Feminism  

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Aristotle and Phyllis, c. 1485, from the medieaval legend Lai d' Aristote

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Feminism comprises a number of social, cultural and political movements, theories and moral philosophies concerned with gender inequalities and discrimination against women. Feminism is also described as an ideology focusing on equality of the sexes. It started as a reaction to patriarchy.

Contents

Culture

According to the Tate Collection, feminist art can "be defined as art by women artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory since about 1970."

Architecture

Gender-based inquiries into and conceptualization of architecture have also come about, leading to feminism in modern architecture. Piyush Mathur coined the term "archigenderic". Claiming that "architectural planning has an inextricable link with the defining and regulation of gender roles, responsibilities, rights, and limitations", Mathur came up with that term "to explore...the meaning of 'architecture' in terms of gender" and "to explore the meaning of 'gender' in terms of architecture".

Literature

The feminist movement produced both feminist fiction and non-fiction, and created new interest in women's writing. It also prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical and academic contributions in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Much of the early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Commensurate with this growth in scholarly interest, various presses such as Virago Press and Pandora Press began reissuing long-out-of-print texts.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote one of the first works of feminist philosophy, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman which called for equal education for women in 1792 and her daughter, Mary Shelley became an accomplished author best known for her 1818 novel Frankenstein. The Female Eunuch, by Australian feminist Germaine Greer, was first published in 1970, and became an international bestseller and an important text in the feminist movement.

Beginning in the 1960s, authors used the genre of science fiction to explore feminist themes. Notable books in this genre include Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ' The Female Man (1970). Octavia Butler's Kindred, and Margaret Atwood'sThe Handmaid's Tale. Russ, Le Guin, and other authors also engaged in feminist criticism of science fiction in the 1960s and 70s.

Music

Women's music (or womyn's music or wimmin's music) is the music by women, for women, and about women. The genre emerged as a musical expression of the second-wave feminist movement as well as the labor, civil rights, and peace movements. The movement was started by lesbians such as Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, and Margie Adam, African-American women activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and her group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and peace activist Holly Near. Women's music also refers to the wider industry of women's music that goes beyond the performing artists to include studio musicians, producers, sound engineers, technicians, cover artists, distributors, promoters, and festival organizers who are also women.

Feminsim became a principal concern of musicologists in the 1980s. Prior to this, in the 1970s, musicologists were beginning to discover women composers and performers, and had begun to review concepts of canon, genius, genre and periodization from a feminist perspective. In other words, the question of how women musicians fit into the traditional music history realm was now being asked.

Through the 1980s and 1990s musicologists such as Susan McClary, Marcia Citron and Ruth Solie began to consider the cultural reasons for the marginalizing of women from the received body of work. Concepts such as music as gendered discourse; professionalism; reception of women's music; examination of the sites of music production; relative wealth and education of women; popular music studies in relation to women's identity; patriarchal ideas in music analysis; and notions of gender and difference are among the themes examined during this time.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Feminism" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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