Socialist feminists have generally assumed an analogy between women and proletariat , and have urged that women need to develop an analogous true consciousness of their own oppressed condition , in process shedding false consciousness , or male-identified ideologies that serve male, ruling – group interests. Males are given the social approval to openly explore their sexuality and establish a link between their sexual experiences and the conceptualization of the world around them.
Taslima Nasreen has portrayed the same identity of the Muslim girl named Shamina Begum in chapter Day Eleven whose identity of being a prostitute is constructed the moment she meets Suranjan..
Should he kick the girl out of the house ? Naked and shivering with fright, the girl stood by the door. She dared not to ask any questions, since she had been told not to talk.
Not far but in the same chapter get to know about the victimized girls male identity construct wherein she herself does not speak anything in spite of being treated as an animal.
It is really very pathetic wherein Gage presents a lengthy analysis of prostitution and concludes that “Christianity” created the modern brothel…” This is because Christianity presents “ a religious theory which . . . has trained men into a belief that women was but created as a playing for their passions .
According to Marxism, what women lack is the true consciousness. The true class consciousness requires that class members see the world from the perspective of their own true class interests and not from the point of view of the interests of the oppressor class. To absorb uncritically that class’s ideas is to operate in terms of false consciousness . Characteristic in the idea of consciousness is the concept of ideology. Ideology is often used in two distinct ways: one, as a: generic term for the processes by which meaning is produced, challenged, reproduced, and transformed. While a more narrow application is used to imply a false intellectual system rooted in ruling class interests. Other than the economic false class consciousness faced by the women in Lajja form Kironmoyee to Maya or to the girl of the streets Shamina Begum ,they also face the false consciousness of their body. The women in this novel are playing their characters as representing their relation to their male counter-parts . Thus as women experience significant physical events that are different from men’s which begins from menstruation, which every women in the world experience at one or the other time, childbirth and breast feeding. Women’s experience in the domestic sphere may be analyzed in terms of its three primary aspects- Housekeeping, child rearing and economic production for use – which seem to have further contributed to the construction of female epistemology .
Maya becomes a strong feminist character promoting to go beyond the general conduct of expressing her desires.
The alienation of the worker in his product means no only that his labour becomes an object, assumes external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power.(Manuscripts,96)
She very strongly uses the way of alienation, a modern experience altogether of being cut off from oneself, from others and from the sense of meaning. A Newtonian concept of dislocating of subjective and objective, private and public, spiritual and material. The feminist needs to perform small group consciousness raising, with emphasis on the checking and understanding experience and thus connecting personal experiences to identify with their totality.
Beverly Fisher-Manick (1977) cautious that the so-called conscious-raising group may be more congenital form to white upper middle class women than to Third world and working lower class women. This is because the formality of the group discussion process may turn off these black women. Moreover, they may see the concept as pretentious: “Many black women see it as typical for the white people to make a big deal out of something they do (talking) and call it by a fancy name (consciousness –raising) ” (158)
It seems to be nullifying on the fundamental issue inherent in the notion of consciousness-raising . This issue in turn points to a basic paradox that is at the heart of the Marxist notion of consciousness and its relationship to revolutionary change. This is only an attempt of sharing experiences and lead the members to see common denominators in that experience and determine the political reasons for that negative experience, for their familiar oppression. Or another way of resolving the discrepancy is to allow a leadership who somehow itself comes from the equivalent consciousness and help the group to recognize its own interest ,or to formulate those interests for them and to lead them.
Taslima Nasreen once famously took on the 'freedom of choice' school of India's Muslim intelligentsia by writing that "covering a woman's head means covering her brain and ensuring that it doesn't work". She's always argued that whether or not Islam sanctifies the purdah is not the point. Painfully dramatic events over the past week, involving the persecuted Bengali writer and reminding many of the banished painters, illustrate a major threat to peace in the subcontinent - inside and between its impoverished nations. Competing forces of bigotry, whose edicts have condemned both to cruel exiles, can coexist with each other, comfortably so. But they cannot coexist with enduring South Asian peace. Forty – five - year - old writer Taslima Nasreen is being kicked around like a football for a week now within India, where she sought asylum 13 years ago.
The only way out of these consciousness is to reject the patriarch imposed duty of being humble and physically meek.
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