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| Construction, Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Western Concept of “Femininity” |
| Gao Fen Ye Xiaojuan |
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Abstract The concept of “femininity” in the West carries a multi-facet and progressive understanding of women’s social identity, gender characteristics, body style and spirit of life. Its connotations can be sorted out from the three stages of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction in patriarchal culture, feminist movement and criticism, and interdisciplinary research. In order to maintain the hegemonic position of men, patriarchal culture constructs the subordinate, accompanying and normative characteristics of femininity from the perspectives of social reality, literary fiction and ideology, and divides them into “emphasized femininity”, “hegemonic femininity”, “pariah femininity”, “subordinate femininity” and so on, to celebrate subordinate femininity and devalue autonomous femininity. Feminist movement and criticism have both gone through developmental stages of deconstructing and constructing femininity. Feminist movement takes social reality as its object of study, which attacks the status quo of inequality between men and women, and criticizes and denies the femininity constructed by patriarchy, and calling for attention to the gender differences between men and women. Feminists, on the basis of post-structuralist and Western Marxist theories, articulate the view that femininity is not externally imposed but is manifested by the female body, pointing out that the physical and cultural characteristics of women that patriarchy defines as “deficient” and “lacking” are precisely the manifestations of femininity. British and American feminist criticism and French feminist criticism take literary works as the object of study, and through analyzing “female image” and “female writing”, they respectively elucidate the transmutation process of femininity from self-sacrifice to self-fantasy and self-escape to self-construction and the qualities of female discourse such as ecriture feminine and parler-femme. Interdisciplinary research has not only provided a general overview of “femininity” in terms of physical appearance, ethical orientation, caring and nurturing abilities, psychological and personality traits, but also provided in-depth ethical, spatial, and psychological reconstructions of the characteristics of femininity. From the ethical dimension, academics have put forward the idea that the ethics of caring and the ethics of virtue are the core elements of femininity, affirming the importance of women’s virtues of caring, empathy, and altruism so as to break through the limitation of femininity that is confined to the body, and to examine in depth the value of women’s personalities and thoughts. From the spatial dimension, academics have analyzed the important role of the domestic space as the basis for the reconstruction of women’s images and identities, and have proposed that the domestic space be regarded as a culturally valuable place as a means of enhancing the identification of the social nature of femininity. From a psychological perspective, the concept of “conscious femininity” has been proposed to reveal the intuitive, perceptive and harmonious features of the female psyche and its value, and to deepen the understanding of the female psyche and mind. The construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of the concept of “femininity” illustrate the development of the Western understanding of gender from social to cultural to spiritual. By examining the historical origin and cutting-edge progress of the concept of “femininity” from social, historical, cultural, literary, gender, ethical, spatial, and psychological perspectives, and by revealing its constructive nature, we can not only reassess the achievements and value of feminist thought and criticism, but also recognize the necessity and importance of interdisciplinary research on feminism, gender studies, and literary criticism.
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Published: 08 October 2024
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