Feminist and gender criticism examines how a literary text represents gender, whose perspective a story centres and treats as the default, unmarked viewpoint, and whose perspective it treats, by contrast, as marked, secondary or simply absent. A significant part of this critical approach's ongoing work is showing that gender assumptions can shape even elements of a story that don't appear, on their surface, to be directly about gender at all, structural choices like whose interiority a narrator has access to, or which characters' desires actually drive the plot forward.
A story's default viewpoint is a choice, even when it isn't announced as one
Every narrative makes choices, often without ever explicitly naming them, about whose experience it treats as the story's central, unmarked reference point, and whose experience it treats instead as peripheral, filtered through the central perspective, or largely absent from the story altogether. Feminist and gender criticism examines these often-unstated choices directly, asking whose perspective a given text implicitly assumes as its baseline reader or protagonist, and what happens to the text's meaning once that assumption is made visible and specifically questioned rather than left as invisible background.
Gender assumptions run through structural choices that don't look like they're about gender
This kind of criticism doesn't restrict itself to texts whose subject matter is explicitly about gender or women; it also examines how gender assumptions shape seemingly unrelated structural elements, like which characters' internal thoughts and motivations a narrative actually gives readers direct access to, or which characters exist mainly to enable other characters' stories rather than having genuinely significant arcs of their own. Uncovering these structural patterns, present even in texts that never explicitly discuss gender as a topic, is exactly what distinguishes this approach from criticism that only examines gender where a text happens to raise it directly.
What we're still unsure about
That feminist and gender criticism represents a genuinely established, substantial tradition within literary studies, with its own well-documented history and range of specific analytical methods, is well documented in the field's own scholarship. What remains more genuinely an internal, actively debated question within the field is how to theorise gender's interaction with other overlapping identities and social positions, like race, class and sexuality, that also shape a text's representation and a reader's relationship to it — critics continue to actively debate and develop frameworks for analysing these intersecting factors together, rather than treating gender as a single, isolable analytical category that can be examined fully on its own.
This sits inside Feminist & Gender Criticism, one of seven topics in Literary Analysis, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.