Historical Traces of Feminist Poetic Resistance: Responses to Anti-Gender Discourse in Amy Levy's “Xantippe” and Mina Loy's “Parturition”

This study examines the historical responses of feminist theory to anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses by comparing Victorian and modernist poems from a comparative perspective. Amy Levy's “Xantippe” and Mina Loy's “Parturition” were selected as examples that reveal the construction of female identity against patriarchal structures and feminist resistance strategies. The study employs qualitative content analysis, coding the themes, images, and narrative strategies in the poems within a feminist theoretical framework for comparative analysis. The theoretical framework of the analysis is based on Elaine Showalter's Cultural Model of Gynocriticism. Through this approach, the study discusses how women writers' experiences and forms of expression develop a woman-centered alternative discourse against the patriarchal literary tradition. In “Xantippe,” Levy criticizes the intellectual suppression of women and the silencing power of the patriarchy while the structure of dramatic monologue transforms the female experience into a collective space of resistance. In contrast, Mina Loy, in “Parturition,” presents the birth process as an experience in which the female body asserts its own authority; by reversing the language of patriarchal discourse that passivates women, she turns birth into a moment of empowerment for the female subject. This comparative analysis reveals the continuity and transformation of feminist poetry's responses to anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses across different periods. Levy's strategy of reclaiming the suppressed voice of women intellectuals and Loy's approach of politicizing the female body demonstrate the diversity of historical counter-discourses in feminist theory. Thus, the study reveals that literature has both a reflective and a formative function in the context of gender politics; it has played an active role in the historical construction of feminist strategies against anti-gender discourses. This historical reading is important for understanding the ideological foundations of the anti-gender movements rising in Europe today. Literary studies add a cultural and historical dimension to feminist theory discussions, offering the opportunity to address anti-gender policies not only as a political but also as a discursive phenomenon. The evolution of women-centered discourses that emerged in the Victorian era into a transnational feminist expression in the modernist period reveals the local and transnational dimensions of these resistance strategies.