Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. [Vol. 5.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 25)

Studies - András Tarnóc: Voices From the Wild Zone: Three Versions of the Feminist Aesthetic in American Culture

ANDRÁS TARNÓC VOICES FROM THE WILD ZONE: THREE VERSIONS OF THE FEMINIST AESTHETIC IN AMERICAN CULTURE Feminism as a blueprint for political action is a derivative of the women's liberation movement. Whereas the foundations of the movement can be traced to the issuance of the Seneca Falls Declaration in 1848. the United States witnessed two major upsurges of feminism in the twentieth century. The passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 indicated the climax of the first phase, the struggle for universal suffrage. The second wave emerged as a result of a society-wide cultural, political, ethnic, and racial awakening in the 1960's, and as a backlash to the New Left's failure to take women's aspirations into account. The female aesthetic is the cultural arm of the second stage, or the modern feminist movement, launched by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). This essay concentrating on historical development, principal aims and objectives, placement in the macrocultural context, and methods of cultural polarization will perform a comparative analysis of three variants of American feminist thought, the white female, black female, and Chicana aesthetics. However, before proceeding any further, a clarification of terms is in order. Since the feminist movement cannot be treated as a monolithic unit, the expression" feminisms" appears to be more appropriate (Országh-Virágos 254). Among the everincreasing feminisms, cultural, psychoanalytical, linguistic, lesbian etc., the white female, the black female, and the Chicana aesthetics are representatives of an extremely crowded arena emphasizing a transformational mode of literary critical practice. Feminist literary criticism, however, is only a component of a wide range of critical problems denoted under the umbrella term of feminist criticism 97