What feminist literary criticism is

A term you'll meet in literary theory.

Feminist literary criticism reads literature with attention to gender: how women (and ideas of femininity and masculinity) are represented, who gets to write and be read, and how texts reinforce or challenge the assumptions of a male-dominated culture.

Rereading the canon

One early task was to reread familiar works and expose the gender politics hiding in plain sight — the angelic or monstrous women, the plots that reward female silence, the "universal" reader assumed to be male. Critics asked what happens to a classic when you read it as the women in it, not just the men.

Recovering lost writers

A second project was recovery: rediscovering women writers excluded from the canon and asking why they were forgotten. Elaine Showalter called the study of women's own writing "gynocriticism" — shifting focus from how men wrote women to how women wrote themselves and their own traditions.

Gender as a construction

Later feminist theory, drawing on thinkers like Judith Butler, treated gender not as a fixed essence but as something performed and produced — including by texts. This widened the field toward questions of sexuality and identity and overlapped with queer theory, asking how literature helps build the categories it seems merely to describe.

How to read with it

Ask who acts and who is acted upon, whose interiority the narrative grants and whose it withholds, and what the text treats as natural about men and women. The point isn't to convict old books — it's to read more fully by seeing what the text, and its era, took for granted.

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