Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters

2012

Women's Studies International Forum, 1983

Journal of the Odisha Association for English Studies, 2016

Operationalizing feminism has been a challenging tribulation despite the various efforts of previous feminist and critical scholars. Previous Feminist conceptualizations fail to acknowledge the politicized process of feminism and have focused too much on gender mainstreaming, which can limit the scholars' ability to ask critical questions about the process of feminism. While a plethora of definitions of Feminism exist, this paper aims to redefine the existing theory and to examine the process of the intersection of sex-gender oppression on the one hand and the sex-positive women's rights on the other. The paper discusses the background of feminism that situates movement for women's liberation in the existing literature. It also analyses the early phase of Feminism, including early activists who sought to advance women's suffrage; the later phase of women's fight for their rights focusing on their politicized inequalities, and the sex-positive feminism that strongly campaigns for sexual freedom to enjoy sexual pleasure and promiscuity at par with the men to liberate women from sex-gender oppression. After analyzing each phase, this paper argues that redefining Feminism provides important implications for post-modern Feminist scholars on how we can conceptualize this theory to ask critical questions for inquiry purposes and to discuss the process of understanding Feminism's political, sociological, economical, and historical roots.

Journal of Language and Politics, 2009

First Amendment Studies, 2015

A feminist analysis of sex and gender was integral to the feminist movements of the twentieth century, and were transformed and shaped by them. The aim of these analyses was to answer fundamental questions such as: ‘what is a woman?’ discussed in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and ‘can we refer to a “given” sex or a “given” gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means?’ asked by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble.

This article has been written as a response to a talk by Gloria Steinem in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, earlier this year. While the immense provocation of some of the political assumptions of the talk inform the tone of this piece, it also is an attempt to grapple with what is one of the least addressed areas of mainstream feminist theorising - the relationship between sex and work. This preliminary reflection is an attempt to rescue labour from modernist imperialist frames for instance, the rights discourse. It seeks to address frontally the ‘problem’ of sex most often theorised in the context of sexuality, family, or even ' love'. What happens then if we shift the ground and make sex the site for understanding labour? While the labouring body has been studied in many different contexts such as factories, fields etc., it is striking that there is a tremendous anxiety doing the same in the context of sex. It is this anxiety that this brief paper wishes to draw attention to, as indeed to the implications it has for messy terrain of what is seen as 'feminist' politics.

Journal of International Women S Studies, 2009

2014

This master thesis deals with the gender perception in leaderships positions. Starting from our awareness of a gendered leadership gap, this thesis aims to show our development towards our understanding of reality as socially constructed. We apply the Discourse in order to see how oppression works on women.In the course of our master thesis, we came across poststructuralists, like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, philosopher and psychoanalysts, like Freud, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Kristeva and Butler, as well as sociolinguists, like Cameron, Miller, Baxter and Tannen. Their ideas have enriched our gendered Discourses. Furthermore, by dealing with their ideas, we were able to understand how powerful words can be. Words have the power to create identities, our reality and oppress certain groups of people. The group of people we have focussed on are women. Although the category “women” is fragmented and gender is one of many features of persons, there is something that all women share – oppress...

AFRREV LALIGENS: An International Journal of Language, Literature and Gender Studies

Drawing on the Critical Discourse Analysis grid put forth by scholars such as Van Dijk (2001a&b, 2004, 2006), Fairclough (1989, 1995, 2001, 2003), Van Leeuwen (1996, 2008), Meyer (2001), Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard (1996), Wodak (2001), the current paper exuded how institutional social power is deployed to naturalize ideologies as common sense or common knowledge in a sample text drawn from a contemporary feminist novel, notably Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2006). It also tried to unravel how, through discursive structures and properties, the womenfolk resist or/and transgresses the established sociocultural norms and conventional ideologies as regards gender, role assignment and power. Finally, it advocated the view that only gender-balanced power relations between men and women can ensure a fair social justice and peaceful society. Key Words: Critical Discourse Analysis, feminism, gender, ideology, patriarchy, power