Resisting reader

Concept formulated by Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1978), in which she argued that women in literature have traditionally had a male (and often misogynistic) point of view and value system imposed on them against their own subjectivity in the interpretation of texts. Inspired by Elaine Showalter (1971), Fetterley proposes ‘reader empowerment’ by using various narrative codes to unmask the androcentric and patriarchal ideology underlying texts, reading paradigms and the classical literary canon.