Western Feminism, Subalternity and Portrayal of Muslim Woman: Selected Cultural Production in Focus

Abstract

 This study uses Catherine Belsey’s textual analysis to study Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone in a bid to highlight the status of the woman in the East. The strategic essentialism that is advocated by the Western frameworks of Feminism have already been termed by Gayatri Spivak as instances of epistemic violence. Western framework and parameters of the women rights are not universally applicable and their implementation in the Eastern, third world countries has been a neo-colonial strategy to achieve colonial purposes. This kind of feminism adds to the misery and marginalization of the third world subaltern women. By means of carrying out the textual analysis of the selected literary text, the researchers explore the instances in the text where the colonial interests are closely but clandestinely linked to the feminist concerns promulgated in the novel. This western feminist politics and its negative consequences for subaltern women have been explored in this research, using Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the subaltern. Moreover, Lisa Lau’s theory of re-orientalism and the theory of New-Historicism has been used as a supporting lens.

Keywords: Subaltern, Postcolonialism, New-Historicism, Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism, Epistemic Violence, Re-Orientalism, Orientalism, Dependence, Affiliations.