“A woman’s garb covers me from tip to toe.
Inside, made of stone, a hardened heart alone
Can stone ever be molten by tear’s ebb and flow?”
-Binodini Dasi.
Violence against women is a worldwide phenomenon which spans all social classes and age groups. Violence in both its subtle and blatant from is so deeply embedded in cultures around the world that it is almost rendered invisible. To quote Charlotte Bunch – “Opening the door on the subject of violence against the world’s females is like standing at the threshold of an immense dark chamber vibrating with collective anguish, but with the sounds with protest throttled back to a murmur. Where there should be outrage aimed at an intolerable status quo there is instead denial, and the largely passive acceptance of the way things are”. (Bunch) In this limelight, this study intends to focus on the consumption of violence and the associated fear, deliberately and subtly illustrated by the elements of silence and darkness in Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Lights Out. Violence in India is multifaceted: not merely physical, it is more often mental and emotional, subtle and indirect, most often insidious and difficult to recognize. Lights Out is based on a true incident, an eye-witness account. The incident took place in Santa Cruz, Bombay, 1982, wherein just like the play, a group of urban middle-class people chose to stand and watch ...
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... core of contemporary masculinity that allows such violence, for good behavior is definitely not something that we can legislate, nor can it even be prompted or propelled in accordance to the need of the hour, it only comes from the essential human feeling.
Works Cited
Abraham, Taisha. Feminist Theory and Modern Drama. New Delhi: Pencraft International,
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Bunch, Charlotte. The Intolerable Status Quo: Violence Against Women And Girls. www.unicef.org/pon97/women1.htm. Kudchedkar, Shirin and Sahiba-Al-Issa. Eds, Violence against Women: Women against
Violence. Delhi: Pencraft International, 1998. Print.
Manjula Padmanabhan, Dina Mehta, Poile Sengupta. Body Blows. Calcutta: Seagull Books,
2000. Print.
Subramanyam Lakshmi. Muffled Voices: Women in Modern Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Shakti
Books, 2002. Print.
When Katz interviews inmates in prison, many of them say that the reason why they use violence is that it is the quickest way to achieve respect. The idea behind respect is that it is a circle. When one wants to achieve respect, in some cases, they use violence to develop it, but to establish respect, one has to show their masculinity. Many times masculinity is achievable only through violence, which then completes the casual loop. The sociological idea of sociobiology, the study of social behavior in both humans and animals, can be applied to this scenario since humans have the incessant need to be socially accepted by their peers. For instance, many gang initiations involve an act of violence, and if one does not go through with the task at hand, the individual will lose the respect of every member. Therefore, males will show their masculinity to their peers to gain their respect. While I do agree with the notion that every person has to prove themselves to others, the idea of establishing respect through violence is not the answer. While it is the fastest way to achieve masculine approval, it is also the fastest way to lead one down a path that they cannot come back. While violence is not the answer, if one does not establish their masculinity, many often comment that they are not a man, but feminine instead. This transitions into how one tries to prove their
The documentary Tough Guise reveals that the cause of violence traces back to cultural codes on masculinity and societal expectations rooted from such codes. Prior to watching the documentary, it was difficult to understand how culture played a part in men’s violence—it was thought to be more of a natural phenomenon linked to men’s biological traits. The documentary, however, disproves this: men’s violence in America is “made” by the society, not “given”, and thus cultural implications should be explored to understand where the violence really comes from.
The effects from this corrupt enterprise are undeniably painful and scaring. In common societies women are belittled and objectified excessively, it is hardly considered a conflict when unimaginable pain is inflicted upon them. The physical, emotional, and mental distortion and destruction, caused by violence last an eternity. The inane fear, agony of sha...
Campbell, A. (1993). Cultural Lessons in Aggression. Men, Women, and Aggression: From Rage in Marriage to Violence in the Streets – How Gender Affects the Way We Act. New York. Basic Books, 1-18.
This also leads into the fact that people interpret male violence and aggression as natural. They’ll pin it as something hardwired from ‘the hunter-gatherer days’. Often times they’ll also blame it on media violence, such as graphic video games, movies and TV shows. This is something much broader than that.
Gender-based violence is made possible by the ideology of sexism in Indian traditional culture which argues that women are worth less than men in the sense of having less power, status, privilege, and access to resources that is more prevalent in middle class and low caste families.
... did not have a history of troubled behavior or personal connection to the victim, were capable of being involved in such a random, yet passionate act of violence. Virk was a ‘punching bag’ for the internal anxiety or frustration these girls faced, which essentially leads back to parent’s inability to detect these issues and societies failure to provide support for these girls. The autopsy reports showed that Virk would have most likely died solely from her head injuries from the severe beating she took, essentially making every person present that night underneath the bridge responsible for Virk’s death. Although female violence has been on the rise, the media did play an essential role in creating fear of female violence in Canada. While the story of the murder of Reena Virk is both ruthless and alarming, not many similar cases have occurred in the past 17 years.
Najumi, Mohadesa. “We Live in a Rape Culture.” The Feminist Wire. N.p., 9 June 2013. Web. 5 Feb
In this chapter Mahasweta Devi’s anthology of short stories entitled Breast Stories to analyze representations of violence and oppression against women in name of gender. In her Breast Stories, Devi twice evokes female characters from ancient Hindu mythology, envisions them as subalterns in the imagined historical context and, creates a link with the female protagonists of her short stories. As the title suggests, Breast Stories is a trilogy of short stories; it has been translated and analyzed by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and, in Spivak’s view, the ‘breast’ of a woman in these stories becomes the instrument of a brutal condemnation of patriarchy. Indeed, breast can be construed as the motif for violence in the three short stories “Draupadi,” “Breast-Giver,” and “Behind the Bodice,”
Gairola, Rahul. “Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to Deepa Mehta’s Fire.” Comparative Literature 54:4 (Fall 2002). 307-324. EBSCOhost.
For women in India, the last century has marked a great amount of progress, but at times it has been as stubborn as all the centuries before it. Women have been expanding their roles in society, at home, and even politics with female Prime Minster Indira Gandhi. Gender roles are ingrained deeply, however, and that is no more apparent than in the current rape epidemic. Specifically the last 40 years have been some of the most promising for Indian women, but they have also seen an 875% increase in rape cases (Park). The answers to why this is happening, and why it is happening now may open up a much deeper issue. The social climate is changing; a power struggle between genders steadies the quantity of violence against women. Meanwhile, their empowerment to speak out and hold a rapist accountable brings it to the attention of the world. A longstanding injustice that has been occurring right bellow the surface for years may have reached its boiling point.
In order to tackle the issue of gender based violence, one must first understand the root of the issue. According to Peterson and Runyan, gender refers to the socially learned behavior and expectations that distinguish between masculinity and femininity. However, sex identity is known as the genetic and anatomical characteristics. Meanwhile, socially learned gender is an acquired identity gained through performing predetermined gender roles. Understandably, Society places different values on masculine and feminine behaviors. Gender has now become the basis for relations of inequality and is a powerful lens that we all use to experience and organize reality.
The uncivilized character of Indian men exhibited violence that now has turned to the silences many of them unwillingly endure years later. The topic of the Indian partition is a controversial topic, it was a time where women were symbolized as national subjects, and faced the horrific procurement of religious catastrophe. The confusion of not understanding such mental lapse is the silence is best depicted through children in the movie, 1947 Earth. It is the battle Lenny and writer Butalia deal with, as Butalia paints a vivid picture of silence though her oral history, The Other Side of Silence. Butalia recounts the silence that lies within an interviewee’s memory, as she recounts, “‘I cannot ...
At this stage it is important to highlight that the South Asian community is characterized by vast diversity and complex nature. The members of the group are heterogeneous with respect to their cultural norms and religious inclinations (Khan, 2000). The sheer rapid growth in the size of this community calls for researchers and practitioners to explore and develop a better understanding of how these women folk face and experience violence in the context of being a sub-group in
Wading through the tempestuous waters within which our society is drowning, is India’s first Sahitya Akademi award winning dramatist, Mahesh Dattani. He is a humanist who uses his multifaceted personae as a weapon in his fight against inhumanity. Dattani sees in society what others wish to ignore. His works are a plea for humane treatment of homosexuals, equality towards women and moreover equal rights for every small section of society including the hijras. His plays question all kinds of discrimination, be it religious prejudice, gender discrimination or even homosexuality. His plays not only bring up gender issues and the space allotted to women in a patriarchal society, but also they deal with gender biases and prejudices which still affect the lives of many girl-children even amongst educated, urban families.