Abstract
The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the masculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman’s entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies her inevitable confinement to passivity. This essay aims to examine the sexual politics of metaphors of vision in a literary text that is controversially argued to be a voice for the subordinated Indian immigrant women in the US. As one of the most influential schools of thought in Western philosophy, the Sartrean paradigm of sexual difference is employed to investigate this allegation by identifying the latent binary system at work in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, who has garnered substantial yet controversial critical attention over her representations of gender. Specifically, this essay focuses on Lahiri’s prefatory story to her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (2000), to unravel the manner her exercise of vision in this narrative perpetuates the dichotomies of a male subject and a female object pre-established in the traditional hierarchies of gender in the West. In this story, Lahiri (un)wittingly privileges masculinity over femininity and reduces the latter to a typically disgusting Sartrean female body of holes and slime. Hence, notwithstanding infrequent emasculated images of the male subject, it is ultimately the masculine that, in the battle of looks between male and female, nihilates the Other to the state of “being-in-itself” and enjoys supremacy over the feminine. DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2016-1602-08
Highlights
The gaze matters; looking and being looked at, together construct hierarchies of power, “the premise of the politics of identity” (Sen, 2007, p. 151)
In Sartrean ontology, in a similar vein to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the woman becomes the object, the body, whereas the masculine is granted the power of asserting his nihilating look at the feminine as the passive object
The dyad of seeing and being seen, taken as the two fundamental modes of being in relation to the concept of the Other falls into what Storr describes as a “classic heterosexual division of labor between masculine and feminine cast along the lines of the mind-body split by Sartre's characterization of being-in-itself as essentially feminine” (p. 100)
Summary
The gaze matters; looking and being looked at, together construct hierarchies of power, “the premise of the politics of identity” (Sen, 2007, p. 151). We argue that the mode of vision in Lahiri’s narrative fails to decenter the traditionally imposed sexist hierarchies and cannot be ISSN: 1675-8021 considered a voice for Indian women in particular, and the woman in general, but it enables and enacts the construction of the dichotomy of the male subject and the female object as it exists in the traditional gender hierarchies of the West. Unless one appreciates the Sartrean articulations of sexist-norms, crucial in the formulation of the dichotomies of active-passive, subject-object, and feminine-masculine, ISSN: 1675-8021 one would not be able to identify the hierarchical gender relations produced in the battle of looks between Lahiri’s male and female characters. The triumph of the point of view of the Other over the point of view of the subject is toward him-/herself is “death” (Sartre, 1992, p. 540)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
