The Big Names in Feminist Theory
Let's start with the Continental players. Yes, the European Continent.
Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva make up the Holy Trinity of French feminism, and in the 1970s and '80s, these ladies turned psychoanalytic thinking on its head. In their own ways, each of them revealed how inadequately dudes like Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan had thought about women as women: for the most part, psychoanalysts were in the habit of talking about women like they were nothing more than men without penises. Um, okay.
Both Irigaray and Cixous pointed out that imagining women in this way made them seem scary and strange; plus, it's kind of childish to imagine the world as if it were only about the twig and berries. Another example: according to Freud and Lacan, young boys learn to obey their fathers because they're terrified of being "castrated," just like mommy who's got nothing but "lack" between her legs. And obviously young women want babies of their own to make up for not having anything else going on down there. Frankly, friends, early psychoanalysis isn't fun times for the womens.
Within the American academy, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar were doing important literary work, teaching and interpreting texts by women writers who hadn't been given much attention by male critics and profs. They also explored new ways of evaluating women writers' creativity on its own terms, rather than comparing it to men's. Also in the lit world, Annette Kolodny did her thang to challenge readers of all stripes to re-examine the ways they'd been taught to recognize "great" works of fiction.
Meanwhile, black feminist scholars like Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, and bell hooks were working to make sure that the voices of African-American writers and thinkers were getting the attention they deserved.
Along similar lines, feminist scholars from a huge diversity of backgrounds were laying the foundations for new forms of antiracist, decolonizing, and postcolonial lit crit: Gloria Anzaldúa, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak were all working among these ranks, along with our cyborg sweetie Donna Haraway.
On top of ALL THAT, feminist scholars outside of lit departments like Adrienne Rich and Gayle Rubin were duking it out over issues like pornography, kink, and sadomasochism, and soon, Judith Butler would step into the fray by making a bold case for sex and gender "deviance." If all of this sounds like a lot to you, buckle up—we're still at the tip of the gender non-conforming iceberg!