Proza kobieca lat dziewięćdziesiątych w świetle krytyki feministycznej

Abstract

In the nineties of the twentieth century a literary debut of many women writers, such as Olga Tokarczuk, Izabela Filipiak and Manuela Gretkowska, was an interesting sociological phenomenon. These writers undertook tabu topics like period, sexual behaviour and psychological problems of women. Because of the thematic range and the placement of female awareness in the core of the works, they were included into the category of so-called feminist literature. In the desire to raise the low status of female values in culture they criticised negative stereotypes of femininity and they fought against the patriarch model of the society according to which the woman was refused the right to manage her own life creatively. Demanding the acknowledgement of the female universe equal to the male one the women writers frequently discussed carnality (Izabela Filipiak), sexuality (Zyta Rudzka), and female mythology (Olga Tokarczuk). Those young writers’ texts aroused lively discussions, in which the texts were described as a ‘gently feministic’ prose and which introduced the female point of view into the mainstream culture. The writers participated willingly in the debate over the necessity to differentiate between the biological and cultural gender that was determined socially and that usually led to female discrimination. They made an attempt to domesticate all those spheres appropriated by men including the language, which they approach rather hesitantly as a factor of discrimination and exclusion. Part of the literary critics, just like those writers, try to organise the new niche in literary studies, which means to conduct feministic criticism and read women’s texts in this vein. Maria Janion’s, Agnieszka Borkowska’s and Inga Iwasiow’s books are examples of valid critical methodology, which break many pejorative stereotypes about feminism and introduce new perspectives into the literary criticism.