Intersecting economic relations and the critique of aspects of female sexuality in the works of Carter and Jelinek

• Main Author: Nafeesa Saini
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59634
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Contemporary feminist discussions and research on human sexuality continue to expand across numerous disciplines and theoretical perspectives. Of the differing debates, feminists are largely agreeable upon “[the need to] examin[e] [the importance of] the role of sexuality in the construction of male dominance and female subordination” (Feminist Review 1). While the past decades of the feminist movement have effectuated various issues and campaigns for reforms, it has made it evident that men continue to circumscribe female sexuality. Although the different currents of feminist thought prescribe to divergent theories on the issue of oppressed female sexuality, the chosen works of Angela Carter and Elfriede Jelinek exemplify a common thread of materialist feminismDespite the various currents of feminist reasoning for oppressed female sexuality, the manner in which this repression is carried out is a pattern ingrained in society. Of the numerous ways in which female sexuality has been oppressed, literature has been one of the most dominant ways in which men write women into patriarchal ideologies. Feminists have fought such limited representations of women. Two of the ways include the ideology of compulsory heterosexuality and myths and ideologies of motherhood. Although there are various theoretical perspectives on how human sexuality is shaped, my essay will focus on a materialist feminist explanation of oppression of female sexuality through these limited representations of women in the works of Elfriede Jelinek and Angela Carter. Through the four chosen texts, I will attempt to demonstrate how the construction of female sexuality is grounded in capitalist patriarchal ideology and the everyday, material realities of women that are regulated by economic relations.