English Language, Literature and Creative Writing Blog

 With cultural norms becoming an important concern within feminist enquiry, the need for feminist and cultural theories, that could cater to the needs of specific groups of women (intersectional feminism) such as Blacks, Indians, lower-class women etc., was deeply felt.  To steer clear of essentialism, and of the oversimplification of the experiences of women, became the major focus. The influence of Western feminist philosophy has been unmissable in the way Indian feminism has taken shape but the critical theories of the first-world countries are absolutely divorced from the circumstances of women who are operating at the grassroots.  The whole idea behind ‘feminism without borders’ is to widen the scope of feminism and to not privilege feminist theories about and by White, middle class women. It thus emphasizes on the need to maintain culturalspecificity when talking about women’s experiences.  To state an example, in nineteenth century Britain and America, the pro...

Women’s writing across the world and in India has, since the beginning, also seen the trend of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writing.  This trend garnered greater vogue in the latter half of the twentieth century when ‘authentic realist’ feminist reading practices stressed on the importance of knowing about the experiences of other women through literature which would feed into their understanding of their own lives. Such intellectual engagements with the lives of other women helped women readers make sense of their own lives.   By examining women as recipients of literary texts, we can analyze how they employ these texts to challenge the narratives imposed on them by the society. Feminist theories, therefore, concern themselves with not only women as writers or producers of texts but also as readers and consumers. Like their Western counterpart, autobiographical writings by women in India have been endowed with increasing critical and scholarly attentio...