Feminist criticism is part of the broader feminist political movement that seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities. White there is no single feminist literary criticism, there are a half dozen interrelated projects: exposing masculine stereotypes, distortions, and omissions in male-dominated literature; studying female creativity, genres, styles, themes, careers, and literary traditions; discovering and evaluating lost and neglected literary works by women; developing feminist theoretical concepts and methods; examining the forces that shape women's lives, literature, and criticism, ranging across psychology and politics, biology and cultural history; and creating new ideas of and roles for women, including new institutional arrangements. Feminist theory and criticism have brought revolutionary change to literary and cultural studies by expanding the canon, by critiquing sexist representations and values, by stressing the importance of gender and sexuality, and by proposing institutional and social reforms.

Theorists of a 'feminist aesthetic' argue that women have a literature of their own, possessing its own images, themes, characters, forms, styles, and canons. Women writers form a subculture sharing distinctive economic, political, and professional realities, all of which help determine specific problems and artistic preoccupations that mark women's literature. Sandra M-. Gilbert and Susan Gubar propose that nineteenth-century women writers had to negotiate alienation and psychological disease in order to attain literary authority, which they achieved by reclaiming the heritage of female creativity, remembering their lost foremothers, and refusing the debilitating cultural roles of angel and monster assigned to them by patriarchal society. Gilbert and Gubar's "anxiety of authorship" depicts the precursor poet as a sister or mother whose example enables the creativity of the latecomer writer to develop collaboratively against the confining and sickening backdrop of forbidding male literary authority.

As Judith Fetterly insists in The Resisting Reader: A feminist Approach to American Fiction (1978), women read differently than men. She examines American fiction and points out that this is not "universal" but masculine literature, which forces women readers to identify against themselves. Such literature neither expresses nor legitimates women's experiences, and in reading it women have to think as men, identify with male viewpoints, accept male values and interests, and tolerate sexist hostility and oppression. Under such conditions, women must become 'resisting readers' rather than assenting ones, using feminist criticism as one way both to challenge male domination of the institutions of literature and to change society.

As such concepts as the anxiety of authorship, écriture féminine, and the potential of the Imaginary order suggest, psychoanalysis is fundamental to a great deal of feminist theory and criticism. However, feminist psychoanalysis is typically revisionist: it has had to work through and criticise the 'phallocentric' presuppositions and prejudices of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and other pioneering pschychoanalysts. For example, the feminine anxiety of authoship - in its opposition to the masculine anxiety of influence- reconfigures the 'oedipal' relationship between writers as cooperative abd nurturing rather than competitive ans rivalrous. Similarly, écriture féminine transforms Lacan's idea of the Imaginary, casting it not simply as an infantile sphere of primary drives superseded on the way to the patriarchal Symbolic order but as a liberating domain of bodily rhythms and pulsations associated with the mother that permeates literature, especially modern experimental poetry. Moreover, the pre-Symbolic Imaginary order, a realm of bisexual/androginous/polymorphous sexuality, opens the possibility of sexual liberation from the suffocating confines of the "compulsory heterosexuality" that dominates patriarchal culture.

One of the main flash points among feminist critics has been identity politics, by which is meant a politics of difference based on some fixed or definable identity (as middle-class white woman, a working-class black woman, a third world brown woman, and so on. Critics of identity politics have several major complaints. To begin with, defining feminist identity by giving priorities to race or class or geography tends to essentialise these features, reducing people to social indicators whose 'real essence' is determined by race or class or country of origin. Moreover, an emphasis on the multiplicity of female identities undermines the solidarity and united front of feminists. Advocates of the politics of difference respond, in turn, that the act of herding all women into one homogeneous category (Woman) is a reductive totalisation and very unlike to disturb the dominant order. They argue that alliances and coalitions, in strategic cooperation with other new social movements, will best and most democratically address issues of equality and recognition. In the spheres of theory and criticism, the politics of difference opposes universal notions of traditional humanism and promotes two key ideas: there are many women's literatures across the globe, and there are many modes of resistance and of resisting reading.

An influential field that has built on ideas from feminist criticism, gender studies, women's studies, and lesbian and gay studies is queer theory. It begins by criticising the dominant heterosexual binary, masculine/feminine, which enthrones 'the' two sexes and casts other sexualities as abnormal, illicit, or criminal. Queer theory attacks the homophobic and patriarchal basis of heterosexuality. The stress on the socially constructed character of sexualities. Of particular interest are transgressive phenomena such as drag, camp, cross-dressing and transsexuality, all of which highlight the nonbiological, performative aspects of gender construction. To be 'masculine' or 'feminine' requires practising an array of rituals (which cross-dressers faithfully mimic and parody in the production of gender identity).