Russian 0090: Russian Fairy Tales

Feminism

Prepared by: John Kachur and David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt+tales@pitt.edu)
Last modified: 2009-02-08
Location: http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~tales/feminism.html

Sex
A biological quality; male or female.
Gender
A social or cultural quality; masculine or feminine.
Female
A designation for the biological ability to bear children
Femininity
A set of externally-defined characteristics through which cultural and social norms of sexuality are ascribed to people. For example:
Feminine Masculine
body, material mind, abstract
domesticity (keeping house) adventure (hunting and gathering)
passive active
nurturing demanding
silence voice
subservience dominance
humility, modesty pride, boasting
sweet, courteous curt, rambunctious
emotional intellectual, rational
chaos, fragmentation order, unity
intuition logic
spinning tales, gossip writing literature, reporting
damsel in distress knight in shining armor
Feminism
A political stance that seeks to uncover and debunk the patriarchal prejudices and sexism endemic to social, institutional, and personal power relations between the sexes. Feminist criticism seeks to expose the ways in which males appropriate certain high-status roles for themselves, while relegating females to lower-status roles determined by male-dominated society. Feminist criticism strives to reveal the bias in supposedly neutral or objective observations.
Patriarchy
A society in which political power is maintained in the hands of men and is used to repress women, according them a secondary status. A major device of patriarchies is to equate female and feminine in order to make the connection seem natural (that is, based on laws of nature), and thus indisputable.
Sexism
The automatic ascription of essential qualities to people solely on the basis of sex.
Essentialism
From a feminist perspective, ascribing invariable, or essential (in the meaning of “pertaining to the natural essence”), traits to men and women without respect to geographic, cultural, or social factors.