FEMINIST HOUSEWIFE SOAP OPERA

Feminist Housewife Soap Opera

[Name of the Institute]Feminist Housewife Soap Opera

Introduction

Charlotte Brunsdon is a British film and television critic and a key cultural studies scholar. She has suggested that feminist intellectuals in television studies come in three varieties (Brunsdon, 1997). There are those feminist intellectuals who do not differentiate between themselves and “women”—there are no “others,” the relationship is transparent, and “woman” is an unproblematic identity shared between the intellectual and those she talks about. Secondly, there are feminists who aim to recruit nonfeminist others: The relationship between feminists and women is a hegemonic one. The formerly undifferentiated group of women now comes in at least two categories: feminist women (including the academics) and nonfeminist women (the ones feminist women talk about) (Canedy, 2007, 11).

Lastly, there are postmodernist feminists, for whom “feminism” would appear to be the more stable identity and “woman” a profoundly unstable one. Biological gender ceases to be a reliable indicator of the discursive positions that the academic herself and those she studies may occupy (Brunsdon, 1997, p. 117). When seen as a developmental logic, feminist intellectuals moved from not questioning their own authority and superior, more powerful position (which included their automatic right to speak on behalf of other women) to a questioning of that position to—lastly—exploding the category on whose behalf, presumably, they had been politically active.

Relationship between Feminism and Feminity

For cultural studies, femininity is an identity category that refers to the social and cultural characteristics associated with being female. It is a discursive-performative construction that describes and disciplines the cultural meaning of being a woman. As such, femininity is to be understood as the culturally regulated behavior held to be socially appropriate to women. Thus, for cultural studies femininity is not an essential quality of embodied subjects but a matter of representation by which sexual identity is constituted through ways of speaking about and disciplining bodies. As such, femininity is a site of continual political struggle over meaning and there are multiple modes of femininity that are enacted not only by different women, but also by the same woman under different circumstances.

According to Kristeva, femininity is a condition or subject position of marginality that some men, for example avant-garde artists, can also occupy. Indeed, it is the patriarchal symbolic order that tries to fix all women as feminine and all men as masculine, rendering women as the 'second sex'. Kristeva suggests that the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics. Sexual identity concerns the balance of masculinity and femininity within specific men and women. This struggle, she suggests, could result in the deconstruction of sexual and gendered identities understood in terms of marginality within the symbolic order.

To speak of feminism in the context of a set of overarching ideals that define a unified movement is a misrepresentation. It is more accurate to speak of feminisms, which highlight the fact, that identifying oneself as a feminist can mean different ...