her tweets was an analysis of how Ogola's work in the book relied on gynocriticism as a literary style. Society and its artistic reproductions are usually androcentric in style, meaning that they place male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history. Societal roles and projections are essentially reproduced by favoring masculinity over femininity.
"According to the rules of androcentrism, men and women alike are rewarded, but only insofar as they are masculine (e.g., they play sports, drink whiskey, and are lawyers or surgeons). Meanwhile, men are punished for doing femininity and women… well, women are required to do femininity and simultaneously punished for it." Lisa Wade
As a prelude to Saturday's event, Aisha Ali discussed Margaret Ogola's The River and the Source on Twitter. The highlight of "According to the rules of androcentrism, men and women alike are rewarded, but only insofar as they are masculine (e.g., they play sports, drink whiskey, and are lawyers or surgeons). Meanwhile, men are punished for doing femininity and women… well, women are required to do femininity and simultaneously punished for it." Lisa Wade
Ogola's work in the River and the Source, employs a gynocentric style to counter this and center women and their experiences as the center of the books 'universe'. It must be mentioned however, that the feminist reading of a text and gynocriticism are different. Feminist reading looks at critiquing and applying male models, theories and text to feminism, as wealthy, white, male work is the hegemony as far as theory and text is concerned. It looks at how wealthy, white men know the world and tries to apply a feminist lens to critique or apply the work with race, class and sex in consideration.
However, gynocriticism as a style, "... constructs a female-framework for the analysis of women's literature and develops new models that rely on the study of the female experience." Ghada Abdel Moneim
The question however, still remains, why do androcentric text have such a pull in comparison to gynocentric ones? According to Patricino Schweikart in Reading Ourselves: Toward a feminist theory of reading
"The answer is not so much the power of the false consciousness into which women have been socialised, but the power of such texts to harness authentic female desires to the process of immasculation. Women learn to identify with the vicissitudes and the aspirations of the male protagonists. The woman reader experiences a “bifurcated response” in that she reads
“both as a man and as a woman. But in either case, the result is the same: she confirms her position as other”"