"Interrogating the Language of Feminists in the Context of India and Africa "

Abstract

Feminism has come a long way. Gone are the days when women took out rallies to fight for their suffragist rights. Gone are the days when women demanded for the demonstration of equality in their pay slips. Gone are the days when women writers were bashful to reveal their gender identify and wrote in the guise of a male. Thanks to the surging waves of Feminists movements, the emergence of the "new woman" has turned the tables on the patriarchal world order. In an age of cyber punkism, when the proxemics of the 'private' and the 'public' has been problematised, the 'muscle power' has been contested and wrested by the 'lung power' and 'scribal power' of women's writing and has become a force to reckon with The claims, however, of feminism in its fight for women's liberation are not without limitations. Black feminists Barbara Christian and Alice Walker and Third world feminists Gayatri Chakravarthi Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanfy have articulated their concerns of homogenizing the female subjectivity without contextualizing its cultural constructions. This paper seeks to extend the argument further by looking into the representational politics within the Third World feminist discourses. Also the lingo, 'women's liberation' has become the watchword of feminist's movements across worlds (First, Second, and the Third). Drawing on Jacques Lacan's theoretical insistence that there is no feminine outside language, the ambiguity that clouds the term/language of feminists is subjected to scrutiny all the while highlighting the need for a comprehensive sociological awareness in articulating women's concerns. Therefore this paper purports to interrogate the validation of certain claims of 'feminism' and its complicity with the Lichtung of academia which is increasingly becoming a fetish.