Women Protagonists Research Articles

The Subaltern Women Protagonists Depicted in Historical Sinhala Novels (With Special Focus on Women Authored Texts)

A unique feature inherent to contemporary Sinhala Women Novelists is their fascination with History. Consequently, a trend of writing historical novels based on the period of the Kandyan Kingdom and the British Colonial era has emerged. The mainstream women novelists of the new millennium focused mainly on subaltern women protagonists, the representatives of a voice-less class who live on the periphery of the nation-state. Hence, these texts conceptualise reality through the voice and experience of an underprivileged subaltern class and gender. Further, they operate within the paradigms of subaltern histories, privileging subaltern subjectivities that question and challenge the identities the elite ruling groups bestowed upon them. The woman Novelists Shrewdly reveal the hidden text of the nation in their oeuvre. Accordingly, these literary texts can be found in the context of subaltern histories. This research is intended to analyse the roles of women protagonists that give rise to issues concerning gender, social stratification, and cultural hegemony. How women Novelists were inspired and conditioned by historical and sociological sources for depicting convincing characters was examined, and an attempt was made to capture the continuing interaction among author, text and History. With a view to grasping the uniqueness of Sinhala women Novelists, creative dexterity in reconstructing the historical sources and perceiving the metamorphosis that has taken place, their Novels were compared with mainstream South Asian Women Authorised texts. It was revealed that interdisciplinary studies across customary subject divisions, including History and cultural anthropology, have a significant impact, influence and conditioning over the subaltern protagonists and their quest toward self-identity.

ЧУЖИНКА: ПРОЄКЦІЯ АЛІЄНОВАНОЇ ЖІНОЧОЇ ОСОБИСТОСТІ В МАЛІЙ ПРОЗІ ДЖИН РІС

The present study examines the prose texts written by Jean Rhys (1890–1979), a British woman writer of modernist literature. It is based on the perusal of several short stories, among others: “In the Rue de l’Arrivée”, “A Night”, “La Grosse Fifi ”; “Outside the Machine”, “The Lotus”, “Till September, Petronella”, and “Let Them Call It Jazz” which were included in two collections of her fi ction – “The Left Bank and Other Stories” (1927) and “Tigers are Better-Looking” (1968). The purpose of the paper is to analyze the author’s concept of lonely, alienated, vulnerable and defenseless female individuals which forms the core of her artistic imagination. The scientifi c research uses gynocritics as its methodological background. According to the theory of its critic E. Showalter, it was possible to identify four models of woman writing having been realized in Jean Rhys’s short prose: a) psychoanalytic; b) biological; c) linguistic and d) cultural. The psychoanalytic model of Rhys’s fi ction is viewed in the context of both the emotional and conscious worlds of an alienated female identity. The woman protagonist being rejected by a hostile society, becomes a stranger and outcast. The feelings of deep loneliness, pain, fear, and loss, intertwined with the death wish and with resistance, determine the constants of female existence. An important aspect of woman personality is the dimension of female friendship and solidarity. The biological model of short prose by J. Rhys is explored through the concept of female corporeality. The corporeal vulnerability of women protagonists is shown as a form of the fragility of their inner world. An unattractive woman image created by the author manifests the psychological uncertainty and brittleness of female characters. And a metaphor of the looking glass as a refl ection of their appearance reveals the concept of the female Self as a loss which varies from the loss of a woman’s youth to the loss of feminine identity or its splitting. The linguistic model of Rhys’s short stories testifi es to the bipolar artistic world of the writer, which is demonstrated at the confrontation between French and British cultures with the signs of laconism, subtext, and silence as the main features of her writing manner. Meanwhile, the cultural model of J. Rhys’s prose is read through the prism of the intertextual discourse of literature, music and painting. Key words: loneliness, fear, suff ering, alienation, hostility, corporeality, vulnerability.

From the desk of the Editor-in-Chief: Introduction to the Black Theatre Review, <em>Nurturing</em>

In this issue, Vol. 3.1., we invite readers to explore the collective body of Black and African Diasporic theatre history, dramatic literature, performance and production, multimedia media, artistic leadership, pedagogy, and praxis for elements of nurturing that center Black female and femme experiences. For this issue, nurturing is defined as the acts, rituals, and strategies of care that enhance one’s inner power and enable them to flow toward joy and vitality. Black women scholars, artists, and administrators often teach, conduct research and creative scholarship, govern, build, and nurture within institutional systems in the face of lack and their peril. Collectively, the entries featured in this issue attempt to move Black women—protagonists, playwrights, contemporary icons—from the margins to the center. Black Feminist and Afro-indigenous acts, rituals, and strategies of care are explicit and remind readers that love can be found everywhere. In all circumstances, a real revolution occurs within.

(Im)Possibilities of Development: Women and the Paradox of Growth in the Malaysian Novel

Abstract: Though women figure prominently in the discourses of postcolonial nations that concern development, these discourses position women in a way that vacillates between tradition, which needs to be preserved, and modernization, essential for "catching up" to the developed or so-called first world. This article approaches the ambivalence surrounding the question of women and development through the lens of literature. It turns to two turn-of-the-century novels, Chuah Guat Eng's Echoes of Silence (1994) and Yang-May Ooi's The Flame Tree (1998), to problematize the depiction of the "Third World" woman and development in colonial and postcolonial Malaysia. The article explores the coloniality embedded within narratives of growth of the women protagonists against the backdrop of the developing nation—and highlights when the conditions for women underwent far-reaching changes, for instance, at the end of colonial rule, when women became a part of an independent social and political nation, and persistent structures of marginalization and discrimination resulted in decreased opportunities for women. The article's focus on Malaysian Chinese writers foregrounds the colonial constructions of race and gender that Malaysia inherited from the colonizers, which continues to shape the lives of postcolonial subjects. The two novels provide a glimpse of the problems underlying the developmental agendas in postcolonial nations and call for a shift in the understanding of development—from a prescriptive sense of "how it should be for the third-world women" to a consideration of national and global frameworks of development that limit the choices and agency of women.

Towards inclusivity: Dalit women’s representation in contemporary Telugu cinescapes

Cinema acts as a cultural product, a medium of expression and a source of popular entertainment; usually it appears to conscientiously genuflect to upper-caste dictums. Since its inception, Telugu cinema, or Tollywood, the third-largest film industry in India, has produced various caste-based films like Gudavalli Ramabrahmam’s Malapilla (1938), Kasinadhuni Vishwanath’s Kalam Marindhi (1972) and K. Balachander’s Rudraveena (1988), amongst others. In the discourse surrounding caste, the ‘Dalit woman question’ and its representation is either consciously ignored or erased, and thus, it stands enfolded in upper-caste reformist politics. This article analyses the representation of Dalit women in select Telugu films produced at significant sociopolitical junctures of contemporary times. These films mark a significant departure from the stereotypical representation of Dalit women as submissive and portray them as women with voices. Within the larger framework of feminist activism and human rights discourse, we see Dalit women protagonists in these films with an agentic space of their own. In the Indian context, where equality and no discrimination are constitutional rights, the films under discussion, Srikanth Addala’s Narappa (2021) and Sekhar Kammula’s Love Story (2021), are an appropriate intervention to showcase the inclusivity of Dalit women in the larger scheme of Indian feminism. This study employs critical textual and frame analysis to read selected Telugu films as cultural texts with Dalit feminist consciousness embedded within them.

Examining identity crisis in Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days

An identity crisis, a term devised by Erik Erikson, is a phase of rigorous study of different means of looking at oneself. Modern Indian English writers have been in the pursuit to restore order and meaning in their lives, especially the women. Women writers have presented their women protagonists as the one who are taking control of their lives, eventually, with or without the support of their family. Samina Ali is one such writer, who explores the identity of her characters in a Muslim community. The novel, Madras on Rainy Days determines the identity of a contemporary Muslim woman protagonist, Layla who is torn between her liberated life in the USA versus her controlling life in India. She faces several difficulties as she cannot be her independent self. She’s forcefully married to Sameer, whose real identity is revealed later by the end of the story. In search of her own home and identity, Layla chooses to stay in India as a brave and enlightened single woman rather than moving out to free America with her gay husband. This paper tends to discover in the text that how a character deals with the fluctuating notion of identity, by breaking free from the shackles of the dominating society. Keywords: Examination, Identity, Women, Self-expression, Modernization, Liberation

Gender (im)balance in the Russian cinema: on the screen and behind the camera

The relationship between on-screen and off-screen inequality in film industries and the relative impact of these on movie attendance is widely discussed but not necessarily empirically demonstrated. This article examines the binary gender composition of film project teams and the gendered representation of film characters as factors for cinema attendance. We collected a unique dataset (N=1285) of all films released during the pre-pandemic decade (2008-2019) in Russia – at that time the largest European cinema market. A marked-up subset of 243 films was used to calculate a novel version of the Bechdel-Wallace test that accounts for the proportion of all non-stereotypical dialogues in the film narration, as opposed to the classical binary test. Our test proves very informative, revealing a strikingly high proportion of dialogues with stereotypical portrayals of women even among the films that pass the Bechdel-Wallace binary threshold. We also undertook a social network analysis (SNA) of the characters’ communications. This analysis demonstrate that women predominantly occupy a peripheral position in film plots. Both stereotyping and marginalization of women are positively related to the proportion of men in the film crew, especially in the role of screenwriter. Simultaneously, having more men in key positions is also correlated with access to larger budgets and better distribution, thus effectively impeding films with stronger women characters from wider audiences. These audiences, however, show no prejudice towards films with such characters: after 2015, films featuring central women protagonists have the same level of attendance as movies without them. Although Russia exemplifies a large non-Western cinema market, the trends we identify, particularly the “gatekeeping” effect of male filmmakers, is notably in line with those observed in Western democracies.

Feminist analysis of Rupa Bajwa’s: The sari shop

An analysis of the ‘The Sari Shop’ by Rupa Bajwa using Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Theory of women and economics has been attempted. The Researcher has analyzed the different ways and circumstances through which the women protagonists were made to leave productive modes of employment to take up reproductive employment and the benefits offered to them, the consequences and the intermingling of both capitalism and patriarchy to keep those women under subjugation along with the consequences of the rebellion lead by the protagonists which differed according to their class, family and educational background.

Times They Are A-Changin’? Evolving Representations of Women in the Assassin's Creed Franchise

This study analyzes representations of women—protagonists and NPCs—in Assassińs Creed games between 2007 and 2024, to explore the impact of the last decades’ work for gender rights on the English language AAA game industry. Through close playing, we explore game bodies with attention to the surface level of narrative, graphics, sound, and underlying mechanics of actions and reactions. Through netnography, we add promotional material, retail sites, and social movements of importance to the analysis. Results show four eras for female protagonists: nonexistent, protagonists in side games, defined by their male coprotagonists, and choose your gender. Over the 17 years studied, women are more present, and NPCs are more complex. Though female protagonists remain sidelined or shallow representations as female skins on male characters. We discuss how discrepancies and conflicts between artistic visions, marketing, and brand choices impact how women are represented, and the impact on representation by external cultural events, for example Gamergate/Metoo, during this period.

Ascendancy of Mass Media in Achieving Gender Equality

For centuries, marginalisation has affected the niches and nooks of the world on a different level. Identities like caste, creed, religion, language, race and gender have been practiced with a hierarchy and hegemony. Women are one of the largest marginalized communities along with LGBTQIA+. OTT platform plays a crucial role in displaying voices from the margins in order to showcase socio-cultural inequality and inhumanity. The present paper deals with the Indian patriarchal mindset that refuses to accept women as a major contributor and creator of society. Accepting all weak gender identities as a part of the main stream is almost like mission impossible. Desmond Tutu’s ‘rainbow colour society’ is a far reaching-goal in India. Thanks to social media of the 21st century for transmitting these minority voices to the public’s attention and awareness. The media of the 21st century has aided a lot in conditioning society’s mindset into accepting an egalitarian society. The present paper deals with marginalized married Indian women’s voices from a film called The Great Indian Kitchen on OTT and a television series based on Manju Kapoor’s novel Married Woman and Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, Namesake. The house wives have been portrayed as searching for identities and are rebellious against the stereotypical roles. The issues of identities of the women protagonists have been powerfully depicted through these channels. The research is based upon qualitative and quantitative data analysis with statistical evidence wherever necessary. The paper is divided into four parts, namely the role of media in the 21st century, issues of identities as a theoretical background, application of the identity issues of Ashima , protagonist of book , Namesake Nimisha, the protagonist, in the film The Great Indian Kitchen and in the tele-series The Married Woman and last but not the least conclusions. This is a study and critique to highlight how the media aids in re-conceptualization of societal norms and traditions for the queer and female community to gain their self-esteem and dignity with special reference to GEM (Gender Empowerment Measure).

Intersections between Science and Social Justice: A Conversation with Liza Finkel

In preparation for the special issue: Cascading Crises: Power, Equity and Liberation, the Editors of NWJTE sat down for a conversation with Dr. Liza Finkel, a Science Teacher Educator in the Graduate School of Education and Counseling at Lewis & Clark College. Dr. Finkel’s passions include science (especially geology), finding intersections between science and social justice and helping new teachers learn to include those connections in their teaching, knitting, cooking, birding, and reading mystery novels with women protagonists.

Angry women in horror: Challenging traditional notions of femininity

One of the major contributions to popular culture by feminist movements has been that of the figure of the angry woman in horror cinema. Although the expression of female rage challenges traditional notions of femininity and disassociates strength and power from masculinity, it also makes women to be portrayed as perverse and monstrous. With this videographic essay, I want, on the one hand, to show how the rage of women protagonists in horror has nevertheless recently been depicted as the complex emotion it is. On the other hand, this video essay proposes to emphasize the idea of rage as a site of political resistance that can be channelled into a productive form of social change and justice. To this end, I focus on a scene from Midsommar (Aster, 2019) in which a group of women reflect the protagonist’s emotions of rage and pain as a form of healing. Their cries connect to those of the women who in 1984 protested nuclear weapons in Greenham (England), weaponizing traditional notions of femininity to denounce an environmental injustice.

Home: Depiction Of Social Reality In Manju Kapur’s Novel

The portrayal of women in Indian English fiction as the silent sufferers and upholders of the tradition and traditional values of family and society has undergone tremendous change in the post independence period. Manju Kapur’s novel, Difficult Daughters, A Married Woman and Home, displays a new confidence in using the fictional mode for creative expression and depicting social reality. Taking into account the complexity of life, different histories, cultures and different structures of values, women’s question, despite basic solidarity, needs to be tackled in relation to the socio-cultural situation. The impact of patriarchy on the Indian society varies from the one in the west. Manju Kapur has her own concerns, priorities as well as her own ways on dealing with the predicament of women protagonists. Kapur, being one of the modern day women authors, has expressed herself freely and boldly on a variety of themes without adopting feminist postures. Her novels furnish examples of a whole range of attitudes towards the importation of Indian tradition. However, the novelist seems to be aware of the fact that the women of India have indeed achieved their success in sixty years of Independence, but if there is to be true female independence, too much remains to be done. The present paper attempts to portray the reality of a typical Indian family in Manju Kapur’s Home.

A Study of Female Subjectivity and Agency in Indira Goswami's" A City of its Nakedness" and "The Offspring"

: Diversity is one of the significant characteristics in India, e.g. caste, community, culture, tradition, etc., and due to such diversities, social hierarchies can also be seen or felt as aspects relating to female subjectivity have seldom been a part of the literary canon. The paper's centrality is established on the dual subjection and oppression of women protagonists in Goswam's stories. The study of female subjectivity brings forth issues such as sexual surrender and unwilling physical consummation within and outside the marriage, where female characters eventually lack agency and search for their individuality. It also prompts a challenge to ethical boundaries of the imagination to the readers and enables an understanding of the clamour of the female quest for identity. This present paper attempts to locate different forms of oppression in the select short stories of Indira Goswami, i.e. "A City of its Narrative" from the collection Relive Indira Goswami: The Rich Legacy of Her Stories (2014) and "The Offspring" from the collection The Shadow of Kamakhya: Stories (2002)

Sita’s Story: Intertextuality and Folkloric Allusions in the Creation of a Desi Feminist Discourse in Nandini Sahu’s Sita

The story of Sita in the Indian epic Ramayana has over time been subject to several transformations, reinterpretations, and recontextualization. Sita the fiercely dedicated wife of Lord Rama has evolved to become a woman protagonist and, in some cases, even a feminist idol. Although there have been several modern interpretations of the Ramayana, Nandini Sahu’s Sita composed as a poetic memoir running into 25 cantos, in its form, content, and context is situated in a liminal space between the real world and the mythical world. This liminality is otherwise referred to as the “permeable membrane” in the words of A. K Ramanujan provides scope for many voices to emerge; from orality, from marga and desi mediums all of which oscillate between the temporal zones of the past, present, and future, constantly engaging with one another. Furthermore, the figure of Sita and her narratives extend to what Sahu refers to as the “Sitaness” in every woman whose agency has been snatched. For instance, she yokes together women protagonists from the Literary domain such as Desdemona, mythical namely, Trijada, and historical such as Meerabai, Mother Teresa, Kalpna Chawla, and even Nirbhaya respectively to create a uniquely Indian feminist discourse highlighting various instances of injustice meted towards women. Moreover, the poem is crafted using self-reflexive storytelling inspired by oral tradition and folklore. It also implements multilayered intertextual allusions to reimagine Sita as a woman protagonist transcending time and space. Therefore, this paper will investigate the intertextual and folkloric allusions in Nandini Sahu’s Sita consequently exploring the relevance of this composition as a contribution towards the creation of a desi-feminist discourse.

Lost in Translation? Agency and Incommensurability in the Transnational Travelling of Discourses of Sexualized Harm

This article argues for incommensurability, incoherence, and difference as the grounds through which to think about sexualized harm and its redress. It seeks to remove the “me” from the “too”, and to instead consider the structures of white supremacy and neocolonial power that have facilitated white Western feminists’ ability to participate in shaping a hegemonic discourse of sexualized harm and its transnational travelling. The article traces the author’s personal genealogy of rights work in the context of shifts in international jurisprudence in relation to wartime sexualized violence. It looks back and reflects on an eight-year feminist participatory action research project that accompanied 54 Mayan women protagonists who survived a multiplicity of harm, including sexual violence, during Guatemala’s 36-year genocidal war. The project documented the protagonists’ engagement with transitional justice mechanisms, including a paradigmatic court case and a national reparations program, as part of their struggles for redress. The concept of “protagonism” is used to understand agency in the aftermath of genocidal violence as relational, co-constructed, and imbued with power. The meaning of sexualized harm is always “in-translation” between Western and Mayan onto-epistemological positionings, as Mayan women seek to suture land-body-territory in their multifaceted strategies for redress that engage but always exceed rights regimes.

Wilhelm Speyer's best‐selling novels of 1927 and male responses to female emancipation

AbstractThe Weimar Republic witnessed significant advances in the professional, political, and social opportunities available to German women, as well as a substantial increase in the visibility of women within the German public sphere. Existing research into the reactions of German men to female emancipation during this period has tended to focus on the fear and hostility that were most noticeable during the early years of the Republic. In contrast, this article discusses two more supportive responses to female liberation: Wilhelm Speyer's best‐selling novels Charlott etwas verrückt (1927) and Der Kampf der Tertia (1927). These novels depict their unconventional and powerful women protagonists in a sympathetic light, but their emancipatory potential is limited by the use of traditional motifs and perspectives within their descriptions of female characters.

The Depiction of Violence as a Social Reality: A Cross Sectional Analysis of Mahasweta Devi’s The Hunt and Indira Goswami’s The Beasts

The paper attempts to explore the violence meted out to gendered subaltern and also scrutinizes the destructive role of patriarchy in the lives of women protagonists in the writings of Mahasweta Devi and Indira Goswami. Violence against women is as old as the world. The kind and the intensity of violence vary from time to time and place to place, but it is there everywhere. Mahasweta Devi and Indira Goswami are some of the rare women writer-activists who have taken a daring attempt to expose the kind of violence faced by the women in their everyday life. Their writings expose the cruel deeds of patriarchy. The cruelty happening in the lives of gendered subalterns in terms of caste and class is heart breaking. Through their writings, they advocate them that protest is the only choice to stop such atrocities against women instead of being a mute observer. Only by resisting, women can minimise the violence committed on them. Women protagonists of Devi and Goswami are trying to protest and they challenge patriarchy. The gender based violence like rape and sexual assault threatens the well-being and the dignity of women. The paper analyses Devi’s short story The Hunt (2001) and Goswami’s The Beasts (2002) in bringing about the stark reality and cruelty occurred in the lives of “gendered subaltern” of the contemporary West Bengal and Assam in the 90’s through their writings.

The Oppression of Women in Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens

Shyam Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan – Canadian writer best known for incorporating various themes in his novels. This article analyzes the women protagonists of the novel Cinnamon Gardens. His other novels are Funny Boy, Hungry Ghosts, and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea. All four novels present women of varying characteristics and living in extremely different situations. However, all of them finally end up in a state of embracing their self-identity and freedom by shattering all the social clutches holding them. This paper investigates the life of each woman portrayed in the novel.

Walking as a Gendered Practice: Travel and Transgressions in Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1878) and The Wings of the Dove (1902)

Abstract This essay investigates the gendered practice of taking a walk in two works of Henry James, his early success Daisy Miller: A Study (1878) and his later-phase masterpiece The Wings of the Dove (1902). We focus on James’s women protagonists, the titular Daisy Miller and Wings’ Milly Theale and, specifically, their desire to walk unhindered through the European cities they are visiting, Rome and London, respectively. The simple activity of going for a walk in an unknown city, this essay argues, points beyond the scope of the streets traversed; it becomes a practice of self-assertion. Both narratives draw on the deep-seated connotations of transgression and deviance with which travelling women have long been associated. We begin by addressing travel as transgression and look at the cultural-historical context of women travellers in which James places his heroines. Our major objective is to map the ways in which James’s treatment of the woman pedestrian has changed over the decades between the two works. To this end, we explore the gender-determined restrictions to mobility in the two case studies and bring out the pleasure that both protagonists derive from bypassing those restraints, the pleasure of travelling and walking freely, in their own distinct ways.