Author
Professor of Critical Theory
Abstract
Feminist Criticism in Cultural Studies is particularly distinguished from other approaches in modern literary criticism in that its emergence and expansion is the consequence of a social movement. Women’s self-consciousness of the inequality of their civil rights compared with men not only led to the formation of social movements aimed at achieving goals such as universal suffrage and equal pay for equal work, but it also inspired a reconsideration of culture and how cultural mechanisms have helped to place women in their inferior position in society. Consequently, literature as an undeniable constituent of culture has been one of the main foci of feminists’ attention. The development of women’s studies in the 1970s and 1980s was combined with its merging with some of the other critical approaches (in particular poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis). This combination led to such a diversity in the cultural studies of women’s issues that in the opinion of most feminist theorists we can no longer talk of a single feminist approach, but a variety of these approaches. The present essay starts with a review of the theoretical foundations of feminist criticism and then examines a short story entitled “The Model” by the contemporary female Iranian writer Simin Daneshvar. The next section of the essay deals with the effect of Marxism and poststructuralism in the cultural study of the images of women in literary texts and offers further readings of Daneshvar’s story in the
Persistence of traditional cultural values, and the incompatibility of laws and regulations regarding inheritance have imposed an unequal living condition on the elderly women and have deprived them of their most basic needs and necessities such as decent retirement income and shelter.
Keywords
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