Primarily focusing on such themes as human relationships, desires, passions, sexualities, gender inequalities and empowerment the novelists under discussion voice the age-old silence of the “gendered subalterns”. This trauma discourse makes the muted trauma of South Asian women visible and attempts to create a framework that promotes the healing of trauma. The novels under discussion create a space, a site for contestation of ideologies in an effort to break the silence on gender-based violence by transforming it into a ‘speakable’ subject. This paper seeks to present a new perspective on violence, thus challenging any simplistic and limiting definition of the term that only engage with its physical manifestations.
Tehmina Durrani’s My Feudal …show more content…
It questions the notion of patriarchy, subjugation of a woman’s life to her sexual functions, and the guilt which society induces in her when she demands freedom or thinks of her own emotional needs. The external world seeks to construct notions of femininity, virtue and morality and circumscribe a woman’s role in the society from a male perspective. Choden’s text, thus, situates gender in relation to other intersecting factors that constitute female subjectivity. The female self, in order to emerge in its own right, has first to validate her existence on her own terms, without male protection and support. A woman does not necessarily or automatically grow into a Self. As Beauvoir points out in The Second Sex- “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute- she is the Other” (16). She thus becomes the second sex, the gendered subaltern residing at the periphery in an androcentric culture.The Circle of Karma articulates a woman’s experience of her life in a patriarchal society and her attempt towards finding an identity of her own. The protagonist deconstructs the concept of personhood in order to reconstruct it as inclusive of
Tehmina Durrani’s My Feudal …show more content…
It questions the notion of patriarchy, subjugation of a woman’s life to her sexual functions, and the guilt which society induces in her when she demands freedom or thinks of her own emotional needs. The external world seeks to construct notions of femininity, virtue and morality and circumscribe a woman’s role in the society from a male perspective. Choden’s text, thus, situates gender in relation to other intersecting factors that constitute female subjectivity. The female self, in order to emerge in its own right, has first to validate her existence on her own terms, without male protection and support. A woman does not necessarily or automatically grow into a Self. As Beauvoir points out in The Second Sex- “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute- she is the Other” (16). She thus becomes the second sex, the gendered subaltern residing at the periphery in an androcentric culture.The Circle of Karma articulates a woman’s experience of her life in a patriarchal society and her attempt towards finding an identity of her own. The protagonist deconstructs the concept of personhood in order to reconstruct it as inclusive of