Gender and Culture

It is a gendered world everywhere. We might talk about gender justice, campaign for it, we have not been able to eradicate the cultural borders, the hierarchical power system in our daily walks of life. Gender is performance. It totally depends on the person or society to assign roles on the self and community. If the individual choice harmonizes with the masses, which is rarely the case, there is no conflict. But generally, the patriarchal system, through regulation and control, curbs the individual choices. At times, the social construct is benevolent to restrict individual eccentricities, but mostly, as cultural histories of nations would unfold, the patriarchy operates as a crushing power system, where “might is right” too. This space in the Caesurae journal, is to discuss the issues of gender with its relevance to culture, subsuming the very subtexts of race, caste, class, religion and the processes of transculturation and transmutation. We look forward to articles based on:

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• Gender and religion

• Gender Activism

• Socio-cultural politics of the “Queer”

• Artistic interventions for foregrounding the voice of the gendered

• Gender and the Nation

• Feminism

• Gender and Performance

• Masculinist discourse

• Intertextualities of Gender discourse in literature

• Gender and popular culture/ mass media

• Gender in “His Story” and Her Stories.

 

This issue of Caesurae Volume 2: Issue2, contains four essays by different scholars. The first essay by Krupa Shah explores through the method and metaphor of translation, a short story Dariyav Dil by the well-known writer Vinodinee Neelkanth, in twentieth century Gandhian Gujarat. Since identity is a temporal construct, Anup Sharma’s essay on Khaled Hosseini’s novel, And the Mountains Echoed, analyses how queering of identity problematizes further the concept of hybridity in the text. Debanjan Mitra’s essay attempts a brief survey of Sita’s agni-pareeksha sequence that resolves and problematizes Sita’s character in Nina Paley’s 2009 Anime film Sita Sings the Blues. The essay on Bharati Mukherjee’s novels by Rajib Bhaumik, discusses the poetics of exile as a trial where and when centres, between essence and metaphysics constantly shift in the changed global condition.

 

Jayita Sengupta

 

Contents

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1.Translation as Elision: Women’s Narratives from Twentieth Century Gujarat- Vinodinee Neelkanth’s  Dariyav Dil (Click Here)

 

2. Queering “Hybrid” identities in Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed (Click Here)

 

3. Recasting new hybrid (sub)-culture: Bharati Mukherjee’s depiction of female subjectivity in diasporic condition (Click Here)

 

4. Thinking on Paley’s Quills: Why should Sita’s give agni-pareeksha? (Click Here)

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