1. Gender Criticism
“The study of gender, within literature, is of general importance to everyone.”
- Judith Spector
“I have a male mind with male experiences. Therefore I see things through the perception of a man. I couldn’t relate to some of Virginia Woolf’s views and I despised the way she pushed her viewpoint on the reader. This was brought on by my masculinity, I feel.”
-Bill, 12th Grade

2. Gender Criticism
Sees the exclusion of women from the literary canon as a political as well as aesthetic act.
Works to change the language of literary criticism
Examines the experiences of women from all races, classes, cultures
Feminist criticism reasserts the authority of experience
Exposes patriarchal premises and resulting prejudices to promote discovery and reevaluation of literature by women
Feminist literary criticism has most developed since the women’s movement beginning in the early 1960’s.

3. Gender Criticism
Examines social, cultural, and psychosexual contexts of literature and criticism.
In the production of literature and within stories themselves, men and women have not had equal access.
Men and women are different: they write differently, read differently, and write about their reading differently. These differences should be valued.
Describes how women in texts are constrained in culture and society.
Gender is conceived as complex cultural idea and psychological component rather than as strictly tied to biological gender
Always political and always revisionist

4. Gender Criticism
This patriarchal ideology pervades those writings that have been considered great literature. Such works lack autonomous female role models, are implicitly addressed to male readers, and shut out the woman reader as an alien outsider or solicit her to identify against herself by assuming male values and ways of perceiving, feeling, and acting.

5. Gender Criticism Advantages Disadvantages
Women have been somewhat underrepresented in the traditional canon; a feminist approach to literature helps redress this problem
Disadvantages
Feminist critics turn literary criticism into a political battlefield and overlook the merits of works they consider “patriarchal.”
When arguing for a distinct feminine writing style, feminist critics tend to regulate women’s literature to ghetto status; this in turn prevents female literature from being naturally included in the literary canon
Often too theoretical

6. Gender Criticism Strategies and questions
To what extent does the representation of gender in the work reflect the place and time in which the work was written?
How are the relationships between gender presented in the work? What roles do men and women assume and perform and with what consequences?
Does the author present the work from within a predominantly male or female sensibility? Why might this have been done, and with what effects?
How do the facts of the author’s life relate to the presentation of men and women in the work? To their relative degrees of power?

7. Gender Criticism Strategies and questions cont.
How do other works by the author correspond to this one in their depiction of the power relationships between men and women?
What role does gender or sexuality play in this work?
Specifically, observe how sexual stereotypes might be reinforced or undermined. Try to see how the work reflects or distorts the place of women (men) in society.
Look at the effects of power drawn from gender within the plot or form.