The most prominent point of The Second Sex is to illustrate how women are segregated from society by men, something which happens a lot in Heart of Darkness. De Beauvoir explains to the audience that men and women often do not understand one other and because men hold a higher social status in a patriarchal society, they have made women the ‘Other’ group in society. This is made evident by De Beauvoir’s following quote: “To pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being.” (De Beauvoir 1266). As a consequence of not understanding women, De Beauvoir explains, men use this false sense of mystery as an excuse not to understand women or their problems. In Heart of Darkness the narrator Marlow believes that women live in their own naïve little world and that they should not interfere with the affairs of men, which he states in the following
Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) makes a scathing attack on the imposition of white/Anglo-Saxon standards of beauty on black women and creation of cultural perversion. It presents a critique of the dominant aesthetic that is internalized by majority of the black community, and attempts to deconstruct the meta-ethnicity, which exercises a hegemonic control over the lives of blacks in America. The political connotations of ethnicity are derived from the desire of minority ethnic groups in a multi-ethnic society to resist oppression by the dominant culture. The celebration of a separate identity constitutes its cultural corollary. Thus The Bluest Eye becomes a powerful expression of Toni Morrison’s ethnic cultural feminism which
Judith Butler is an American philosopher and feminist who in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, explore the idea whether we are assigned our gender or do we perform it based on what values we have learnt. She seeks to radically reconceptualize, challenge and help alter our ideas on how we understand gender and sex. She starts off by saying that existing feminist movement are limited in how they define gender. She says that this definition is outdated but still reflected by the world’s treatment of gender as a set of binary categories, this means that when we are born we are distinctively placed into one of the two categories i.e. male of female and these categories define how we behave.
ABSTRACT: The study tends to depict how Eliot treated women as mere second sex in his poetry. It further explores Eliot’s misogynic, female-hater temperament and the reasons behind this abhorrence against women. The subjugation of women, throughout centuries, from ancient to present time has been done by male in patriarchal society. Eliot in his poetry, through the allusions of myth, history, religion, literature and philosophy not only narrates the degenerated state of women but also contributes to it by his fun, ridicule and satire of women. Instead of breaking the notion of patriarchy, Eliot becomes a torch-bearer of patriarchy and contributes to perpetuate the process subjugation of women by strengthening the mechanisms of women subordination.
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993) works are fundamental texts of study for this thesis. Both works are deeply influenced specially by French structuralism and post-structuralism schools of thought. In Gender Trouble, Butler deconstructs the established, normative, Western construction of the Gay/Straight and hetero/homosexual binaries to discuss the lack of perspective regarding the heterogeneity of sexual identity and diversity as it is present in twentieth century society. Her arguments focus not only on the production of binaries and their rigidity from a sociological standpoint, but also on how the use of these binary structures can affect us in processes of sexual identity construction because of interpretations and constraints coming from various fields such as: the economic, the philosophical, the medical and the psychological and the use of language. Butler focuses repeatedly on the production of language.
Chauvinism and Feminism in Handmaid’s tale Introduction This paper explores the relations between patriarchy and class in the context of a dystopian society which is very well depicted by Attwood. In this sense, how patriarchy is used against women. Debates appeared when society acquired language and now a days is still a hot debate. Radical, feminists point men as the 'main enemy’ and they say that, patriarchy is considered as a form of domination imposed by men on women. Feminists are dealing with how to understand the relations between patriarchy and how to confront, oppose male chauvinism in the ruling class.
Prescriptive as in, how men and women should behave, like agentic attributes are prescribed for men, while communal attributes are prescribed for women. Proscriptive as in, how men and women should not behave, like dominant "masculine" traits are proscribed for women and submissive "feminine" traits are proscribed for men. These societal expectations and roles may differ from culture to culture. However, it has been commonly identified that, to an extent, inequality prevails within work places based on the gender of the individual. Some of the common stereotypes that are often associated with women are negative, such as, they are considered to be individuals, who are incapable of taking quick decisions, who lack logical thinking and as someone who is sensitive and incapable of handling pressure and stress.
The researchers described two different barriers, difference barrier and societal barriers. First, the difference barrier is discrimination based upon bias or prejudice. Women are thought to be followers while men are thought to lead. Social role theory defines women as incapable of maintaining control and influence the way men can. Also, supply barrier defines an unfair advantage that men have over women regarding
According to vijay kumar Mehta,” Manju Kapur, the radical feminist, truly presents the hidden intricacies of women psyche in her novels. Her protagonists make an effort to dismantle the gender polarization up to a great extent Gender polarization is a concept that what is feminine cannot be masculine and what is masculine cannot be feminine. It is expected of men and women to display stereotypic gender roles. It utilizes the differences between the two groups of male and female to designate particular characteristics to group members of one group and not the other. Sandra Bem describes “the relationship between men and women as a division of social responsibilities.
against the traditional position of women in Indian society and they try to find their own way on their own choice. His plays mock the unjust values of the patriarchal society which does not care for the feelings of a woman and considers her a subhuman who exists only to serve him with absolute loyalty. Call it Hayavadana, Nagamandala or The Fire and Rain --- these elements are all there to serve the purpose of the dramatist. Exploitation and oppression of women have become a recognized culture of male chauvinism. So, his plays represent the junction point at which women are characterized as enlightened and emancipated with the power of resistance who struggle to overcome the male dominance.