Feminist critics have long debated the extent to which gender plays a role in the creation and interpretation of texts. Androgynist poetics, rooted in mid- Victorian women's writing, contends that the creative mind is sexless, but from the 1970s on, many feminist critics rejected the idea of the genderless (5) mind, finding that the imagination cannot evade conscious or unconscious structures of gender which is part of culture-determination where separating imagination from the self is impossible. The Female Aesthetic, expressing a unique female consciousness in literature, spoke of the 'female vernacular, the Mother Tongue, a powerful but (10) neglected women's culture.' Virginia Woolf discusses how a woman writer seeks within herself 'the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber,' inevitably colliding against her own sexuality to Confront 'something about the body, about the passions.' Accessible to men and women alike, but representing female sexual morphology, this method sought a way of (15) writing which literally embodied the female, thereby fighting the subordinating, linear style. of classification or distinction. It must be admitted that there are problems with the Female Aesthetic that feminist critics themselves recognized. For instance, they avoided defining exactly what constituted their writing style, as any definition would then (20) categorize it and safely subsume it as a genre under the linear patriarchal structure—its very restlessness and ambiguity defied identification as part of its identity. Some feminists and women writers could feel excluded by the surreality of the Female Aesthetic and its stress on the biological forms of female experience, which also bear close resemblance to essentialism. Men may (25) try their hand at writing woman's bodies, but according to the feminist critique, only. a woman whose very biology gave her an edge could read these texts successfully—a position which, worst of all, risked marginalization of women's literature and theory. Later, Gynocritics attempted to resolve some of these problems, by (30) agreeing that women's literature lay as the central concern for feminist criticism but rejecting the concept of an essential female identity and style, while simultaneously seeking to revise Freudian structures by emphasizing a Pre-Oedipal phase wherein the daughter's bond to her mother inscribes the key factor in gender identity. Matriarchal values dissolve intergenerational conflicts (35) and build upon a female tradition of literature rather than the struggle of Oedipus and Lais at the crossroads. Lastly and most promising in its achievement of a delicate balance are developments of an over-arching gender theory, which considers gender, both male and female, as a social construction built on biological differences. Gender theory proposes to explore ideological (40) inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender system, opening up the literary theory stage and bringing in questions of masculinity into feminist theory. Taking gender as a fundamental analytic category brings feminist criticism from the margin to the center, though it risks depoliticizing the study of women. Which of the following titles best summarizes the content of the passage?