The Newly Born Woman Cixous Pdf 13
Lorean Hoefert
It is generally accepted that third wave feminism was started through the writing of Afro-American women in conjunction with the civil rights movement. Non-Anglo women had always been a part of the feminist movement, but they became an important dissident voice within feminism that helped shape what was to become known as third wave. At the time, the public feminist rallying call was for women to leave the family home and find work. It was through economic independence that women could begin to free themselves of the socio-economic dependence that was oppressing them. But of course many poor and non-white women had been leaving their homes (often to other homes as domestic help) for decades. Thus these writers argued that the existing feminist theory did not talk to them as non-white, non-middle class women. Mann and Huffman quote Audre Lorde:
Another critical argument against second wave feminism is idealism. Of what use are these theories written in ivory towers? How does theoretical feminism help women who are forced into arranged marriages, who are physically abused in their own homes, who are blocked from education, who earn less money for doing the same work as men, who have no voice? There is a divide between the ideal and the political. How can the activist or the woman in the street take an ideal and create change in her/the world?
[1] Cixous (born in Algeria in 1937) is a feminist theorist, writer of fiction, plays and poetry and a university professor. Along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva she is considered a mother of post structuralist feminist theory.
I really enjoyed reading your analysis of; the deconstruction of the masculine binary that remains so inherent throughout. The idea that we can rid ourselves from the fears which have encapsulated us within the dominant rhetoric and find a momentum for the celebration of diversity and honesty in how we can embrace equality, is hopefully more than just a utopian ideal.