Cultural Feminism Discourse
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Michelle Moravec analyzed feminist periodicals from the late 1970s to early 1980s using corpus linguistics to explore cultural feminism. She compared the journals Feminist Studies, Feminist Review, and Chrysalis. Key findings included that Feminist Studies contained more language associated with cultural feminism like "women from" implying separation. Chrysalis did not appear essentialist like the other journals based on modified uses of "women." The analysis provided nuanced insights but also limitations, prompting Moravec to consider expanding the analysis to additional sources and contexts.
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Cultural Feminism Discourse
- 1. Michelle Moravec, Ph.D @professmoravec Project made possible by assistance of Maggie Byrd Micki Kaufman JSTOR Using corpus linguistics to look for “cultural feminism”
- 2. “cultural feminism” Echols' trajectory of radical feminism's decline into cultural feminism is one of the most influential interpretations of the women's liberation movement. Cultural feminism is described as apolitical, celebratory, female, alternative, separatist implicitly apolitical, racist and essentialist in discussions of feminist theory (Alcoff 1988)
- 3. Discipline* of JSTOR journal publishing article w/ reference=Daring To Be Bad total peak history journals sociology women’s studies *determined by me not JSTOR designation
- 4. Previous work Spring 2013 Compared Off Our Backs " the best-known newspaper of the 'radical feminist' " family and Chrysalis a magazine of women’s culture conceived of by Rennie and Grinstead as a “new national feminist magazine.” They claimed OOB left behind radical feminist movement to focus on intra-movement schisms from a “predominantly male left perspective.” Women's Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues
- 5. My Project Comparing Feminist Studies and Feminist Review (digitzed from JSTOR) as well as Chrysalis to explore features of feminist discourse Focused on period of 1978-1981
- 6. Feminist Studies (US) and Feminist Review (UK) • Feminist Studies founded in 1972 in New York to encourage “analytic responses to feminist issues Moved to University of Maryland in Fall of 1977 • Feminist Review founded in London in 1979 as ‘a vehicle to unite research and theory with political practice, and contribute to the development of both’ • Chrysalis founded in 1977 in Los Angeles as “a magazine for women’s culture”
- 7. Corpus Linguistics software finds patterns based on math in a large number of sources to find features brains can’t periodical size (token) files Dates Feminist Studies 632,150 117 Fall 1979 vol 5, no 3- Summer 1981 vol 7, no 2 Feminist Review 475,705 91 Fall 1979 #1 – Autumn 1981 #9 Chrysalis 663,807 171 Fall 1979 #1 – Spring 1981 #10
- 9. How does women appear in the texts? Journal Feminist Studies Feminist Review Chrysalis Keyness WomAn (+FR) womEn (+ FS C) WomAN (+ FR, FS) Cluster L white women black women against women with women Cluster R women of women from women of N-grams women and men men and women of the women
- 10. Women from (FR)
- 11. Women from (FS)
- 12. What does women from all mean? words that co-occur in span of 5L and 5 R protect isolate separate emancipate free liberate
- 14. women and men vs men and women (n-grams)
- 15. women - modified black MI 5.1 class 3.5 working 4.06 white MI 5.2 working MI 4.9 black MI 4.7 class MI 4.2 white 4.7 Collocates tendency of two words to co-occur (here within span of 5 L and 5 R) Pie= clusters
- 16. conclusions Context is everything. In Feminist Studies women from measured against Feminist Review “protect” appears like “cultural feminism” Similarly, trigrams women and men and men and women point to less focus on equality in Feminist Studies than in Feminist Review Collocates and clusters of women show that Chrysalis not essentialist (universalizing) as compared to women modified in other periodicals Against women in Chrysalis lacks the co-occurrence with sexual that appears in Feminist Studies ,but does have high co occurrence with violence. This stat highlights a potential nuance between focus on violence against women and “sexual” danger Ngrams reveal Chrysalis isn’t much about men. Trigram there about the movement (apolitical). This stat means we need to look in different ways for engagement with politics and patriarchy.
- 17. Where am I going with this? Look for more evidence in • more from JSTOR • more “movement” periodicals from JSTOR • create own corpus of black feminism • expand beyond the US
Editor's Notes
- How historical shift in a social movement moved into a descriptor of feminist thought Echols' trajectory of radical feminism's decline into cultural feminism one of the most influential interpretations of the women's liberation movement. Cultural feminism described as apolitical, celebratory, female, alternative, separatist implicitly apolitical, racist and essentialist in discussions of feminist theory
- NWSA The Second Sex: Thirty Years Later The Scholar and The Feminist Berks
- word frequency = # times word appears collocates = words that appear together at frequency greater than random chance clusters = words that appear together keywords = unusually frequent words in a corpus when measured against reference corpus
- CF appears no where in Chrysalis twice in FS, (Fall of 1979 editorial referring to Estelle Freedman’s separatism as a strategy although she herself doesn’t use it. And Summer 1981 in Helene Vivienne Wenzel The Text as Body/Politics: An Appreciation of Monique Wittig's Writings in Context and ) and Also appears twice in FR one in Jan of 1979 in an article by Griselda Pollock in a feminist art review and a second in April 1981 Feminists Must Face the Future Why we can’t just look at the word culture for cultural feminism. In fact looking at words we select, user driving approach isn’t making full use of the software which can compare patterns in one set of texts to those of another. That can highlight words that are more common or less common in one set as compared to the other. What kinds of linguistic patterns might get us closer to something we’d call CF
- Ran a whole bunch of analyses that got me to the above. Starting with comparison of the texts zoomed in on this difference around women/woman.
- women from on the other hand appears in almost a third of the files so that may be an interesting pattern. From is tricky may be used to (used to indicate source or origin): ”women from both the third world” may be used to express discrimination “prevent women from being as economically efficient” Or it may be used to differentiate clearly distinguished working women from bourgeois women. with that in mind I start sorting by various words to left and right to see what sorts of patterns emerge (note if I had this corpus POS tagged this would be much easier but alas I do not yet) in the slide here we see that the use that predominates is the second sense of “from” to indicate a form of discrimination. the verbs preceding “from women” are emancipate, exclude, free, liberate, prevent, prohibit, separating, as well as variant form exclusion, elimination, eviction, In this case, of course, the lines are talking about how to STOP this not advocating for it “voices of women” which is a fairly major trope at least in US feminism only appears twice in title of a book a smaller set are used to designate specific women “women from the republic of ireland” women from merchant families women from the former slum indicate distinguishing isolation of women from each other, of the 58 pretty easy to code all but 7 into categories
- Remember FS is larger corpus by about 25% than FR, From this would appear MORE about discrimination against women than in FR These aren’t collocates, but rather semantic coding
- Ok so we can see that the sense of “women from” in FS is more about discrimination, but more than that what can we say. FR not so much about women’s discrimination but about how to free/liberate them ( numbers here) Can see that FS contains an additional sesne saving, smaller in terms of greedom greater in sense of deiscr Does this mean victim feminism, now to move to looking at how mwn and women are talked about in these corpora Looking at words that co occur with 5 to the l or 5 to the R of “women from” can see that FR contains about 10% to do with free/liberate, empower
- So to see if what we have is apolitical victim feminist that takes differences between women and men as a given rather than seeking to change them. Looked at cluster “against women” then coded the meaning of each line (contained word or variant) prejudice discrimination bias sexual violence FR against women 23 files a quarter of the files sorting for the term on the left reveals again a very discourse around discrimination interestingly a term we might expect “violence against women” pops just 2x as opposed 7 times in to Feminist Studies that leads me to look at against in FS, against is overused in FR INSERT LL ( 42 times in 23 files about 1/4th of corpus) compared to FS (42 times in 19 files) makes for an interesting comparison since the N is almost the same (although must remember FS corpus is about 25% bigger FS could be said to belong to a strong sexual thread (1/4th of occurrences) which is wholly absent from the FR (just as occurred when looking at “women from” and there was a “protect/save” hint Chrysalis contains high violence but as Carolyn Bornsteain has illustrated key in the movement to address violence against women
- Apolitical, by this comparison FS appears the more apolitical, talking more about women in relation to men, less about the differences b/n women and men or equality or work Compared to both the fact that Chrysalis is so much “more” about women and so much less about men (isn’t that W & M don’t’ occur, but that in comparison to other trigrams in the text occur so much less frequently and when I looked them over, in no discernable pattern as FS and FR do) However Ch most common trigram that contains a similar construction refers to the women’s movement itself its consequences outcomes results actilites The sense of between is strongly tied to relationships I FS while spread over differences and relationships as well as equality Both in FS has a tie to ideas of reproduction and the family but only about half the occurrences, while in FR both is tied loosely to work For is associated with equality in FR but to no discernable subject in FS What the above suggests is again some sort of idea that FS is about relationsips betwee Or perhaps apolitical ot about contesting male power but about women’s position within it? while the discourse of equality and labor bound tightly to specific prepositions not as clear in FS as in FR (inequality more prevalent than equality) work loosely tied to of (25% of the time) both 15% of the time) both more likely to be connected to a discourse absent in FR one around reproduction (n=10_ (just over 25% of occurrences of both w/reproduction) almost a third of the examples from FR for “men and women” contain the word “between” 34 dif bn 7 rel bn both 16 a little over 10% over half referring to work for 13 a little over 10% over half referring to equality Ch men and women present in only about 25% of the files as opposed to in half for FR. Instead highest cluster women of the, n = 88 over a third about the movement, with a second cluster refering to organizations or groups of women (recall “of women” also a strong cluster although we looked at women from. So far as I can tell women of also works in this way, to designate
- How about essenitialist as in universalizing women not biological which doesn’t come up as a collocate read racist Not of total occurrences relationships between terms I chose to look at, in order to explore idea of essentialism identity Unique collocates q/ freq over 100 for chryalis compared to other two is black, for FS white, none of these for FR Lesbian still another term I need to look at. Heavily over-represented in Chrysalis