Talk:Feminist analysis

Why merge?
User:Pearlg has merged the articles on feminist theory, feminist film theory, feminist legal theory, and feminist literary criticism into this one, and made all of those redirects to this article, without discussion. I don't really understand why this was done (the edit summaries said only that those articles were "short") and I think this is a bad idea. Each of those is a reasonably well-defined topic for an encyclopedia article, and each of them is more or less separate from each other. (And, in fact, a short stub article is a good thing, because it can delimit a topic while allowing for later expansion.) By contrast, "feminist analysis" is a hodgepodge as currently constituted, and it sounds like it has something to do with psychoanalysis, which it doesn't. Before I undo it, is there a good reason for this article merge? -- Rbellin|Talk 15:59, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Here's what I was thinking:
 * Each of these topics involve applying the same basic ideas and approaches to different mediums. For example, male gaze in film studies relates directly to narrative perspective in literature.


 * Film Theory, Legal Theory, Literature all deserve to be summarized under the title of Feminist analysis. None of the sub-articles were really more than summaries though.  Regarding your arguement about delineation; I maintained the sub-articles names as major headings--so I'd expect things to continue to be well-defined.  As this article expands, we can think about forking off those sub-topics to be on their own.


 * I don't really agree that there is any connotation of psychoanalysis--other than the word itself. Analysis is the commonly and regularly used term in this context.  Whereas, I find theory to be rather dubious as none of those articles is about a theory.  The theory is feminism (of some form).  The application of that theory in criticism of film, law, writing, etc is analysis.


 * What do you think? -- Pearlg 05:29, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The word "analysis" does not have this as its primary connotation, at least not in the English which I speak, and I do not find it a "commonly and regularly used term" as you do. In fact, to my knowledge, "feminist analysis" is not widely regarded as the name of anything in particular. By contrast, "feminist theory" denotes a widely recognized set of ideas and texts (and it is not the case, as you imply, that everyone recognizes feminism as a theory; there is a wide variety of non-academic, untheoretical feminism). Similarly, "feminist literary criticism" denotes an approach to literary criticism, etc., and I don't see a reason for your contention that these subjects "deserve" to be so hastily unified. There's a lot to be gained by carefully delineating coherent subjects for articles, and no real reason to aggregate them. Yes, the articles you redirected were currently short -- that does not argue against their existence, and you've done nothing to expand them by piling up their text all together here. Encyclopedic topics such as these deserve their own stub articles for expansion -- especially feminist theory, but all these are worthy topics for an encyclopedia.

And this page, as now constituted, does nothing but aggregate a bunch of unrelated bits of text -- it doesn't even attempt to describe one unified subject for the article. In fact, your contention above that these topics use "the same basic ideas and approaches" is quite controvertible, though they certainly have informed each other and cross-fertilized ideas. Are you familiar with No original research, and are you sure that this proposed synthesis of all these apparently separate feminism-related subjects is commonly agreed upon? Can you point to some sources for that?

I think the original pages should be restored and de-redirected, as each of them is a worthy topic for an encyclopedia article. If you want to work on synthesizing all of their content in this article, I have no objection to that for now (though I think this synthesis needs to be a summary of commonly accepted thought about a precisely defined topic, and I don't see "feminist analysis" as such a concept, perhaps a better-synthesized and sourced article would convince me). -- Rbellin|Talk 05:59, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I am a afraid that I must respectfully disagree on at least one point. Analysis in the Woody Allen sense is not less than the 12th meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary.  In position #6 is "The investigation of any production of the intellect, as a poem, tale, argument, philosphical system, so as to exhibit its component elements in simple form."


 * I agree that the current article is incompletely written. What took place was step one--precisely because I've found it's better to do things incrementally and proceed following the reaction/consensus.  -- Pearlg 06:45, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

merger
I've merged this page in Feminist theory as this article is performing exactly the same function as the other one, except by a slightly different name. This is a bold move I know so if anyone contests this I am happy to dialogue and reach consensus. Until that happens this page will be a redirect to Feminist theory-- Cailil  talk 18:42, 5 August 2007 (UTC)