for women did not begin or end with this period of activism ().
Other notable 19th-century feminists include, Feminism is not a new concept. Women have defended their rights, as they perceived them, on various battlefields throughout history (). Even so, in the modern sense, Feminism can be said to have begun around 1830′s with the women’s movement for suffrage. Women, as a collective unit, stood together asserting their rights as members of society, to take equal part in the government that supposedly represented them. This movement is now known as the First wave of Feminism. Some forty years later women began mobilizing again and hence The Second Wave of Feminism arose out of the demand of equal pay for equal work.
Feminism is a general term used to describe a very broad and complex
ideology. There are lots of different feminist theories and approaches, as well as several different types of feminists. The most straightforward meaning however describes it as ‘a movement advocating the rights of women and of their social, political and economic equality with men’ (). Feminism views the personal experiences of women and men through gender identity (how people think of themselves), gender roles (how people act), and gender stratification (each sex’s social standing) are all rooted in the operation of society.
Certainly, as long as women have been subordinated, they have resisted that subordination. Sometimes the resistance has been collective and conscious. Despite the continuity of women’s resistance, however, only within the last two or three hundred years has a visible and widespread feminist movement emerged that has attempted to struggle in an organized way against women’s special oppression ( ).
There are two types of feminism, the liberal and radical feminism. Liberal feminism is the dominant ideology of modern society and is grounded in classic liberal thinking that individuals should be free to develop their own talents and pursue their own interests and should be treated according to their individual merits rather than on others basis’s such as in the feminist’s case, sexual characteristics (). But because liberalism evolved in a context in which the private sphere of the family was excluded from political demands for equality, in which traditional social arguments remained strong, and in which the Church upheld women’s subordinate role in the family, liberal feminism developed.
Radical feminists, meanwhile, find the reforms called for by liberal feminism to be inadequate and superficial. The main goal for radical feminists is not to introduce equal rights, (they do not want women to become like men) but to free women from patriarchal control, the main challenge to patriarchy being in the form of separatism. While liberal feminists wish to create equality in society and are quite happy to live with men so long as they are not treated as lesser citizens, some radical feminists wish to see a policy, which would see women, cut themselves off from men entirely both socially and sexually ().
Deconstruction and Feminist theory
In the field of history the term linguistic turn denotes the historical analysis of representation as opposed to the pursuit of a discernible, retrievable historical “reality.” Any attempt to define the linguistic turn should acknowledge that in popular academic usage — in graduate seminars, conference debates, and even in many scholarly papers — “the linguistic turn” (like the term postmodernism) has become a catch-all phrase for divergent critiques of established historical paradigms, narratives, and chronologies, encompassing not only poststructuralist literary criticism, linguistic theory, and philosophy but also cultural and symbolic anthropology, new historicism, and gender history ().
It is difficult to disentangle the complex ways in which each of these strands of inquiry have (depending on one’s subject position) challenged, threatened, or revitalized the discipline of history or to discern how these strands (separately or in convergence with one another) have engendered a sense of epistemological crisis, a “crisis of self-confidence” among social historians in particular (1992). What is new and controversial about the linguistic turn for social historians is the pivotal place that language and textuality occupy in poststructuralist historical analysis. Rather than simply reflecting social reality or historical context, language is seen instead as constituting historical events and human consciousness ().
Feminist history can be defined in many tools of the linguistic turn. One of the tools that can be used is the deconstruction approach which was formulated by . Feminism can be traced back to the early 19th century. It contains several different theoretical perspectives that are quite often
contradictory to each other and can also be looked at in three main ways-empirically, theoretically and politically. Feminism originated from the works of and liberal political theory and each of these created a different strand of feminist thought.
The path of feminism started in two separate strands. One started with the German philosopher and the other with liberal political theory.
Hegel’s strand produced Existentialist feminism and Marxist feminism.
Existentialist feminism is mainly associated with the work of
this work then went on to influence psychoanalytical
feminism that is associated with and more recently
Existentialism also produced a strand that is known as New French
feminism. New French feminism is associated with and
. This in turn created then, area of feminism that this essay
is concerned with- post-structuralism (). This is associated with the work of . The work of focuses on the concept of deconstruction.
Many feminists believe that feminist politics should be focusing on deconstruction, so that they can change the traditional stereotyping of women. emphasizes that meaning is set up through series of binary oppositions, with one of the pair being superior or more positive than the other is. This can be applied to man/women with man being the superior and women being the other and therefore dependant on the man for power. wants to see the deconstruction of the cultural and linguistic assumptions regarding the inevitability of forms of power with the aim of opening up alternative possibilities. takes the idea of binary opposition further by commenting that women are always the other. Active/passive, culture/nature, strong/weak, all the first ones of these pairs represent the man and are meant to be the ‘norm’ from which the second part deviates.
Deconstruction can be used in feminism in many ways. It can be used to denote new meaning for the feminism and feminist theory itself. It can also be used to criticize masculinist contexts or to negate, dismiss or censor the concept feminism and lastly be used in the reinscription and redeployment of the feminist concept ().
A feminist deconstruction of the historical subject or agent suggests not the negation, dismissal, or censorship of the concept but rather requires its “critical reinscription and redeployment.” Categories can be reinscribed and redeployed once “all commitments to that to which the term . . . refers” are suspended and the ways in which it consolidates and conceals authority are unmasked (). Significantly, Butler and Scott invite feminists to reinscribe concepts like subject or agency but do not suggest a rewriting of
The third group of feminists to which is referred here envision an encounter, a strategic engagement between feminism and poststructuralism, that transforms both sides in significant ways. for example, seek to meld the analytical and critical power of both strands, to “combine a postmodern incredulity toward meta-narratives with the social-critical power of feminism” (29). Literary scholar calls upon feminists to first rewrite deconstruction in order to render it useful — to endow it with tools for analyzing specificity, to historicize it, to enrich it with a model of change, and finally to deploy it upon itself. And because deconstruction challenges feminism in fundamental ways, this act of rewriting will transform not only deconstruction but also feminism ().
Feminist projects of “rewriting,” “reinscribing,” or “redeploying” key concepts of political and historical vocabulary have emerged as one primary outcome of the encounter between feminism and poststructuralism. There are feminists that aim to rewrite the terms experience and discourse and, by implication, the notions of agency, subjectivity, and identity. Specifically, their purpose is to untangle the relationships between discourses and experiences by exploring the ways in which subjects mediated or transformed discourses in specific historical settings ().
Among the mentioned use of deconstruction in feminism, the most successful is in line with the use of deconstruction to criticize masculinity. The main goal of the feminist is to change the social world. Hence, the most interesting query regarding the use of deconstruction for feminist theory is whether, and others have been able to convinced each everyone that there is nothing natural, objective or scientific about any given practice or description of masculinity and that all things attached with it like neutrinos, women, men, chairs, feminism, literary theory) are social constructs, there is any further support that deconstruction can provide in deciding which constructs to keep and which is to change or n finding alternatives for the latter.
It is often said that the deconstruction context provide tools which enable feminists to identify the variations between entities such as prose and poetry and man and women. Such difference is shown to be based on despotism of discrepancies within entities, ways by which such item differ from it.
Conclusion
It can be said that deconstruction which is concern with writing and text is highly relevant to textual constructions of feminist theories. Although some feminists are critical of deconstructionists’ preoccupation with textuality, it can be argued that texts, understood in the broadest sense as discourses of any kind (i.e., rituals, forms of worship) that encode ideology and represent the imaginary (and desired) relationship of individuals and collective groups to their real conditions of existence. In fact, a more compelling drive for textual analysis and production may arise from the need to bring the imaginary and the real into closer alignment.
In this particular issue, it can be noted that deconstruction and its tools can be used in feminism. Through the underlying concept of deconstruction, some issues in feminist theory are now being understood. Hence, it can be concluded that deconstruction especially the tools in providing new meaning and discourse is useful for having a comprehensive and modern feminist theory.
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