''Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.'' By Andrea Dworkin .
Women will remain trapped in age-old patterns of enslavement and they will lose hard won freedoms unless they learn and transmit their history. An important part of that history is the extensive body of feminist theory that has been developed over the centuries. Women remain illiterate without the knowledge of this theory.
One sees a very strong imprint of feminism in Lajja. Nasreen is an outspoken feminist and secularist, and a stern critic of the role of religion in the oppression of women and the poor. Her own experience of sexual abuse during adolescence and her work as a gynecologist marked in writing about the treatment of women in Islam. Humanity is male man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being . Her writing is influenced by two connected elements: her struggle with the Islam of her native culture and her feminist philosophy. She feels closer to Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir for their determined works. Woolf has pointed out that telling the truth about one's experience as a body means “rejecting the ideal, pure image of woman”. It is actually true that when a female entirely rejects her identity constructed by the patriarch, she becomes true to herself. Taslima Nasreen has initiated in her literary work. One feels it difficult to let go the condition and treatment of the female characters in the novel. What Nasrin wanted to point out in her novel is that it is always the women who are at the receiving end, whether it is war or religious fundamentalism. Whether it is Trojan War or Second World War, it is the women who always ended up as destitute. It is this consciousness which belittles her in front of herself. It is as if they are waiting for their male counter parts to think some way out of the situation. The situation still prevails in may parts of the world whether it be east or west. Its also makes us feel ashamed of these varies of feminist wave that came building no epoch-making changes. Lajja - shame for being women in a country which runs on fundamentalist dogma. It lacks development for women and promotes anti-feminist traits. The women under the veil who wants to give away her - Lajja and fight against the dark world of fundamentalism and feminism . Tracking feminist resistance and assertion in the nineteenth century through word and deed, and identifying its crucial connections to the mutations that took place in the early twentieth century which witnessed and facilitated the rise of feminist nationalists, forms the core of this work . Thus, till this date women are facing hardships in the form of religious practices and also in the form of fundamentalist family.
On one hand south east world dependent entirely on the west to tell and articulate on feminism, must not forget that the geographical and cultural boundaries that still exist between us have made our way to look at female freedom from bondages in a particularly different way all together. While stern feminists and stern theoretical replica of feminism have done a meritorious job of deconstructing several age-old binaries that have characterized dominant philosophical and political thinking on gender, what is notable is the continued existence and even application of the dichotomy of the west and ‘the Rest ’ in their discourse. Readers on feminist theories, even if they claim to give ‘multicultural’ or ‘global’ perspectives on women’s studies, are still dominated by stern opinion and arrangement. Feminist perspectives from the global South are included as a mere fascination to the limited or for the references. The proposition is that there is homogeneity or even agreement on what feminism means in these very diverse cultures of the global South. Different geographies and histories are merging until difference is lost and one ‘third world feminism’ becomes exchangeable with another, folding into one theoretical model the multiple struggles of very different women under very different conditions. Thus, Maitryee Chaudhuri rejects claims that feminism in India has been a stern significance. More or less, she says, ideas about women’s civil liberties and gender construction are always argued in Indian subcontinent , but altogether differently. Though there has been a great degree of inconsistency in this theorizing both historically and within different women’s social movements today, one aspect that runs through all the work is the fact that feminism in India has always had to negotiate around and distinguish itself from stern discourses.
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