Gender Trouble in Literature
SUBMITTED FOR
Higher Education and Research Society
PREPARED BY
Budhiditya Shankar Das
Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Bhavnagar, Gujarat
Abstract
“I myself
have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that
people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me
from a doormat or a prostitute.” (West, 1913)
Research
means careful investigation or inquiry especially through search of new facts
in any branch of knowledge. Gender trouble feminism and the subversion of
identity is a book of society which argues that gender is a kind of improvised
performance. The work is influential in feminism, women’s studies, lesbian and
gay studies.
Keywords-
Gender trouble, Feminism, Literature.
Introduction-
“I myself have
never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people
call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a
doormat or a prostitute.” (West, 1913)
Research means
careful investigation or inquiry especially through search of new facts in any branch
of knowledge. Gender trouble feminism and the subversion of identity is a book
of society which argues that gender is a kind of improvised performance. The
work is influential in feminism, women’s studies, lesbian and gay studies.
Objective
The
objective of this paper is to highlight the difference between the male and
female of the present and past times in and outside India. Another objective is
to highlight the problems of the feminine gender which they are still facing in
today’s world. The paper also highlights that women are not only facing
problems inside the confined walls but they are also facing problems outside
the confined walls instead of the ample rights given to them.
What
is Literature?
Literature
in its broadest sense is any single body of written works. It’s Latin root
literature /litteratura (derived itself from littera; letter or handwriting)
was used to refer to all written accounts, though contemporary definitions
extend the term to include texts that are spoken or sung (oral literature). Literature
can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and whether
it is poetry or prose; it can be further distinguished according to major forms
such as the novel, short story or drama; and works are often categorized
according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features
or expectations (genre). Simon and Ryan begin their attempt to answer the
question “What is Literature?” with the observation: “The quest to discover a
definition for “Literature” is a rod that is much travelled, though the point
of arrival, if ever reached, is seldom satisfactory. Most attempted definitions
are broad and vague, and they inevitably change over time. In fact, the only
thing that is certain about defining Literature is that the definition will
change. Concepts of what is Literature change over time as well”. Definitions
of Literature have varied over time; it is a “culturally relative definition”.
(Wikepedia)Gender Trouble in
Literature
What
is Gender Literature?
A
gender study is a field for interdisciplinary study devoted to gender identity
and gendered representation as central categories of analysis. This field
includes women’s studies (concerning women, feminism, gender and politics), men’s
studies and queer studies. Regarding gender Simon de Beauvoir said: “one is not
a born woman, one becomes one”. This view proposes that in gender studies, the
term “gender” should be used to refer to the social and cultural constructions
of masculinities and feminities and not to the state of being male or female in
its entirety. Gender is pertinent to many disciplines such as-literary theory,
drama studies, film theory, performance theory, contemporary art history,
anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics and psychology. Each field came to
regard “gender” as a practice, sometimes referred to as something that is
performative. (wikipedia)
Feminist
Activists:
Malala
Yousafzai- She is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest
ever Nobel Prize laureate. She is mainly known for human rights advocacy for
education and for women in her native Swat Valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
province of Northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban at times banned girls
from attending school. Yousafzai’s advocacy was grown into an international movement.
She fights for the rights for women as well as for the children.
The
famous autobiography “I Am Malala”- Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb was to
take a stand and raise Malala‟s voice on behalf of the millions of girls around
the world who are being denied their right to go to school and realise
potential. My mission, our mission, demands that we act decisively to educate
girls and empower them to change their lives and communities. It was when a group
of teenage girls and teachers who were chafting from a bus ride from their
school. The midterm final had just started and in their joy the girl started
singing a national song. As the school bus drove along the country road and
approached the town of Mingora, two men halted the bus and then suddenly
entered the vehicle one of them pulled out a girl and asked which one of you is
Malala? None of the girls spoke some out of loyalty and others out of fear and
unintentionally their eyes turned to Malala, that’s how the gunmen knew she was
the target and at point length range fired four shots at Malala. Here Malala
continues her story and tells about her recovery and her rise as a global
symbol of peaceful resistance. Later on we read how her land is taken over by
Taliban and how life changed during their rule. For example- any girl who was
over the age of ten was banned from going to school. So, Malala and her
classmates had to pretend of being under the restriction age, when going to
school they had to hide their pen and books underneath their clothes. According
to Taliban doctrine local men were forced to grow beards and women were not
allowed to laugh out loudly or even white coloured shoes because for some
reasons white shoes were male privileges. The televisions were also banned only
the Taliban radio station Mullah was allowed. People were told what to eat,
wear, how to behave and think. The Talibans enforced a totalitarian fact of
state. Every day is a struggle for the local people. The lack of education for
girls is especially alarming, the thing is to “educate a man is to educate an
individual but educating a girl is educating a generation”. In this book in the
words of Malala is a war for education, a war for reform and it‟s a matter of
life and death. Malala explains how proper education can reform her country. By
the quotes of Malala we see the story of each and every girl:
“I
tell my story, not because it is unique, but because it is not. It is the story
of many girls”.
“Extremists
have shown what frightens them most: a girl with a book.” (Yousafzai, 2013)
Angela
Yvonne Davis- She is an American political activist, academic scholar and
author. Her research interests are feminism, African-American studies, critical
theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and
history of punishment and prisons. She grew up surrounded by communist
organizers and thinkers who significantly influenced her intellectual development.
The
famous book of Angela Yvonne Davis “Colors of Violence against Women”-she
states violence is one of those words that is a powerful ideological conductor
one who’s meaning constantly mutates. Many of us now take for granted that
misogynist violence is a legitimate political issues, but let us remember that
little more than two decades ago, most people considered domestic violence to
be a private concern and thus not a proper subject of public discourse or
political intervention. Only one generation separates us from that era of
silence. The first speak out against rape occurred in the early 1970’s and the
first national organisation against domestic violence was founded toward the
end of that decade. We have since come to recognise the epidemic proportions of
violence within intimate relationships and the pervasiveness of date and
acquaintance rape as well as violence within and against same sex intimacy. One
of the major question arises is how to develop analysis that furthers neither
the conservative of sequestering millions of men of colour in accordance with
the contemporary dictates of globalized capital and its prison industrial
complex nor the equally conservative project of abandoning poor women of color
to a continuum of violence that extends from the sweatshops through the
prisons, to shelters and into bedrooms at home. The argument that sexual and
domestic violence sometimes leads to a hierarchical notion that genital
mutilation Africa and Sati, or wife burning in India are the most dreadful and
extreme forms of the same violence against women which can be discovered in
less appalling manifestations in Western cultures. As Kimberle Crenshaw
germinal study on violence against women suggest the situation of Native
American women shows that we must also include within our analytical framework
the persisting colonial domination of indigenous nations and national within
and outside presumed territorial boundaries of the U.S. (Wikipedia)
Suchitra
Bhattacharya- In the mid eighties that she took to novel from short stories.
With the publication of the Kacher Dewal she became one of the prominent
writers of Bengal. Her writings basically revolve around social issues. She
writes mainly on the crisis of all human relationships and the changing values
of the present era which involves degeneration of honesty and morality. Being a
woman writer she portrays the sufferings of woman from all classes of life and
society, although she is not a feminist.
The famous book of Suchitra
Bhattacharya “Dahan”- This is a story of a middle class young woman named
Romita Chowdhury. In the first letter to her elder sister who stays in Canada
she says that she is in love with her new home, her in laws. The arranged
marriage has ensured that the couple didn’t know each other well. The incident
which shakes up the easy and quiet rhythm of her post marital romance, takes
place when she and her husband Palash go on a shopping trip and are caught without
transport in an evening shower outside the metro station near their house.
While Palash is across the road buying cigarettes a group of men started
harassing Romita and finally assaults her. When Palash comes to save his wife,
the men beats him up severely and tries to carry Romita with them. No one came
to her rescue but only one woman Srobona Sarkar a school teacher comes to her rescue.
The men were thrown off their balance due to the persistent trial of both
Romita and Srobona and they both finally escaped. Srobona was to be facilitated
for her act of bravery whereas on the other hand, Romita was seen as a
housewife being molested by several men. Even when Romita recovered from the
trauma Palash was questioned many ill things about Romita. Romita was
constantly supported by her sister-in-law. Srobona was also not allowed to
support Romita because it was a matter of prestige for her in-laws and her
husband. Romita writes in long letters to her sister briefly contemplating
divorce after Palash beats up and rapes her, all the while taunting her about
her metro station lovers. Everything got confined for Romita after the
incident. Both women at the end seem to find a modicum of freedom by being on
the road being between spaces-travelling from one impossible shelter to another
which also perhaps does not exist. Romita does not break up her marriage
legally but decides instead to travel to her sister in Canada. Her future is
indefinite-perhaps she will find a job, perhaps take up a course, perhaps she
will stay, perhaps come back. She is no longer so concerned, she writes about
whether her marriage formally remains or is ended, but asserts nonetheless her
desired to be freed from confinement. In a sense she denies a possible legal
solution to her problem, perhaps having realised the limitations of legality to
give freedom and dignity to a women in a world where she continues to remain half
a human being – infantilised, powerless, and silenced by the very relationship
that she holds dearest. Srobona too struggles with herself but finally agrees
to marry Tunir in spite of her utter disillusionment. Her loss of respect and trust.
The book seems to argue that love survives the death of these emotions and
because there is nowhere else to go, perhaps to stay is as good as solution.
Romita‟s voice reads from her letter, as Srobona walks out from the old age
home; “We are all inevitably alone. Then why disturb these relationships as
they are? Let them be. Perhaps it is enough not to depend on them any longer”.
(Wikepedia)
How
Literature represents Gender Trouble?
In
Literature gender trouble is depicted in many ways. In the past in earlier Asia
and Africa there women also faced gender problem. During Renaissance women were
given freedom to wear according to their wish, they were allowed to party, sing
and dance but in confined walls. In that age men were only given rights to
express their views through writing. But when women thought of doing so they
were denied, so writers among the women folk had to use different male
pseudonyms- Mary Ann Evans as George Eliot and many other like her. The fight
for women’s right remained crucial and was articulated in powerful slogans such
as equal pay for equal work. This type of liberal “equality feminism” is best
associated with the pioneering American feminist Betty Freidan whose works expressed
the frustration and psychological distress of 1950‟s housewives in America and
labelled their secret sufferings the “problem with no name”. The Second Sex
argued that there was no such thing as “feminine nature”. There was no physical
or psychological reason why women should be inferior to men, and yet,
throughout history and across cultures, women had always been second class citizens.
Even when worshipped and adored, they have had no autonomy and received no
recognition as rational individuals, any more then when they have been abused
and denigrated. Biological differences do not provide a casual explanation for
women’s oppression; however their reproductive function has placed women at a
disadvantage trying them to the domestic sphere and associating them with the
body and thus with animals and nature. Just as man considers himself superior
to nature, so he considers himself to be superior to woman. Asking why women
have allowed men to subordinate them (existentialist philosophy emphasizes
self-determination) brought de Beauvoir back to the body and motherhood.
Excluded from the public sphere women fail to form the alliances made by men in
war and government and business, and form instead male-female bonds that
destroy the potential female group identity that could position man as the
other to women’s self. For de Beauvoir marriage is an oppressive and
exploitative arrangement, which reinforces sexual inequality and binds women to
domesticity. It perpetuates the belief that if the female is protected and
provided for by her male partner, she is happy; she is thought to be content
that her needs are provided for de Beauvoir however related this belief.
Introducing the concepts of „transcendence‟ and „immanence‟, she argued that
the fulfilment of human potential must be judged not in terms of happiness but
in terms of liberty. Liberty is something attaining more than one’s existence
peacefully and comfortably; to be free, a person must transcend his or her life
–the temporary and unthinking happiness that comes from being warm and well
fed- and pursue the uniquely human desire to know more, do more, have more. The
male we are led to believe, is transcendent: his work and invention will shape
the world for future generations, thereby affording him a form of immortality.
The female, however, is immanent: through motherhood she produces the next
generation in a purely animal way, and does not affect the future. She is excluded
from the pursuit of knowledge; her liberty is limited and defined and granted
her by someone else and as such, is no liberty at all. For de Beauvoir, the key
to female emancipation lay in women’s release from her bodily identification.
De Beauvoir believed that women’s reproductive cycle and typically lesser
physical strength have worked to entrap her within the imminent, whilst men has
been free to transcend the purely biological through the philosophy, art and
science all of which differentiate him from the other animals. Feminist
literary criticism was born of the debates of second wave feminism. Feminists
brought to literature a suspicion of literary ideas which made their approach truly
revolutionary. They were interested in literature as a means of creating and
perpetuating belief systems. Before 1970‟s the established cannon of great
works‟ was male authored, with a few exceptions such as Jane Austen, George
Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte. Up to this point, the field of literature like the
whole of culture had been considered gender-neutral. Whilst second wave
feminists were working through their disagreements a growing voice of dissents
could be heard coming from number of different directions. Increasingly black,
lesbian and working class women were protesting that the seemingly universal
voice of feminism did not represent their views or their lives. Some feminists
had been guilty in ignoring their issues. Black women protested at the common
division between race and gender in feminist discourse and argued instead that
two categories were inseparable. For black women all oppression was not
reducible to sexual difference and there was more than one identity battle to
fight. As well as being accused of racism, feminism came under attack for „homophobia‟
or at least for “heterosexism” – the presumption of a heterosexual norm. Taking
its cue from use of the terms Black and Third World War, lesbian criticism
began by questioning the politics of defining oneself as a lesbian. As the
politics of sexuality were further explored the definitions of lesbian and
lesbian writing began to expand. Following for example- Daly’s inclusive idea
of the „lesbian in all women‟, a novel such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
Herland an all female (non sexual) utopia could be seen to overlap to lesbian
identity. In today’s times we all say that Sati system (Pratha) has been
eradicated from our Indian society but is it really so, I say no because in
some developed society and states still new born brides are being burnt live by
their in-laws in the name of
“Dowry”;
can’t this act be called as Sati? In the book My Name is Malala, there Malala
raises her voice for the education of girls but the sadistic part is that
parents sent their girls to school mainly not for education but for having meal
in the Mid-day meal programme if this continues no one can educate a girl.
(Tolan, 2006)
Conclusion
In
present day’s society though many feminist writers have tried much to raise the
issues of the women folk but then also in many places we can see that women
folk are being victimised in one way or the other. In some of the religious
places also she is denied to enter till today, but for why, is it only because
they are women or has God said that „No‟ women should come to my temple to
worship me; so why and who are we to make rules differently for the women folk.
Can we proudly say that we are giving all the rights to the women folk, are we
truly worried for the welfare and empowerment of the women folk? I don’t think
we all can give a appropriate answer to this because we all at the back of our
mind know that till date women folk are being subjugated and being confined in
between four walls. Government is providing with employment but how many of the
women folk are being employed. Though child marriage has been eradicated from
our society but is it so because girls after attaining the age of eighteen
immediately gets married, though she is eighteen (18) years old and is legally
eligible for marriage but biologically she is not ready; isn’t it is indirectly
child marriage? Feminists are trying their best to uplift the women folk and
upto some extent it’s been successful in the upper classes and in urban area
but in the rural and lower classes till the old patriarchal society reflects why
so, it’s just because for we the people; now again a question arises how?” the
answer is though we say untouchability is eradicated but I will say it’s not been
eradicated in true sense because when the question of going to any villages
arises then we the literate people from urban area start giving ample of
reasons for not going there; if we will not go there then how will the feminist
get helping hands to help the subjugated rural women folk to overcome their
nightmares?
Works
Cited:
Tolan,
F. (2006). Literary Theory and Criticism. Patricia Waugh.
West,
R. (1913, 11 14). Mr. Chesterton in Hysterics.
Wikepedia.
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature
Wikepedia.
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchitra_Bhattacharya
wikipedia.
(n.d.). Retrieved from A gender study is a field for interdisciplinary study
devoted to gender
identity
and gendered representation as central categories of analysis. This field
includes women‟s
studies
(concerning women, feminism, gender and politics), men‟s studies and queer
Wikipedia.
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis
Yousafzai,
M. (2013). I am Malala. Great Britain: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
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