The hinges of gender criticism and human discourse

-Gender Approach-

Dr. driss Abdennour

Court study

       Research Professor at the Regional Center for Professions of Education and Training Fez - Meknes / Morocco

Professor of Arabic language, didactics and women's literary criticism

Abdennour.driss@gmail.com

abstract:

The concept of “gender”, despite being a problematic concept, makes it easier for the student to decipher the meanings and connotations that cultures give to gender differences, as it can be used as an analytical tool. And here, as we touch on the critical approach to the issue of privacy and difference in women’s writing, we consider the gender approach as an introduction to understanding the complexities of communication between different forms of human interaction, because of its effects and manifestations in the act of symbolic written communication, as the concept of gender is capable of interpreting differences Between men and women on the basis that they are a product of historical processes and their divisions into social symbols that define each gender (male and female) within a particular culture. The boundaries and separations that society establishes between them are fragile, fragile borders that are not fixed before their budge, and the concept of gender here plays a leading role in revealing the gaps of previous literary studies, which considered many of the traits as natural feminine characteristics, and based on them their theoretical hypotheses, which are nothing but qualities that women acquired and imitated through A very complex process, in which the individual overlaps with the collective within each particular culture, where the concept has assumed a critical function, revealing the gaps in literary, social, political and practical studies. This is without forgetting that the concept of gender does not eliminate or marginalize the biological differences that exist between men and women, given that these differences are programmed into our nature as human beings.

Key words: the gender approach, gender criticism, women's literary criticism, women's writing, writing body.

Les charnières de la critique de genre et du discours humain

-Approche Genre-

Dr. driss Abdennour

Une étude contrôlée

Résumé:

Le concept de « genre », bien qu'il soit un concept problématique, permet au chercheur de déchiffrer plus facilement les significations et les connotations que les cultures donnent aux différences de genre, car il peut être utilisé comme un outil d'analyse. Et ici, alors que nous abordons l'approche critique de la question de la vie privée et de la différence dans l'écriture des femmes, nous considérons l'approche de genre comme une introduction à la compréhension des complexités de la communication entre les différentes formes d'interaction humaine, en raison de ses effets et de ses manifestations dans l’ acte de communication écrite symbolique, car le concept de genre est capable d'interpréter les différences entre les hommes et les femmes sur la base qu'elles sont le produit de processus historiques et de leurs divisions en symboles sociaux qui définissent chaque genre (homme et femme) au sein d'une culture particulière . Les frontières et les séparations que la société établit entre eux sont fragiles, des frontières fragiles qui ne sont pas fixées avant leur mouvement, et le concept de genre joue ici un rôle de premier plan pour révéler les lacunes des études littéraires antérieures, qui considéraient de nombreux traits comme naturels féminins. caractéristiques, et sur la base de leurs hypothèses théoriques, qui ne sont que des qualités que les femmes ont acquises et imitées à travers un processus très complexe, dans lequel l'individuel se superpose au collectif au sein de chaque culture particulière, où le concept a assumé une fonction critique, révélant les lacunes dans les études littéraires, sociales, politiques et pratiques. Ceci sans oublier que le concept de genre n'élimine ni ne marginalise les différences biologiques qui existent entre les hommes et les femmes, étant donné que ces différences sont programmées dans notre nature  humaine.

Mots clés : approche genre, critique de genre, critique littéraire féminine, écriture féminine, corps d'écriture: Question linguistique

تمفصلات النقد الجندري والخطاب اللغوي - الإنساني

- مقاربة النوع الاجتماعي (الجندر)

د. ادريس عبد النور

دراسة محكمة

ملخص:

                        ان مفهوم "الجندر" بالرغم من كونه مفهوما إشكاليا، يسهل على الباحث عملية فك رموز المعاني والدلالات التي تمنحها الثقافات للفوارق الجنسية حيث يمكن استعماله أداة تحليلية، فبالإضافة لانتقاده للتصورات السائدة والمؤسسات والقيم الاجتماعية والثقافية، بإمكانه أيضا بناء معارف وتصورات جديدة في الأدب والفن والفلسفة والقانون، وهنا إذ نلامس المنحى النقدي لقضية الخصوصية والاختلاف في كتابة المرأة، نعتبر مقاربة النوع الاجتماعي (الجندر) مدخلا لفهم تعقيدات التواصل ما بين أشكال مختلفة من التفاعل الإنساني، لمـا له من تأثيرات وتمظهرات في فعل التواصل الرمزي الكتابي، فمفهوم النوع الاجتماعي قادر على تأويل الاختلافات بين الرجل والمرأة على أساس أنها نتاج للسيرورات التاريخية وتقسيماتها إلى رموز اجتماعية تحدد كل جنس (ذكر وأنثى) داخل ثقافة معينة. إن الحدود والفواصل التي يقيمها المجتمع بينهما حدود هشة، واهية غير ثابتة أمام زحزحتها، ويلعب مفهوم النوع هنا دورا رائدا في كشف ثغرات الدراسات الأدبية السابقة التي اعتبرت الكثير من السمات خاصيات أنثوية طبيعية، وأقامت عليها فرضياتها النظرية، وهي ليست سوى صفات اكتسبتها النساء وتقمصنها عبر سيرورة بالغة التعقيد، يتداخل فيها ما هو فردي بما هو جماعي داخل كل ثقافة معينة، حيث اتخذ المفهوم وظيفة نقدية، كاشفة عن الثغرات في الدراسات الأدبية والاجتماعية والسياسية والعملية. هذا دون أن نغفل أن مفهوم النوع الاجتماعي (الجندر) لا يلغي ولا يهمش الفوارق البيولوجية القائمة بين الرجل والمرأة، على اعتبار أن هذه الفوارق مبرمجة في طبيعتنا كبشر.

الكلمات المفاتيح: مقاربة النوع الاجتماعي ، النقد الجندري، النقد الأدبي النسائي، الكتابة النسائية، كتابة الجسد، السؤال اللغوي,

1- In monetary formation

Our critical practice based on this approach depends on the dismantling of the masculine discourse, by working to shake up the concepts that make women a stifled voice amid multiple circles of blocking and prohibition, in the midst of many societal forms that are included in stability: symbols, rituals, traditions, customs, and acquired patriarchal culture, which prevent the emergence of a special voice for women.

The feminine literary criticism, which we will give a synthetic name, combines women’s literary criticism and the approach of gender with the use of the word gender that was previously explained as a reference to it: gender criticism that takes feminine creativity as its subject, and searches in the feminine text about the awareness that flows in its corners, which is On behalf of the woman in expressing her silence, illustrating the idea of ​​the woman writer representing herself and her gender.

 Women are surrounded by many cultural structures and pressured traditional contexts that make them unable to represent themselves, or rather the rest of women, due to the multiplicity of veils and the thickness of ideological curtains that stand in the way of the writer to shake some of the convictions of the patriarchal society, convictions that nourished postulates with the passage of time. The woman who writes because of her insistence on the act of writing, her hand is on the wound of women.

• How does a woman express joy, pregnancy, livelihood, time and the duration of women's monthly habit?

Language works to transmit and crystallize ideas and practices related to gender. The circulated, written, and transmitted language in body movements still bears the signs of a male who has established masculine data in it, with the exclusion of the woman’s world at the linguistic level. As he considers it his best way to be at the center of every theoretical or intellectual discussion, and it is also considered one of the most important tools of this culture for its continuity and reproduction of itself. The exchange of language through the body, even if it participates with the man in the normal expression, it is superior to him in the expressions of the body. The direct language of the body is one of the weapons of a woman to defend her direct existence in front of the authority of the prevailing linguistic institution, and against the open and hidden dissolution and fusion in the masculinity class. In contrast, women’s celebration of their body and its languages ​​is contrasted with the man’s celebration of his virility, through which he expresses his being and his superiority in the rungs of knowledge and cultural authority. Therefore, women have the right to consider the issue of difference in terms of differentiation, not in terms of equality.

2- Critical engineering in the realm of gender

The gender criticism that we adopt in this research hopes to create new lines in the engineering of traditional criticism, which has been using the concepts of objectivity and neutrality in analysis and approach in dealing with women’s writing, as the Arab critical discourse was practiced in the majority by men who expressed a central patriarchal ideology, I tried to discuss women's writing from the standard of equality, at the expense of privacy, difference, and differentiation. This discourse, as it is ignorant of the issue of sexual difference, confirms the weakness of its discourse and vision and the limited conception of women’s literature, which reflects some of its cognitive and historical obstacles.

Gender criticism in the context of its presentation of the problem of women’s literature makes the legality of sexual difference and its impact on the act of writing an independent topic, and thus it seeks to create new outlets in women’s studies and narratives, given the intellectual position of the women’s text towards the official institution and the authority and dominance of society. For example, we refer to the Hijab Foundation as a process of gender drawing of the body rather than an ideological process. With this criticism, we feel that reorganizing the differences between men and women on the basis of the hijab is a process of reviving the societal prohibition that abolishes the woman’s body, and makes her move only with what the punishment mechanism allows.

The masculine thought system produces all kinds of violence against women, from physical violence to moral and symbolic violence, while “abolishing the other” is one of the ingredients that has become unable to be a basis for new knowledge and criticism representing global diversity, and thus bypassing the foundations of the Western mind with regard to its dependence on The instrumental nature of the mind, and ignoring the human cultural character on which the gender criticism is based, which pursues the examination of the reality of women: self, body and thought based on their position in the world, analyzing this positioning and listening to its total and partial facts. The concept of representations that Mustafa Tamim defines as, “Bringing The object and its appearance in front of the eye or in the mind through drawing, sculpture or language during speech” ( 1), the female body is considered an ideal carrier of all the representations in which the masculine logic imagines the public and private world of women, and an essential component of the structure of these representations through what the woman includes in her speech as he interrogates her body, and often deputize for her direct speech. The reality of the representations that the female body carries about itself and the other, is an expression of how the imagined image of women is manifested in all kinds of discourse.

For this reason, gender criticism employs the gender approach and takes it as a strategy to control the interpretive paths of the literary act and deal with it according to the representations it constitutes, which fall into a series of cultural biases subject to the context of the pattern. This critical perception also falls within the cultural approach, with its focus on literary discourse forms and analysis, especially the field of linguistic studies, to reveal the original and natural situation of women in it and the nature of the conflict between it and the discourse of patriarchal thought. Gender criticism cannot but appreciate most of the manifestations of writing about women, whether on the part of the man or on the part of the woman herself, especially what these manifestations discover from different issues that constitute a kind of cultural movement rebellious against ready-made formats, which gives this women literary criticism marked with criticism. Gender is a theoretical and methodological dimension.

3- The methodological and analytical preoccupations of gender criticism

Gender criticism, based on the theoretical foundations of sexual difference, and based on analytical convictions, cannot but contribute to the development of literary criticism theory. Its major characteristics are the exclusion of the feminine, as it appears that women occupy the position of subordinate, marginalized, and excluded because of the dominance of transcendental concepts of thought and language, and because of the patriarchal culture that referred women to subordinate and disciple.

In our critical treatment, we focused on the concept of gender (gender) to reveal the hidden aspect in the world of femininity - whose conscious representation has been absent in modern critical schools - on the basis of the close connection between the literary dimension and the reference dimension that calls for criticism and examination of texts, invoking its analysis tools from The field of reference, Khaleda Saeed says: “If we look at the artwork with its reference dimension, it was a testimony or sign of a fact that preceded the text and existed outside it and independent of it and its laws. Urban, Bedouin... In this case, the examination of this reference level in the text is carried out with tools for analysis and lesson borrowed from the field of reference.(2)

 The woman writer constitutes an essential subject for women’s literary criticism, i.e. gender criticism, due to the borrowing of the tools of its critical approach from the field of reference and based mainly on the scientific conclusions of the gender approach, as well as in terms of taking the issue of sexual difference into consideration in its theoretical and analytical dimension, and giving the issue of language its importance as a device for detecting Cultural and social deception, ending with the female body that carries the psychological and societal formation of women and society together, which allows the violation of the masculine position biased against women by language and culture.

The woman is an object that has always been represented through the masculine discourse, given the clear difference between “talking about” and “talking to” that occupied this discourse. The original cultural context that expresses identity and self.

4- Critical foundations of gender criticism

1) Awareness of the importance of linguistic subtraction

The first topic approached by gender criticism is related to linguistic representation, which aims to propose the possibility of decoding discourse linguistically, and revealing the taboos that language represents in community awareness.(3) In the “Marxism and Interpretation of Culture Conference” held in 1983 AD and entitled: “Can the subaltern speak?”, where the studies of the subaltern were linked to this question, through what this controversy crystallized about cultural identities and the concept of class and gender subordination, it focused on the issue of language that makes women’s writing It belongs by force and deed to the field of the margin by virtue of gender or race or both, while RL Trask focused on the division that appears clearly in the language of society, saying: “The division between men and women in a society is one of the clearest social divisions, and it is surprising that This division is very clear in the speech of that society” ( 4), which is why language is considered a distinguishing mark for the specialization of women’s literature. Gender can prove its cognitive usefulness as a concept that constitutes a variable in the construction of the critical approach that is exposed to the sexual position of the author, whether the author is a man or a woman. He also performs the concept of the female body as it identifies with the femininity that is endemic to language, movements and social representations.

The features and characteristics of gender criticism lie in the questions it poses to the written women’s text, such as:

• What does the woman write about?

• Is the narrator's gender important from a creative point of view?

• Does women's creativity have one mechanism in which women's writing is involved?

• What are the concerns of this writing?

• How does the writer make her speech an essential expression and record of her living reality in society?

What makes us convinced of the feasibility of seeing and visualizing gender-based criticism is what women’s writing enjoys, whether the women’s text is a poetic poem, story, novel, plastic painting, film, play, or other literary genre, from characteristics and distinguishing marks, intellectual perspectives and formats An aesthetic that contributes to the creativity of the women’s text, whose high coding ability gives it the character of continuity and presence after its direct impact has passed. The most important thing is to clarify the closures of the women’s literary text in the light of the perception of women’s oppression, and what women’s writing is saturated with from life experiences full of human tragedy, starting from the formed subconscious In the experience of killing the girl by her family in order to wash the shame, and through infanticide and captivity, and the transformation of the female body into a tool for pleasure in the light of moral duplicity, as much as she despise the body, she works to exaggerate its sanctification, reduce the woman to her virginity and force her to marry, with her demand to have a boy and condemning her to have a girl, And the practice of violence against her, marriage, divorce and withholding of her, although these practices, as the writer crystallizes them in her women’s writing, constitute the depth of vocabulary, concepts and main issues that address Let the women's text have it, making it transformed by force from the tomboyish text frame to a new writing style that searches for equality, freedom and distinction through rebellion. While literary criticism directs thought patterns towards the creative components of the text based on a critical vision that aims to analyze the stylistic, structural and semantic systems of women’s literature, the discourse of gender criticism is influenced by the creative achievement of women, and it tries to explore how women’s literature represents the world of women linguistically, physically and culturally. Psychologically, despite the weakness of this achievement and its modernity in influencing society due to its description of the marginality of what it represents, and in view of the immunity enjoyed by socially established beliefs, and which are not allowed to be handled by criticism, after the male identity that invented the stallion logic, agreed to turn into a diwan that can translate The self and the other at the same time.

As gender criticism turns to the past in order to dismantle it and disrupt its references that humiliated women throughout history, it turns strongly to the analysis that leads to the discovery of the constituent elements of the modern text that falls under the category of women’s writing, and the inventory of its prominent features and the loosening of bitumen from its data in behavior and the structure of general thinking, as the women’s text is not an expression On the ideology of its writer, and it is not a reflection of a society dominated by the majority, but rather a text that gives you the feeling of a minority crisis, that inhabits the spaces of silence inside and outside the text, as it dwells in the quality of its stumbles as it addresses the silent, as it reflects the fact that the human self is devoured by plurality, meaning that the “other” dwells The self does not exist outside it, and this leads to the saying that being male or female is not an inevitable fate except when the prevailing culture deludes it. While it is difficult to limit the human entity to a belief, tradition, or gender, every subject, male or female, does not withstand the fact that man is selves that differ according to the conditions of the same self in different times and places.

The task of the feminist literary critic (= the gender critic) here, in addition to monitoring the literary text, is to reveal the web of material, ideological and symbolic practices that encapsulate every expressive act of women. In the past, it has been far from establishing a tradition in itself, or being currently an organic part of the recognized literary tradition. Perhaps the literary language and the female body, which we have given an important analytical aspect, are among the mechanisms used to suppress the heterosexual and suppress the female, and perhaps our reliance on deconstruction as a methodology More than the semiotic approach is due to: “The tendency to pure semiotics is a cause and effect at the same time for a more general tendency in narratives to isolate texts from the context of their production and reception” (5).

The conclusion that says that patriarchal culture is subject to this heterogeneity through linguistic methods, it is necessary to uncover and know the mechanisms of its operation that enabled the man to blur the features of women and the feminine in them, as it worked to spread the ideological contradiction between men and women.

The representations of language included everything, and its spaces extended to the linguistic law that frames the relationship between male and female, the corruption of the masculine pronoun and dominated the discourse and its axis around itself, although most grammarians say that grammatical gender is random and independent of connotations and sexual signs, and as a result, women engaged in politics chose New linguistic methods provided them with an approach to the dominant language, the language of authority, which is the language of man. The linguistic discourse in its entirety, and whatever its nature, remains inhabited by masculine extensions of its power so that it can possess the speaker’s gender. The literary body summarizes the physical body as a symbolic representation within the text. This perception, as the language has worked continuously to present the society’s perception of the body that automatically determines the cultural pattern, making it an absolute body that does not address our consciousness as much as it addresses the memory that extends in time.

• So, how did the woman employ her body in the face of the cultural pattern, and how did she write and codify that confrontation?

2) Monitoring the literary employment of the female body

The female body in women’s writing is the semi-unknown continent that declares its challenge to literature, and the focus of our analyzes focused on the female text. It is centered around the special relations of events, actions, and facts, and since the narrative representation works to reconstruct the cultural dominances whose manifestations clearly appear in the female text, we will shed light on the subject of the female body in the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, as a model in which the narrator practiced moving from the oral towards Entabtism, because it contains suggestions related to the freedom of women, and the symbolic, cultural and societal violation that she is exposed to in a world saturated with male culture. Therefore, the female body with One Thousand and One Nights has become an official spokesperson for the Arab narrative because it is not isolated from historical backgrounds, aspirations, and psychological, emotional, mental and social values. Related to women and their world, as employed by women in their liberation movement, as a form of resistance to arrogance Masculinity: the cultural and social practice of historical oppression against women.

For women’s writing, as mentioned earlier, the female body comes primarily to confront and resist the dominant institutions that support male domination, including language and symbolic discourse transmitted in speech, images, myths, writing and rituals. French feminism in the words of Ann Rosalind Jones sees that: “Resistance This comes through the restoration of childish bodily pleasures, and after that the bodily pleasures that were suppressed by the father’s law, but he could not erase them, and the woman must live her physical experience in the light of new facts that are not imposed by the centralization of men” (6).

While Anne Rosa Lind Jones agrees with Lucy Irigari about the potential of the female body to inspire some energy in women, Helen Hyxos goes to great lengths to place the female body the optimum possibility for women to enjoy their existence, awareness and writing. This trend leads researchers towards the importance of the female body in the existence and being of women. , makes a woman’s experience with her body among the only objective components of women who stand in the face of the symbolic masculinity patterns that permeate Western thought, and this is mostly done by declaring a woman’s sexual identity that begins by declaring her body as a form of sharp difference between her and the man.

While we agree with the trend expressed by the French writings that the female body should be seen as a source for women’s writing, the value of the female body in this research is a powerful discourse that makes it dependent on the woman’s hand, who can destroy and rebuild through it a male-biased social reality. However, we do not claim, as the French feminist says, that the female body is the only source of self-knowledge, if not in fact a mediator between knowledge within the woman and knowledge outside it.

Late feminist criticism, especially with Anne Rosa Lind Jones, goes on to say that female sexuality has no precedent for social experience. With his small family first, and with symbolic systems that have a great influence on the individual's view of the sexual object (7).

It is no wonder that American feminism and French feminism agree that the female body is the best place through which women can express their rejection of masculine forces that try to isolate them. It is a form of "union" expression and struggle to defend women's freedom, but based on the characteristics of exception and privacy.

• Is it possible for the female body to be a source of an alternative discourse that moves from the social review to the written textual ?

In order to establish her symbolic discourse, the woman writer’s strategy needs two basic elements, one of which was expressed by Madeleine Gagnon in her saying: “We are not masters of ourselves, nor of others, nor do we confront ourselves so that we can liberate them, nor do we remain looking to ourselves in order to understand ourselves, all we have to do is To erase all that might hinder us or harm us in order to create new forms of writing, we preserve what gives us strength, and what is convenient for us, and this will upset the position of the self-centered man.(8)

As for the second element of the strategy, it lies in the difficulty that makes women move from the body to the language, which puts women face to face with the symbolic system, where all the taboos rise up to announce the inability of women to penetrate the language that carries since the ages of the man’s point of view and his vision of the world.

The woman, while using language, places in it her discovery of her sensory pleasure that stems from her relationship with her body, but writes to the recipient who possesses the power and taste of the audience of readers, as well as the means of publishing and distribution.

• Do women write what they want when they are far from the society for which they are writing?

This is a fundamental question expressed by Ann Rosa Lind Jones with another question in which she said: “Well, now you are sitting in your office, alone, not letting anyone or anything hold you back, are you free now?

The writer answered this deep question in two points that constitute so far the most important answer that still governs the written behavior of women. She says:

First: “After this long investigation, you are swimming in a terrible soup of values, and in order to be safe, you must reject the so-called feminine values ​​which are in fact not feminine, but rather a social scheme, and you must identify with masculine values ​​that are not masculine, but rather Men have taken over it, they have given it the mark of human values, you must mix all this with counter-values ​​of oppression, violence, domination and the like, in this mixture, where is your true identity?

Second: It is assumed that you are writing in a specific form, I mean a specific form in which you feel that you have not been usurped by anyone, novels or poetry directed to a limited audience, and in this case the audience will call you a shweira or a weak novelist, and not every woman can bear this(9)

Conclusion:

The French edition of women’s writing would not have been effective if it did not contain its transcendence in itself. It cuts off distinction by using spare parts from within the masculine culture itself. The new proposal established by women’s writing for women’s awareness will not take place without creating trends and orbits in the language, with its approach and structures. And its one-sided conventions, which limit female self-knowledge and curb the feminine’s movement towards a world free of material and ideological masculine domination. Armed with her new awareness, the woman has only to turn with all her might to create a new structure for her revolution: the body/language, to realize that writing the body is now among the  mechanisms that gnaw the body of the existing masculine culture.

This is how feminist writing invested the female body:

 First: As an introduction to understanding the body’s strategy in expressing itself and the identity of its bearer.

Secondly: In order to create a culturo-textuelle legitimacy for this writing that strips the substance of the body in order to make the apparent express the interior and its yearning for liberation, and to remove the veneer of enslavement from the female self, the thing that constituted richness and richness in this writing, and it joins the creative and critical tide. .

References and footnotes

1- Tamim Al-Mustafa, Representations and their Employment in Acquisition of Knowledge, Association for Research, Authorship, Translation and Publishing in the Tadla Azilal Region, New An-Najah Press, Casablanca, first edition, 2002, page: 10.

2- Said Khaleda, “Woman’s Liberation, Creativity,” a series under the supervision of Fatima Mernis, published by Al-Fanik, An-Najah Press, Casablanca, 1991, p. 88.

3- She translated into English Jacques Derrida's book Of Grammatology, which was credited with introducing deconstruction into the Anglo-Saxon culture.

4- R.L Trask, The Basics of Language, translated by Rania Ibrahim Youssef, The National Project for Translation 381, the Supreme Council of Culture, Cairo 2002, pg. 98.

5- Susan Lancer, "Towards a Feminist Narrative Science", Windows magazine, No. 33, September 2005, p. 86.

6- Anne Jones, Rosa Lind: Writing the Body: An Attempt to Understand Feminist Writing, translated by Ahmed Sabra, Windows Magazine No. 33, 2005, p. 115.

7- Anne Jones, Rosa Lind, ibid., p. 118.

8- Windows magazine, the same previous reference, p. 121.

9- Anne Jones, Rosa Lind, Windows magazine, ibid., p. 123.