Marxist Ecocritical Feminist and Queer Criticism
Marxist
Definition
Marxism is both a social and political theory, which encompasses Marxist class conflict theory and Marxian economics. Marxism was first publicly formulated in the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which lays out the theory of class struggle and revolution. Marxian economics focuses on the criticisms of capitalism, which Karl Marx wrote about in his 1867 book, Das Kapital.
It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program. There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements, particularly before 1914. Then there is Soviet Marxism as worked out by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and modified by Joseph Stalin, which under the name of Marxism-Leninism (see Leninism) became the doctrine of the communist parties set up after the Russian Revolution (1917). Offshoots of this included Marxism as interpreted by the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and his followers, Mao Zedong’s Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and various Marxisms in the developing world. There were also the post-World War II nondogmatic Marxisms that have modified Marx’s thought with borrowings from modern philosophies, principally from those of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also from Sigmund Freud and others.
Marxism and Literature
Chernyshevsky, who lived before Marx laid the foundation of Marxist theory on literature. He developed a purely materialistic view of art that placed art subordinate to reality. He believed that the highest beauty is that which man sees in the world and not that which is created by art. He viewed art only as an empty amusement. The basic premise of Marx’s view on art is not much different. Marx views art as subordinate to society. It is just “one of the forms of social consciousness”. Marx also believes that “art is not created in a vacuum”. It needs a society for its existence.
Marx and Engels authored another work – The German Ideology (1845 –46) – that brings out some other important concepts of Marxism; especially connected to ideology. The dominant ideology of any period is the product of the socio-economic structure of that period. That is to say, ideology originates from class-relations and class-interests. Ideology is a ‘superstructure’ with its ‘base’ in contemporary economic system. Literature is part of the cultural ideology and therefore it is only a ‘superstructure
What Marxist critics do
1. They make a division between the 'overt' (manifest or surface) and 'covert' (latent or hidden) content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Thus, the conflicts in King Lear might be read as being 'really' about the conflict of class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal overlords).
2. Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those made by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.
3. A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it. For instance, The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, relates the growth of the novel in the eighteenth century to the expansion of the middle classes during that period. The novel 'speaks' for this social class, just as, for instance, Tragedy 'speaks for' the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad 'speaks for' for the rural and semi-urban 'working class'.
4. A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism.
Queer Theory :
Queer Theory is field of critical theory that emerged in early 1990s. Feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of essential self and upon gay and lesbian studies close examination of the society constructed nature of sexual act and identities. Feminism was contrast between sex and gender - Queer Theory offers the view that all identities are social construction.
What is Queer Theory :
n approach to literary and cultural studies that rejected traditional categories of gender and sexuality critical theory that emerged in 1990s. It is not only sexual desire but it is emotional desire. Queer Theory does not concern itself exclusively with homosexuality - it is about all forms of identity.
What lesbian/gay critic do?
1. Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as such (for example, the relationship between Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre), rather than reading same-sex pairings in non-specific ways, for instance, as symbolising two aspects of the same character (Zimmerman).
2 . Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of 'lesbian/gay' so that it connotes a moment of crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories. All such 'liminal' moments mirror the moment of selfidentification as lesbian or gay, which is necessarily an act of conscious resistance to established norms and boundaries.
Example :
Dostana movie
The act of sex is rarely seen, let alone alluded to, despite how sexual the movies can seem with bare-waisted women and shirtless men are dancing about every ten minutes or so. Until I did some research, I honestly did not think there were any Indian (Bollywood or not) movies which positively portrayed homosexuality. I mean, homosexual intercourse between consenting adults was decriminalized in India in July 2009 (one and a half years ago). So, where does one go to figure out what queer Bollywood films are out there and popular? Well, I go to my family, and the only movie they thought of as having gay characters or themes was Dostana from 2008.
