Gender attitudes towards feminist literature : lecturers' and students' engagement with feminist literary texts at a university in Zimbabwe.

Abstract

The study reports on a qualitative study of the views of university lecturers and students on the feminist literary texts they engaged with at a selected university in Zimbabwe. Through the lenses of the feminist and critical paradigms, the thesis examined how university lecturers and students react to feminist ideologies that are observable in the feminist literary texts they engaged with vis-à-vis their patriarchal orientation. Their reactions to feminist ideologies were viewed from the reader response theory perspective. From a liberal feminist perspective, the study suggests the need to add more feminist literary texts in the selected university’s undergraduate English curriculum. The study utilised informal conversations, semi-structured interviews, observations and document analysis as methods of gathering data. The study found that lecturers’ and students’ views towards feminist literary texts were influenced by several factors which are: patriarchy and socialisation, consciousness, religion, generational cohorts and education. The study recommends that lecturers take into consideration the addition of more feminist literary texts in the university undergraduate English curriculum because these feminist literary texts address important gender issues that are topical in this generation of feminism.