GENDER POLITICS AND SELF-IDENTITY: A FEMINIST COMPARATIVE STUDY OF FAHMIDA RIAZ AND ADRIENNE RICH

Abstract

This research investigates the aspect of gender politics and women’s self-identity through the comparative study of Fahmida Riaz’ collection of Poems Four Walls and a Black Veil and Adrienne Rich’s selected poems. Jacques Derrida’s concept of Binary Oppositions in deconstruction theory is the basic framework to conduct the study under feminist perspective. Since the construction of female gender, issues of women identity and their relevance with opposite male gender have raised many questions. The works of these Eastern and Western poets respectively encounter the universal truth of their subjugation as dependent creature in political and social dogmas where females have been assigned fixed gender roles of motherhood, sexuality and partisanship in undesirable pursuit. This classification of the binary assertions can be challenged and re investigated through various contextual lenses. The problem of gender politics and self-identity has been examined under the feminist perspective against structural binary of male/female as the fundamental viewpoint This research raises questions ;how Fahmida Riaz and Adrienne Rich dismantle their dogmatic beliefs, which tools they practice to reject fixed binary oppositions (bisexuality) and rethink feminism, and how concept of transcendence is deconstructed in Eastern and Western literature through social, cultural and political shifts. This research finds out the real practice of gender politics and women identity in both contexts with dissimilar and also a homogeneous approach of the writers in certain aspects. Keywords: Gender Politics, Self-identity, Binary Oppositions, Feminism, Social Dogma.