2022

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Browsing 2022 by Author "Hibah Zahid"

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    Liminal spaces for women
    (UMT, Lahore, 2022) Hibah Zahid
    The study focuses on Ahmed Ali's work Twilight in Delhi and it is specifically going to shed light on gender roles together with the elements of misogyny in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. When talking about gender roles, one cannot deny the paradigm shift of female characters as the main leads in the contemporary world and the prominence of male dominance in the texts written in the past. These texts discuss and analyze gender passively, but we need to unleash and explore the root cause of the existing inequalities that are much needed to be explored through psychoanalysis of gender development. Ahmed Ali gives prominence to female leads like the character of Mushtari Bai. The role of the female character is given much importance in the light of post-colonial texts. On the other hand, Achebe explicates the idea of men and their misogyny, where the female characters are not given much importance. Not only that it is also visible that if a male character possesses feminine qualities this hate still exists because this hate is not specifically for the gender but more like for the acceptability in society for instance Achebe shows that Okonkwo did not hate his mother as much as he hated his father for having feminine qualities “Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know tha agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken to the title (Achebe). In both of these novels, women are treated as liminal beings. However, bringing these two texts together and unraveling the reasons for gender inequalities and the cause of misogyny needs to be explored. Earlier, there was much work done on the root cause of misogyny, but here we will explore these particular texts with the Zahid 7 significance of the post-colonial era. Gabriela Orlando claims that biological factors are much more responsible for the birth of such inequalities. The western and eastern patterns of gender bias are one thing reflected in both these novels.