Title: What is a feminist approach to literature? - Quora
Headings: What is a feminist approach to literature?
What is a feminist approach to literature?
Himanshi Sharma
Anubhav Jain
Frederic Christie
Darshan Miskin
Sara Chojnacki
Deepak Biswas
Sophie Dockx
Martin Asiner
Akila Rajkumar
William Smith

Content: A feminist approach to literature from the position of a reader, or a literary critic would entail reading a text in terms of how it treats its women/queer characters. To give an example, if a character is just referred to as the wife of a character and appears in the plot only in relation to the needs of a male character, or if most women characters are one-dimensional even though the male characters are painted as complex human beings we can safely say that the author is limited and unimaginative when it comes to writing female characters. The issue is important because for most of history, women characters have always occupied the background while their male counterparts went on ambitious voyages, conquests and plunders and led colourful lives in words. Of course feminist literary studies doesn't stop there. In all good literature, the surface is only the beginning of the journey; it is often the case that a writer might do a lip service to feminism by giving five women in positions of seeming power (in wealth/career/family terms) but when one scratches the surface one encounters an entirely different story. A woman who is the head of a business conglomerate but who always does what the male characters ask her to do, is painted in a good light for those very reasons, subtly subscribes to patriarchal codes of conduct and exhibits no agency of her own is not a feminist character despite her apparent tremendous power. The next step would be to look at the gender roles, and if the book questions them in any way. If the the gender status-quo is taken for granted every step of the way, the book can't be called feminist. Another thing to keep in mind is that with time Feminism has become intersectional, and so have all the associated fields.