Assignment Code: MWG-001/AST/TMA-2022

Course Code: MWG-001

Assignment Name: Theories of Women’s &Gender Studies

Year: 2022-2023

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

Attempt any two of the following Long Answer questions (50 marks each)

1. Critically read Block 1, Unit 1 and 2. What kinds of debates emerged in the feminist movements in the western and Indian history? Discuss with suitable examples.

Ans) Alexandra Kollontai started out as a traditional Marxist who believed that the Revolution could fix all wrongs. Eventually, she changed her mind and became a radical critic of socialist practises that put women in the background. She fought for the party to have separate women's wings and kept saying that women's issues should be at the forefront. After the Revolution of 1917, Kollontai was the first woman in modern times to work in the cabinet. She started laws that gave women full legal independence within marriage. This was a big step toward emancipation for women in the Soviet Union. Through her efforts, abortion became legal, equal pay for equal work was put in place, and illegitimacy was taken away as a legal category, among many other things.

By the time the First World War started in 1914, women in many other parts of the western world already had the right to vote. In 1894, New Zealand was the first country to do this. Australia, Finland, and Norway soon followed. After the First World War, many other European countries gave more people the right to vote, and some even moved toward giving all adults the right to vote. This doesn't mean, though, that the world was full of feminist politicians at the time. On the contrary, the decision to give more people the right to vote was based on political expediency, the need for political stability, and the need to deal with new immigrant populations. Of course, women's constant campaigning is still the most important reason. And giving women the right to vote has to be one of the biggest wins for the feminist movement. Women's right to vote, on the other hand, did not bring about the kinds of big changes that were expected, nor did it make their lives much different. It was also clear that women did not vote as a group. Their interests were affected by class, race, and religion, just like men's.

Women in Europe and the United States were able to get more rights because they fought for them for a long time. Women continued to organise and take part in public life after women got the right to vote, but it seemed a lot quieter than during the suffragette movement. Feminists began to fight over new kinds of issues and ideas. Around this time, two opposing ideas that still cause problems for the feminist movement today began to become clear: on the one hand, women wanted to be treated the same as men, and on the other, women wanted to be recognised and supported for their unique qualities and roles.

The two ideas are called "equal rights" and "welfare feminism," with "equal rights" focusing on the woman as an individual and "welfare feminism" recognising that women have a sex-group identity. Welfare feminism made it possible for feminism, which had been seen as mostly the desire for more freedom by middle-class women, to take on a new face: that of the working-class mother, who became the new face of oppressed womanhood.

Simone de Beauvoir said that each person is the only one in charge of her own life and that there are no rules or structures that must be followed. So, unlike psychoanalysis and the more extreme form of Marxism, existentialist feminism said that each person has to take full responsibility for her own life and has complete freedom to do so. Jean Paul Sartre, who started this way of thinking, didn't think the sex of a person who could be free was important, but Simone de Beauvoir did.

Even though de Beauvoir seems to focus on individual struggles and changes, she actually became a feminist in the late 1960s and was at the forefront of many feminist movements in France, especially the campaigns to make abortion legal. After the deceptive lull we talked about earlier, these movements in France and other places began. They are often called "second wave feminism." It started mostly in the United States, where liberals were upset that the country wasn't keeping the promises it had made to women in the past. Even within the Soviet Union, there was some rethinking going on in the 1960s because of the de-Stalinization movement. Even in other parts of the world, the 1960s were a time of political growth. The New Left movement, the civil rights movements in Europe and the United States, and the energy of the student protests in France all led to a close look at the basic ideas of socialism.

We have come a long way since the days when history was just a list of facts that everyone knew. The fact that writing history is random, that it is a political project, and that it has to confirm multiple and plural locations has made the task difficult. But we might let historians decide how to answer such questions. Let's instead try to figure out what we already know about how the women's question began in modern India and how it has changed over time. The storey has been written and rewritten, each time as responses to challenges of movements and re-conceptualization. This is one of the most important things that both women's movements and the study of women have brought to the world.

Taking into account both the popular stories and the criticisms, it goes something like this: a mandatory mention of the social reform movements of the 19th century and the articulation of the women's question; the growth of women's writing and voices during the same time; the rise of women's groups in the early 20th century; the links between the women's movement, the national movement, and the early left movements; the caste and gender question within and outside the national movement, which had been left out of history books for a long time; independence and women's rights.

Then, it is important to point out that the women's question came up in the specific context of India's colonial modernity. There's something that needs to be made clear. In India, women have been writing about feeling oppressed for as long as writing has been around. But there was no sense that these things were wrong and that the government and society should work to fix them.

2. Read Unit 2 in Block 5, discuss the feminist critique of psychoanalysis in the context of Freud and Lacan.

Ans) In a number of ways, the feminist critique of psychoanalysis is related to both the feminist critique of philosophy and the feminist critique of literature. These disciples have something to do with how society defines and thinks about men and women, or what is masculine and what is feminine. All of them are important to how gender is formed. Philosophy is interested in the mind, thought patterns, and experiences. Literature is interested in culture and ideas. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is interested in the relationship between the mental and the social. The feminist critique of psychoanalysis is made up of feminist critics from different schools and worldviews who keep talking about Freudian psychoanalysis. This section will try to show a wide range of opinions on the topic, but it will also focus on feminist reappropriations, rereadings, and critiques of Freud that have been especially helpful. Here, we will also look at how Jacques Lacan interpreted Freud's work, which has had a big impact on feminist postmodernists. Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Jacqueline Rose, and the French feminists have done the most to reinterpret Freud from a feminist perspective.

Freud's ideas about female sexuality are mostly shown in three essays on the same subject: "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Difference between the Sexes", "Female Sexuality", and "Femininity", as well as a few other essays and case studies. Freud's first theory, which was written in 1925, doesn't really make a difference between how little girls and boys develop sexually. By the second essay, though, there is a clear difference and a thorough look at how close the little girl was to her mother in the early pre-Oedipal phase. Freud's theory isn't good enough, say many feminists, when it comes to the next stage, which is the change to heterosexuality, which is considered normal sexuality. Feminists call his view of women as primarily objects of exchange "phallocentrism," and the way he sees Dora's case is a good example of this.

Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is criticised by feminists because it assumes that everyone is the same.  Freud is also accused of ahistoricism, especially the idea that the nuclear family is unchangeable, heterosexism, biological essentialism, and phallocentrism. The feminist critique of psychoanalysis also goes after some of Freud's basic ideas, like that being separate is what makes someone an individual and that a girl's lack of a phallus is what makes her feminine. In the same way, the goal of therapy is seen as reactionary, conservative, and out-of-date because it steers patients away from a political understanding of their problems and toward a personal solution of adjusting to a (heterosexist) status quo.

Freud's understanding of the masculine and feminine is based on the Oedipal complex and the castration complex. The Oedipus complex helps define and differentiate between the masculine and the feminine by the way it is dealt with. Freud thinks that a boy's Oedipus complex goes away because he is afraid of being castrated, but a girl's Oedipus complex doesn't go away as completely. So, while the boy joins patriarchal culture and accepts the law of the father, the girl takes a very "circular" path to become a heterosexual woman. Juliet Mitchell says in her essay "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Narrative and Wuthering Heights" that if the Oedipus complex isn't resolved, a person can't cross over to "normal" sexuality and may end up bisexual. Mitchell is talking about Cathy's dilemma in the book. Mitchell says that Cathy can't make the jump to normal adult sexuality and stays stuck in the grip of childish desire.

Karen Horney and Melanie Klein criticised parts of Freud's theory that assumed or hinted that women were inferior. They did this by changing his ideas to fit their own views. Klein, for example, talked about how important maternal functions are and how men have "breast envy," which is similar to Freud's idea of "penis envy," which means a feeling of "lack." In Bracha Ettinger's work, you can find similar theoretical perspectives that put the mother at the centre of psychoanalytic interpretations. When Ettinger says that the maternal axis is where therapy should begin, it moves the father figure out of the centre.

Feminists' attacks on Freudian psychoanalysis didn't stop until the 1960s. Psychoanalysis was said to have a sexist bias because of what Simone de Beauvoir said in The Second Sex about how women are made the other and what she said about Freud's work with its focus on instincts and drives. Eva Figes, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Kate Millett viewed psychoanalysis as being anti-women.

Simone de Beauvoir thinks Freud's ideas about how women become women should be put in the context of patriarchal society and the advantages it gives men. So, she thinks that if girls want a penis, it's because the penis is a sign of the advantages boys have. Betty Friedan criticises Freud's attempt to make his account of psychosexual development universal and apply to everyone. So, she thinks that Freud's ideas about Vienna in the late 1800s can't be applied to America in the 1960s. In a similar way, Kate Millett wrote a harsh attack on Freud's supposed biological determinism. She said he had a "grossly male-supremacist" bias. In her book Humanities in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Juliet Mitchell was the first feminist theorist to work with Freud in a productive way. She put forward a view of Freud's work that fit with feminist theory and strategy. Mitchell used psychoanalysis as a way to look at how women have been treated throughout history.

Using Freud's work and Lacan's very influential interpretation of Freud, Mitchell saw psychoanalysis as a changeable, mutable, sociohistorical product that went well with Althusser's ideology theory. Feminists like Jane Gallop (1982) thought that one of the biggest problems with psychoanalysis was that it didn't take history into account. They also thought that Mitchell's use of Freud's work tried too hard to make psychoanalysis fit with feminist goals. Mitchell was also accused of misreading Jacques Lacan, which she addressed in the book she co-edited with Jacqueline Rose on "Feminine Sexuality" (1982). There, she said that psychoanalysis is not about the "internalisation" of "socially created sexual relations," but about the "construction" of sexual difference.