Marxist, Gender and Ecocritical Criticism

From Theory to Practice: Applying Marxist, Feminist/Gender, Ecocritical and Queer Criticism through GenAI

This blog is written as a task assigned by the head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. Here is the link to the professor's worksheet for background reading: Click here.

Introduction: From Knowing Theory to Practising Criticism

Literary theory becomes meaningful when it changes the way a reader asks questions of a text. It is easy to memorize that Marxist criticism concerns class, Feminist/Gender criticism concerns gender and patriarchy, Ecocriticism concerns human–nature relations, and Queer criticism concerns sexuality and normative identity. Yet such associations are only a starting point. The central purpose of the supplied GenAI Activity Worksheet is methodological: students are asked to understand what a critic actually does while reading literature, rather than simply collecting definitions. The worksheet specifically asks for what the critic looks for, what the critic does with the text, an illustration, and a usable critical question. 

The four approaches make different structures visible. Marxist criticism investigates labour and institutional power; Feminist/Gender criticism examines representation and gender construction; Ecocriticism questions anthropocentrism and human/non-human relations; and Queer criticism interrogates fixed categories of identity. None should be reduced to a slogan: each is a method of asking questions of evidence.

Generative AI can help a student compare these methods, but the worksheet deliberately ends with Human Verification. Students must check consistency with the source, textual evidence, and possible invented quotations or interpretations. Thus GenAI functions as a learning assistant rather than an unquestionable authority.

Step 1: Give GenAI the Source 

1. What Does a Marxist Critic Do?

A. What does the critic look for?

A Marxist critic looks at class, labour, and social hierarchy, while also examining the ideology that makes certain social and economic assumptions appear natural or inevitable. The critic pays attention to ownership, exploitation, alienation, and commodification, as well as to institutions that possess and distribute economic power. A Marxist reading therefore does not simply identify which characters are rich and which are poor. Instead, it asks how the text represents relations of production who works, who owns, who profits, and how these arrangements are maintained through ideology.

B. What does the critic DO with the text?

A Marxist critic examines how labour is organised and rewarded and identifies the ideologies that justify existing economic arrangements. The critic questions whether characters accept or resist their social and economic positions and exposes the difference between what characters are told they gain and what actually benefits those who possess power. In this way, the critic reinterprets personal conflicts in relation to larger social structures, moving from an individual scene of labour towards the wider economic and ideological order represented by the text.

C. Illustration

In Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, a Marxist reading does not merely observe that factory owners possess greater wealth than workers. Instead, it examines how the novel’s emphasis on “facts” can function ideologically by presenting a particular way of thinking as rational and necessary. The critic can therefore explore how workers experience exploitation within the industrial system and how the factory becomes a representation of a larger economic structure in which labour, profit, and human beings are organised according to capitalist interests.

D. Question a Marxist critic would ask

A Marxist critic might ask: “Whose labour makes this world function, and who benefits from that labour being treated as invisible or natural?”

2. What Does a Feminist/Gender Critic Do?

A. What does the critic look for?

A Feminist/Gender critic looks at patriarchy as a social structure rather than merely an individual attitude and examines how gender roles are constructed within a text. The critic pays attention to agency, objectification, domestic and reproductive labour, and the ways in which masculinity and femininity are defined in relation to each other. Feminist/Gender criticism therefore does not simply count female characters or focus only on “women’s issues.” Instead, it understands gender as a structure of power and social construction that can organise the entire text and influence the behaviour, opportunities, identities, and relationships of different characters.

B. What does the critic DO?

A Feminist/Gender critic examines how gendered behaviour is presented as natural or normal and questions who is allowed to speak and who is silenced. The critic identifies unequal distributions of power along gender lines, challenges patriarchal structures present in the plot or language, and investigates how gender identities are produced through repeated social performances rather than being determined by biology alone. In this way, the critic explores how a literary text participates in, questions, or challenges established ideas about masculinity and femininity.

C. Illustration

In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a Feminist/Gender reading does not simply celebrate Jane as a strong female heroine. Instead, it examines how the plot repeatedly places Jane in situations of economic dependence and considers the limitations placed upon her agency. It can also examine Bertha Mason’s role as the “madwoman” against whom Jane’s socially acceptable femininity is defined. Such a reading therefore asks what kinds of female independence the novel permits and what forms of femininity it restricts or marginalises.

D. Question a Feminist/Gender critic would ask

A Feminist/Gender critic might ask: “How does this text construct ‘proper’ masculinity and femininity, and what happens to characters who do not fit those constructions?”

3. What Does an Ecocritic Do?

A. What does the critic look for?

An Ecocritic examines the relationship between human beings and the non-human world, particularly the ways in which anthropocentrism places human interests at the centre of existence. The critic looks for non-human agency, ecological interdependence, and the ways technology mediates the relationship between humans and nature. The critic also examines where the boundary between human and non-human is established, questioned, or blurred. Ecocriticism therefore does not simply identify descriptions of landscapes, forests, oceans, or animals. Instead, it asks how a text structures the relationship between human and non-human existence and whether that relationship is based on mastery, dependence, exploitation, coexistence, or something more complex.

B. What does the critic DO?

An Ecocritic examines how the non-human world is represented—as a resource, a passive background, or an active presence with its own agency. The critic questions anthropocentric assumptions within the narrative and investigates the forms of dependence and interconnection between human beings and non-human entities. Through this approach, the critic can reinterpret human identity as something that is entangled with the environment rather than completely separate from it. The reading therefore considers how literary texts may reproduce or challenge ideas of human control over nature.

C. Illustration

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, an ecocritical reading does not simply focus on the Arctic landscape as an important setting. Instead, it examines Victor Frankenstein’s relationship with natural processes of creation in terms of appropriation, experimentation, and control. The critic can question the novel’s representation of human mastery over biological material and examine the Creature’s exclusion in relation to ideas about what constitutes “natural” life. The natural environment and the processes of life therefore become important to understanding the novel’s broader concerns with creation, control, and boundaries.

D. Question an Ecocritic would ask

An Ecocritic might ask: “Does this text treat the non-human world as something to be used and mastered, or does it grant it independent value and agency?”

4. What Does a Queer Critic Do?

A. What does the critic look for?

A Queer critic looks for heteronormativity, or the assumption that heterosexuality is the normal or default condition, as well as gender binaries and gender performativity. The critic also examines unstable or shifting identities, non-normative bodies, and the ways institutions regulate what is considered a “normal” identity. However, Queer criticism does not assume that every literary text automatically contains a queer interpretation. A queer reading must be developed from specific textual evidence, particularly moments where established binary categories become unstable, fail, or are actively enforced and policed.

B. What does the critic DO?

A Queer critic questions the binary categories that a text appears to take for granted and examines how identities are produced rather than simply given. The critic challenges assumptions about what constitutes “normal” gender or sexual behaviour, identifies heteronormative structures within the plot or setting, and investigates how social institutions regulate bodies, identities, and desires. Through this process, Queer criticism explores the instability of categories that are often presented as fixed and natural.

C. Illustration

In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a Queer reading examines how the protagonist’s transformation across different historical periods and genders destabilises the assumption that identity must remain fixed or singular. The critic considers how Orlando’s changing identity challenges conventional distinctions between masculine and feminine existence and examines the ways surrounding society attempts to impose or re-establish binary categories. The transformation therefore becomes a way of questioning the stability and naturalness of gender identity.

D. Question a Queer critic would ask

A Queer critic might ask: “Where does this text assume that identity or desire is fixed and natural, and where does it reveal that assumption to be a social construction instead?”

6. Comparative Table: Four Critics, Four Methods

Critical Lens	What does the critic look for?	What does the critic DO?	Illustration	Question the critic asks
Marxist	Class, labour, ideology, material conditions, exploitation, alienation, commodification, institutional power.	Examines labour and hierarchy; questions ideology; exposes contradictions; connects individual experience with material structures.	Hard Times: industrial/utilitarian values shape education and human value.	How do economic structures shape identity and choice?
Feminist/Gender	Patriarchy, agency, gender roles, representation, objectification, reproductive/domestic labour.	Examines representation; questions gender assumptions; identifies unequal power; investigates voice and silence.	The Yellow Wallpaper: authority limits the narrator’s agency.	How does the text construct gendered power?
Ecocritical	Human/non-human relations, anthropocentrism, materiality, technology, ecological power.	Questions human-centred assumptions; examines material relations; investigates ecological domination.	Frankenstein: natural environments and technological creation complicate human mastery.	What assumptions about human control does the text challenge?
Queer	Heteronormativity, gender binaries, sexuality, identity, performativity, non-normative bodies.	Questions binaries; examines constructed identity; challenges normative categories.	Dorian Gray: desire and acceptable masculinity can be examined through social norms.	How does the text construct and destabilize ‘normal’ identity?

Knowing Theory versus Using Theory

Knowing a theory means understanding its concepts and vocabulary. Using a theory requires a further movement from concept to evidence. A student who knows Marxist criticism may say that it concerns class; a student practising Marxist criticism asks how a passage represents labour, who controls production, what ideology is normalized, and how characters’ experiences relate to institutions. Similarly, knowing Ecocriticism means knowing that it studies human–nature relations; practising it means identifying a particular representation and explaining its implications. Theory becomes criticism when concepts are attached to evidence through questions and interpretation. This distinction is central to the worksheet’s instruction to demonstrate what critics “DO,” not simply what they mean. 

Source versus Synthesis

The supplied worksheet provides the methodological framework: explain what each critic looks for and does, provide illustrations and questions, compare the approaches, distinguish theory from practice, and identify source material versus synthesis. It then requires all four lenses to be applied to one text using evidence, concepts and interpretation. 

Dilip Barad’s 2024 source provides the theoretical foundation and examples involving Hard Times, The Yellow Wallpaper, Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray.  The discussion of The Employees is an extension of the worksheet’s method: its factual details come from external sources, while the four-lens readings are analytical synthesis.

Part 2 — Applying Four Critical Lenses to The Employees

Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century was originally published in Danish in 2018 and translated into English by Martin Aitken in 2020. It is set aboard the Six-Thousand Ship, whose crew includes humans and humanoids. After objects from the planet New Discovery are brought aboard, the employees experience unusual emotional and sensory responses. The novel is constructed from numbered statements made to a workplace committee investigating the objects and their effects on work. 

This form makes the novel especially useful for the worksheet. The institution understands the crew through categories such as workflows, performance and deviation, while employees describe memories, desires and bodily responses that exceed bureaucratic language. Critics have connected the novel to productivity, corporate language, alienation, embodiment and the human/non-human boundary.The readings below deliberately act as four different critics rather than four general summaries.

Marxist Reading: Labour, Productivity and Alienation

A Marxist critic would notice that the workplace is the novel’s central organizing structure. Crew members are workers whose experiences are recorded and evaluated by an institutional committee. The committee is concerned with “workflows” and “deviations,” while employees describe much richer emotional and sensory experiences. The contrast suggests a conflict between lived experience and an institutional language of productivity.

The concept of alienation becomes useful here. The novel asks what it means to believe that a person is more than their work. This can be read as a challenge to a system in which identity is measured through usefulness. The committee’s language also illustrates ideology: workplace categories make productivity appear to be the natural measure of a worker’s condition.

A qualification is necessary. The novel does not present a conventional capitalist economy, so a Marxist reading should not equate every bureaucratic feature with classical capitalism. Instead, Marxist concepts of labour, alienation, ideology and institutional power can illuminate the workplace. A 2023 scholarly article explicitly connects the novel’s work-focused society with alienation and late-capitalist anxiety.

Critical question: “What happens when employees begin to value experiences that cannot be measured by the institution that employs them?”

Feminist/Gender Reading: Bodies, Classification and Identity

A Feminist/Gender critic would not simply count women in the novel. The more productive question is how bodies and identities are classified and regulated. The boundary between human and humanoid is deliberately unstable; readers cannot always determine which speakers belong to which category. This uncertainty makes the institutional power to define bodies especially important.

The body becomes something that can be recorded, classified and judged by the workplace. Statements about being human, or about having a body unlike another person’s, can therefore be read as evidence of bodily uncertainty and institutional classification. The Guardian reports statements including “Am I human?” and “My body isn’t like yours.”  Interpreting this uncertainty as a challenge to conventional gender categories is an analytical extension, not a literal claim that the novel makes about gender.

The distinction between those who are born and those who are made also complicates assumptions about natural bodies, reproduction and constructed identities. A Feminist/Gender reading can therefore ask who possesses the authority to define a body and what happens when an individual does not fit available classifications.

Critical question: “Who has the institutional authority to define a body and identity, and what happens when the body exceeds the available categories?”

Ecocritical Reading: Materiality and the Human/Non-Human Boundary

An ecocritical reading must go beyond saying that the novel contains another planet. The mysterious objects from New Discovery are difficult to classify and are described through sensory effects, textures, smells and material qualities. Scholarship describes them as occupying an uncertain space between biological and technological matter. 

This uncertainty challenges anthropocentrism. The employees initially approach the objects through institutional categories, yet the objects produce responses that cannot be reduced to usefulness. The novel therefore questions the assumption that non-human matter exists simply to serve human purposes. The humanoids further blur the natural/artificial boundary because they are technologically produced but experience memory, desire and attachment.

The ecological significance is therefore relational. Human bodies, humanoid bodies, objects, technology and organic life are not securely separated. The novel’s later movement toward plant life growing around the ship’s remains can be interpreted as a reminder that institutional and technological systems are embedded in material processes larger than themselves. This is interpretation, not an assertion of authorial intention.

Critical question: “What happens to human-centred classification when bodies, objects, technology and organic life can no longer be neatly separated?”

Queer Reading: Unstable Identity and Normative Categories

A Queer critic would begin with the novel’s uncertainty about identity. The human/humanoid distinction is not always readable from the statements, producing what the Guardian calls ontological uncertainty. This gives queer criticism a method for questioning the desire to place bodies and identities into stable binaries.

The most productive queer reading does not claim that every humanoid is automatically queer. Instead, it examines the institutional need to classify employees and the ways their statements exceed those classifications. Human/humanoid, born/made, natural/artificial and stable/unstable become difficult oppositions. This can be connected to queer theory’s interest in the construction and disruption of normality.

Gender performativity can be used cautiously: identity is partly shaped through social recognition and repeated practices, while the committee attempts to stabilize identity through documentation. The novel makes that process visible by refusing complete certainty.

Critical question: “How does the institution attempt to stabilize identity, and what becomes visible when its categories fail?”

What Becomes Visible Through Four Critical Lenses?

The four readings demonstrate the worksheet’s central lesson. Marxist criticism makes labour, productivity, alienation and institutional power visible. Feminist/Gender criticism foregrounds bodily classification, agency and gender construction. Ecocriticism emphasizes materiality, anthropocentrism and human/non-human relations. Queer criticism highlights unstable identity and the institutional production of normality.

These approaches should not be ranked. Their usefulness lies in the different questions they make possible: a workplace can be read as an economic structure, a gendered institution, a material/ecological system, and a site of identity regulation. Each interpretation remains accountable to evidence.

Textual Evidence versus Critical Interpretation

It is evidence that The Employees presents human and humanoid workers aboard the Six-Thousand Ship and that a committee collects statements about the objects.  It is interpretation to argue that the committee represents an ideology in which human value is measured through productivity. Similarly, the existence of the New Discovery objects is evidence; reading them as a challenge to anthropocentrism is interpretation. The difficulty of classifying human and humanoid speakers is evidence; using that instability to question binary identity is a queer synthesis.

This distinction is essential because the worksheet warns students to check whether GenAI has invented quotations, characters, events or interpretations.  Exact quotations should therefore be verified against the edition being used; otherwise, careful paraphrase is preferable.

Human Verification: What Should the Reader Check?

Human verification is a necessary stage of the activity. The worksheet specifically asks whether Feminist criticism has been reduced to a discussion of women, Marxism to rich versus poor, Ecocriticism to nature description, or Queer criticism to an unsupported assumption. It also asks whether actual textual evidence has been provided and whether AI has invented details. 

I agree with the AI-assisted identification of labour and productivity as central to The Employees because independent criticism also describes the novel as a critique of productivity, corporate language and work-focused alienation.  I would qualify the queer reading: the novel’s unstable categories support a queer interpretation, but instability alone does not prove a predetermined queer meaning. The interpretation must remain explicitly connected to the text and theoretical method.

Bibliographical care is also necessary: the original novel is from 2018, while the English translation is from 2020, so quotations must be checked against the cited edition.

Persoonal Reflection

Working with GenAI through this activity helped me understand that knowing a literary theory and practising literary criticism are different stages of learning. It was easy to remember short associations such as class, gender, nature and sexuality, but the activity showed me that a critic must connect theoretical concepts with textual evidence. Reading The Employees through four lenses was especially useful because the same workplace became a site of labour and alienation, bodily classification, human/non-human relations, and unstable identity. My main insight is that a critical lens does not give an automatic answer; it changes the questions I ask. I also learned that an AI response can sound convincing while still requiring verification. I therefore had to distinguish evidence from interpretation and check the novel’s details rather than accepting every generated claim. GenAI is most useful to me when it encourages comparison, questioning and revision. Human judgment remains necessary because literary criticism requires evidence, context and responsible interpretation.

Conclusion: Theory as a Practice of Reading

The GenAI activity demonstrates that literary theory becomes valuable when it becomes a practice of reading. Marxist, Feminist/Gender, Ecocritical and Queer criticism offer different conceptual tools, but those tools matter only when applied to particular evidence. The critic examines, questions, identifies, challenges and reinterprets.

The Employees is especially productive for this exercise because its workplace, bodies, technologies, objects and unstable identities invite different questions. Marxist criticism foregrounds labour and productivity; Feminist/Gender criticism examines bodies and classification; Ecocriticism investigates material and human/non-human relations; and Queer criticism questions fixed categories of identity. None should be treated as an automatic verdict. The strength of each reading depends on how responsibly it returns to the text.

The central lesson is: theory gives concepts and questions; the text provides evidence; interpretation connects them; and verification keeps the argument responsible. GenAI can assist this process, but it cannot replace critical judgment.

Works Cited

Barad, Dilip. Literary Criticism and Gen AI. Sept. 2026. ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/414530437_Literary_Criticism_and_Gen_AI.

Barad, Dilip. “On Marxist, Feminist, Ecocritical, and Queer Criticism.” ResearchGate, 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385739537_On_Marxist_Feminist_Ecocritical_and_Queer_Criticism.

Ravn, Olga. The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century. Translated by Martin Aitken, New Directions, 2020.

Lopes Santos, Marta. “Nostalgic and Precarious: The Affective Power of Objects in Olga Ravn’s The Employees (2018).” Literature & Aesthetics, vol. 33, no. 2, 2023, p. 33.

“The Inhumanity of Work: On Olga Ravn’s The Employees.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2022. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-inhumanity-of-work-on-olga-ravns-the-employees.

Flood, Alison. “The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn Review.” The Guardian, 12 May 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/12/the-employees-a-workplace-novel-of-the-22nd-century-by-olga-ravn-review-am-i-human.

Thank you!