The Act: Marxist, Ecocritical, Feminist and Queer Criticism

 Hello everyone,

This blog is response to the task assigned by prof. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I would like to wrote about my understanding of the critical theories like, Ecocriticism , Feminist theory, Marxist theory and Queer theory and also about my understanding of that. Why this theories are important today to learn.

first of all I would like to talked about ECOCRITICISM,

What is Ecocriticism?

Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and social life. Eco critics try to find out the corporations and companies which damage the nature whether it is directly or indirectly. 

Ecocriticism investigates the relation between humans and the natural world in literature. It deals with how environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the environment and attitudes towards nature are presented and analyzed. One of the main concern of Eco critics is that to study how individuals in society behave and react in relation to nature and ecological aspects. This form of criticism has became more important in todays time as there are many new companies are developed. Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including “green -cultural studies”, “eco poetics”, and “environmental literary criticism.”

Ecocriticism tried to find out demaging factor of the nature and try to look at the situation with the nature perspective or they always put nature into centre. For the ecocritic all human are villan they believe in the idea of ECO V/S EGO.

Human are at the top and all other life are at the downside. Eco critic opposed the idea of mass production because it's not for everybody but only for rich people.

For example, Company of 'water' , Idea of water selling is out of imagination for the local people but it's helpful to rich people. And eco critic or post cultural critics always raised voice against it, because companies are never worked or developed without help of natural resources. As government start some new project as helping to poor people but later on private companies buy it and then government worked according to it rather than companies worked according to government. Ecocriticism is not anti- globalisation or development but it's for nature and people's good and for what post critics spoke and their concern is to save democracy.

For example in the film Sherni  also tigress lost her way of going back to forest.

In today's time how eco critic look at the environment and in history how they look that became important. If we try to look at the nature in any kind of virus coming there are human involvement in the name of development. 

For example idea of Zoo became problematic as in zoo they took animals for the entertainment of the people or we can say for the earning purpose. And we can say life of rural area is romanticized life and it's regressive rather than progressive.

Ecocriticism focus on the Nature v/s Culture  our culture is always damaging the nature one or the another way. 

Ecofeminist thought emerges from the assumption that patriarchal society’s values and beliefs have resulted in the oppression of both women and nature. These feminists suggest that the “natural” qualities of women and the “feminine” qualities of nature are both attributed by males as a result of which, men dominate both women and nature, and assume and act as though both women and nature are to be exploited by men. Nature is like - female to male as nature to culture. Or we can say culture has encroached the nature. Or we can say we make nature like prostitute, as prostitute has to make man happy as like we always aspects from nature to make us happy.

We always habituated to understand things by metaphorically with the help of our culture and in culture Image of farmers - male as father figure and Image of land - as women - Mother. So identity of nature and  women position in society reflect through that and it's became problematic.

We always romanticized the nature and praising it's beauty through our work or art buy we never thought about the nature and we can say their perspective about situation. So Eco critics tries to find out real aspects and situation of the nature with the help of culture.

Mainly Ecocriticism focused on this aspects:-

1) It is claimed that the reigning religions and philosophies of Western civilization are deeply anthropocentric. 

So in this aspects ecocritics try to see how people or society see nature and animals. Society or people connect nature with the religious aspects and myth so for them to harm nature is not sin or guilt but they took as order or statement by God or well-wishers.

2)Prominent in ecocriticism is a critique of binaries such as man/nature or culture/nature, viewed as mutually exclusive oppositions.

There are numerous anthologies of nature writing, representative recent ones are The Norton Book of Nature Writing, American Nature Writers,  Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook (1998).

For example today we are making so many companies and factories to for the development of the country but when some calamities came we blamed local people or tribal people for the destruction of the nature but as Ecocritics say that nature has ability to cure the men-made destruction within a week or month but the destruction made by machinary can not cure for the so many years. 

Feminist Criticism:-

First of all what is called Feminism?

Feminism is defined as the belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.

Feminist critics tried to identify the identity of the women in society as we know that in our literature we don't find much information about the women and women author though they write. Because in history there is women who speaks for the right of the women and write about that time but we never find much information about them. But after the passing of the time when Virginia Woolf started asking for the education and right of the women after that time 1949 feminism became kind of political movement and this fight became vital during 20th century.

Since the history women are more religious than the man so they easily start to believing into whatever society says through the religious aspects.

As Feminist critics says that if you want equality then you have to re-write the history because in 18th or 19th century women were writing but we didn't find any reference of it through our literature.  For example the Aphra Behn - whose only earning source was through writing.

If we try to see women as equal to men then we find that there are many differences between role and status of both the gender. If we tried to see then in many books and stories where if we don't find the name and identity of the narrator or the character then we called them by 'HE'. Like feminism itself, feminist literary theory asks us to consider the relationships between men and women and their relative roles in society. And in most of the story we find that protagonist is always male rather than women. 

There are many books which talked about women's identity and Feminist ideas,

1)Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

2)John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869)

3)The American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). 

 A much more radical critical mode, sometimes called “second-wave feminism,” was launched in France by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), a wide-ranging critique of the cultural identification of women as merely the negative object, or “Other,” to man as the dominating “Subject” who is assumed to represent humanity in general; the book dealt also with “the great collective myths” of women in the works of many male writers. 

From the many works of Feminism in literature writer tried to find out main objective or kind of Criticism they do after that.

1)The basic view is that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal.

2) It is widely held that while one’s sex as a man or woman is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender.

In gender identity what Simone de Beauvoir called Feminism is that, One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. . . . It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature . . . which is described as feminine.  

3.The further claim is that this patriarchal (or “masculinist,” or “androcentric”) ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature.

In this aspect they see that we always find that protagonist of our story or any work is male, we can never imagine women as protagonist or leading character. There are several examples for that like Hamlet, Time Jones, The Great Gatsby or many other.  

So main focus of feminist critics to do study of feminism is to see how our culture or literature put women from the history to the day we live. There are many female writer who try to wrote about women in their work and try resist against injustice.

Examples:- 

 Today's time is digital time and time of internet or entertainment. We had many objects or facilities to entertain ourselves and one of the best thing which most of the people like is television. There are many serials and shows which set high level of examples which raises our  expectations from women as there many serials which idealize women as best wife, daughter, sister and most importantly mother. They set so many expectations from the one person.  

There are best example, I found is that serial Anupamaa. Number one show of television and mostly it's liked by women. In which protagonist or leading female character Anupama who is ideal women who can do anything for the sake of family and children. So she is like ideal mother, daughter in law, daughter and wife. In the serial we find that when she tried and demand to do what she wanted to do then family members and others are start to blaming her by saying that she is not good women. She also constantly making efforts to make family happy and perfect. 

Another example is film Rashmi Rocket in which character of Rashmi who is capable to run faster than everybody around so when she start to won every race or computation on that society or women around her started to doubting her about her gender and they try to prove her as masculine as they can't able to believe that one girl can run faster than male. So in movie we find out that there are not only man who had doubt about her identity but rather women who blamed her. 

So here we find that women themselves are taught to behave in certain ways to being socialozed and ideal. After that when someone give metaphor like power, kind , hardworking, caring, selfless etc .. then she take it as compliment and never tried to look beyond it and out of it.

So basic idea about women identity start from the expectations and literature which portrait women as traditional or ideal who never ask questions or who had desired and wishes kind of dreams.

Marxist Criticism:-

Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory originated by Karl Marx that focuses on the struggle between capitalists and the working class.

Marx wrote that the power relationships between capitalists and workers were inherently exploitative and would inevitably create class conflict.

Marxism is both a social and political theory, which encompasses Marxist class conflict theory and Marxian economics. Marxism was first publicly formulated in 1848 in the 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 book Das Kapital, published in 1867.

Marxist critics demand for the equal distribution of the wealth. In society we found that some are getting more and more material wealth than others.

Nehruvian socialism:-

It is a curious paradox that Nehru was a socialist who consolidated capitalism. He left consider him inadequate and the right have equated his socialism with the ‘License-Permit Raj’.

His socialism was evolutionary, not revolutionary, and it was inclusive, not based on class. It was democratic and comfortable with heterogeneity, egalitarian without levelling, committed to welfare and affirmative action, co-operative to contain destructive competition, oriented to rational planning to overcome anarchic individualism, stressed the need for the government to lead through an advanced public sector, valued local democracy and local management of utilities, and mobilized local initiative in every way. Globally, he viewed it as a movement rather than as a military bloc. In all these respects, if it was to prevail, it would be by democratic recognition rather than by bureaucratic imposition. Above all, he saw it as providing a direction, a momentum, and a value system rather than a final goal.

There is many examples in our literature or entertainment world about Marxism. Collie no - 1, is best example of Marxism.  There is many differences between upper and lower class society. But as The Hungarian thinker Georg Lukács, one of the most widely influential of Marxist critics, represents such a flexible view of the role of ideology. He proposed that each great work of literature creates “its own world,” which is unique and seemingly distinct from “everyday reality.” But masters of realism in the novel such as Balzac or Tolstoy, by “bringing to life the greatest possible richness of the objective conditions of life,” and by creating “typical” characters who manifest the essential tendencies and determinants of their epoch, succeed—often “in opposition to own conscious ideology in producing a fictional world which is a “reflection of life in the greatest concreteness and clarity and with all its motivating contradictions.”

Another one is this video in which we find that what is Marxism and what they want. There were people from working class and they demanded for their rights. Their fight is directly with corporate world and political world. 

Another one is Mr & Mrs Khiladi in which protagonist name Raja belong to poor family and heroine Shalu is from rich family in which we find that father or her doens't like poor and working class people and he want to get married her daughter with rich boy who earn more money.

Our film and social media talked about this things. In our day today life also we find many examples which show about crisis which going on in society but now it's not possible because now the time is for anti - Marxist.

Cycle, fan- symbol of poverty

Car, Air conditioner- symbol of richness

This all frame can be seen as symbol of Marxism. When rich people marry with poor then only dream of Karl Marx came true about equality. Literature is always pro -poor and people always sympathies them. Marxism is not only idea about wealth but the opportunity given to people. Because with the changing of the time one should opportunity to get what they need for like we live in time of service sector and job or we can say government job rather than land owner. And if poor will not get opportunity then rich became richer and poor are more poorer.

Queer Theory:-

Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and women’s studies. Queer Theory subverts traditional institutions of society that are based on the heteronormative model of human sexuality, and acknowledges the broad spectrum of sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender identity

Queer, in sexual politics, description of sexuality that rejects normative definitions of appropriate feminine and masculine sexual behaviour. More contemporary meanings of queer have been picked up and used by activists and academics to mark movements within sexual identity politics and theoretical frameworks for understanding gender and sexuality. Queer, however, is a contested term: scholars and activists constantly disagree on what queer means and the way in which it should be used. Queer is often used as an umbrella term to denote sexual identity within a particular community. A queer community may be made up of people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and so on. Some find queer an easy way to describe such a large community. Labeling people whose sexual identities fall outside of heterosexuality may create solidarity among people based on commonality, which may in turn encourage them to identify with one another and create a community in which they find support and organize to initiate a political movement.

Both lesbian studies and gay studies began as “liberation movements”— in parallel with the movements for African-American and feminist liberation— during the anti-Vietnam War, anti-establishment, and countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s. Since that time these studies have maintained a close relation to the activists who strive to achieve, for gays and lesbians, political, legal, and economic rights equal to those of the heterosexual majority. Through the 1970s, the two movements were primarily separatist: gays often thought of themselves as quintessentially male, while many lesbians, aligning themselves with the feminist movement, characterized the gay movement as sharing the anti-female attitudes of the reigning patriarchal culture. There has, however, been a growing recognition (signalized by the adoption of the joint term “queer”) of the degree to which the two groups share a history as a suppressed minority and possess common political and social aims. In the 1970s, researchers for the most part assumed that there was a fixed, unitary identity as a gay man or as a lesbian that has remained stable through human history.

In history we find many writers who had homosexual relation but the society didn't able to accept that kind of identity. Today the is changing so people and our industry openly can speak and accept their identities now they don't take it as shameful but they appreciate it. In industry we find many movies and webseries which talked about that. 

Mismatched:-

Mismatched is a 2020 Indian Hindi language coming of age romantic drama. Web series on Netflix, based on Sandhya Menon's 2017 novel When Dimple met Rishi. Although the central plot revolved around a heterosexual couple, one of the subplots was about two female best friends figuring out that they have feelings for one another. Namrata and Celina gave goosebumps to many. Although they didn’t have a happy ending.

BOMBAY TALKIES  He (protagonist)secures an internship in a popular magazine and gets close to a colleague named Gayatri (Rani Mukerji). Gayatri invites him over for dinner where he meets her husband Dev (Randeep Hooda) who is a closeted homosexual. Later, Dev gathers the courage to come out of the closet and the LGBT movie ends with him and Avinash sharing a passionate kiss. is a brilliant effort at mirroring the reality of our society. Innumerable people are trapped in loveless marriages, living in the closet, as homosexuality is forbidden in India.

It is a sign of evolution in Indian cinema when a popular actor and a household name like Ayushmann Khurrana openly declares his love in a popular 80s track, ‘Pyaar bina chain kaha re’. Sporting a sparkling top with shiny bell-bottoms, the remixed song is a part of his upcoming film Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan. The film is a progressive attempt towards addressing homophobia and raising awareness on same-sex love. But what makes Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan significant is its attempt at bridging the gap between society and the queer community with the casting of a mainstream actor! 

While the first season of "Four More Shots Please" revolved around the four friends, the second dealt more with a lesbian relationship. Anu Menon and Nupur Asthana curated the series that streamed on Amazon Prime Video. Often tagged as the Desi Sex and The City, the second season showcased Umang played by Bani J dating Samara, played by Lisa Ray. The complications, the love, and the romance all of it, well portrayed on the screens. The series stars Sayani Gupta, Bani J, Kirti Kulhari, and Maanvi Gagroo.

Self-acceptance of sexuality has been defined as accepting one’s sexuality as it is and being comfortable with this part of the self. This is considered a key milestone within sexual identity development frameworks. Self-acceptance, within this theory, is suggested to be achieved by resolving internal conflicts arising from identifying as LGBQ+ within a heterosexist society, which further allows for progression in building positive feelings and pride toward the self - identity affirmation and pride, as well as successfully integrating and valuing one’s sexuality as a part of one’s identity - centrality. However, this model has been criticized for suggesting a common linear progression of identity development that does not acknowledge the likely complex inter-relatedness of these processes and within group variation for people with different intersectional identities.

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