Conceptualizing
Postfeminist ‘Signifying Space’ and Gender Performance: A Representation of
Women Empowerment and Gender Equality
Sahabuddin Ahamed
Ph. D. Research Scholar
Department of English and Foreign Languages
Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya
Chhattisgarh,
India
Abstract:
This
paper analyses the interrelated phenomenon of postfeminism and its pervasive
notion of gender “performativity.”It also explores the key turns in
postfeminism with its most focus on the subversion of the discursively gender
performance and on women’s empowerment. Though the earlier feminist’s concerns
about empowerment and gender were limited to certain impulse of liberation, the
post-feminists are highly associated with a more permanent identity and
representation. It is often seen that though women are given some empowerment
but not in its fullest implementation even today. For this reason, the process
of women empowerment with its emerging need is very important to those
signifying strategies by which women contribute to their liberation, rights,
well-being, achievement, and multiple political identities. Due to discursive
nature of gender roles and empowerment, the female subjectivity needs much more
focus on gender equality and empowerment at regional, national and
international levels. These factors have been a great concern to recent
feminists who attempt to challenge the strong patriarchal values while
struggling for achieving more humanitarian goals for themselves. Such problem
requires an advanced and holistic approach to enable women to empower
themselves, to take necessary measures in securing their status and contribute
to their all-round development.
Keywords: postfeminism; empowerment; gender
equality; resistance; performativity
“There is no being
behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the
deed—the deed is everything”—Friedrich Nietzsche
“To accept the phallus,
as the representation of the law of the father”—Toril Moi
“All feminist criticism
is in some sense revisionist, questioning the adequacy of accepted conceptual
structures”—Elaine Showalter
Introduction
Postfeminism is an
interdisciplinary field and a more debatable area in relation to gender
equality and women empowerment. Unlike the first flowering appearance of
radical feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, postfeminism develops into
a more distinctive discourse whose ideas and goals challenge the most dominant
assumptions regarding gender and sex. Though earlier feminist movements succeed
in establishing domestic rights and raising consciousness about women’s positions
in public life, their works show some limited progresses. By the 1990s,
feminism forms a new turn in viewing women’s relationships with different
existing factors that still dehumanize their selves and status. Such kind of
transition in feminist thought of what is often termed as post-feminism.
Postfeminism goes beyond earlier feminist approaches because of their limited
aims and essentialist and universal ideas to the issues of gender and sexual
identity. Postfeminists are more interested in women’s issues in their everyday
lives with its fullest improvement and progress. Contemporary feminists, though
having different cross-cutting ideologies, are more concerned to transform
society, to bring about gender equality with the aims of securing different aspects
of women empowerment. Women’s full attention to the issues of equality and
empowerment lies in their demands of human rights, paid employment, higher
positions, status in society, representation of women’s experience, legislative
transformation, equal citizenship, political participation, eradication of
violence against women, creation of women’s signifying space, women’s
education, leadership, and individual identity.
To
subvert all stereotypical assumptions regarding gender equality and women
empowerment, postfeminists develop a desire to escape all discursively
constructed notions of gender and sexual identity and also construct a
counter-discourse of multiple subjectivity and unstable nature of all gendered
and sexual identities. Through these activities they reflect a fluid identity
of womanhood and the issues of individual identity, equality and empowerment.
They constantly attempt to go through a process of radical change of becoming
rather than being by making a poststructuralist approach to the female identity
and by questioning the ideological mechanism through which sexual and gender
identities are regulated by historical subject positions and by destabilizing
these identities. For this reason, they stress the idea that the subject or
identity is not essential feature of human existence rather they are the
materialization process under the shadow of ideological discursive formations.
It is the unequal ideological power relations of patriarchy that enables them
to produce and determinate a subjective position within a given form of social
construction. To feminists gender and sexuality are not regarded as essential
aspect of individual identity but rather as social and cultural constructions
regulated by linguistic turn.
Feminists
are very skeptical about sex and gender issues. Gender or sex is the product of
the socialization and materialization process of gender itself
institutionalized in the ideological discursive formations of patriarchy.
Gender is performative in the sense that the gender hierarchy and its
performative modes of production are materialized through the practice of the
discursive modes. They develop a critique of gender identity with an emphasis
on the process of materialization of female body on which the oppressive
patriarchal power relations base. The most important implication of this
insight is that they are defining and redefining the pathways to articulate a
more subversive feminist discourse in which a female can find her own way of
fulfillment by exploring and evading the rigid systems of patriarchal
discourse. Apart from gender performance, what women need more to consolidate
is their individual identity where an individual can mingle in a “free play” of
identity that can transcend time, space, socio-political and socio-cultural
asymmetrical power relations. They create a symbolic space where a woman finds
an equal opportunity of law and protests against discrimination while
developing multiplicity of female expressions, experiences and values. Unlike
more subjective and privileged position, this sort of monumental space is an
appropriate medium of female resistance and expression. Being opposed to
traditional egalitarian feminist approach, it is a symbolic space where all
women can work together irrespective of caste, color, class, society, religion,
or any biased or backed nature by this counter approach. By challenging and
subverting all negative stereotypes (women as emotional, passive, other,
feminine, irrational, and nonentity) and discriminations against women and within
women, empowerment through poststructuralist framework would be a gateway for
the construction of women identity, equality, and their representation in all
spheres of life. Furthermore, women empowerment and gender equality will be
established when there is the presence of awareness, revival of tradition,
participation, provisions, and construction of female discourse. It is the
immense hope for women to gain and exercise all kind of advantages like their
male counterparts in their lives that will ultimately lead to women empowerment
and equality.
First Wave Feminism
The first wave feminist
criticism developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in
Europe and America. It was in many ways a liberal and reformist feminism that
sought to have equal rights, individualism, enfranchisement, political
participation, female property and maturity, reformation, and access to public
realm. During the Women’s Rights and Suffrage movements and after, the first
wave feminists wanted a number of gains by establishing a separate tradition of
female space that they cling to the linear time and history. Their attempts
were to connect themselves with the essentialist experience and universal
nature of female identity. Even they wanted to neglect their cyclical time and
maternity and celebrated the logical values of rationality by clinging to the
metaphysics and symbolic order regulated by a state in her making of
ideological discursive patterns.
In
her book A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf insists that women have
been subjugated to the symbolic expression of male logos and also show the lack
of women’s rooms and women’s social and financial independence. She perceives
that literary canon is male-dominated and unsuitable for women, and the
stereotypical images are imposed over them by canon formation of male writers.
Her perspectives were against the rigid Victorian notions of pure, unselfish
womanhood, against the conventional female themes, female identity and female
sexuality. She argues that women’s literary tradition would be distinct in
relation to men’s and explore women’s experience by dismantling the fixed
gender norms between masculinity and femininity. Woolf further points at
women’s material disadvantageous position in comparison to men, women’s absent
from history, literary tradition and advocate for women’s liberation,
education, socio-economic opportunity, women’s experience in art and
literature, and focuses on “androgynous” mind of “man-womanly” and
“woman-manly,” and “creative, incandescent and undivided” (106).She emphasizes
the possibilities of women’s liberation and change from patriarchal norms:
Intellectual
freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.
And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the
beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of
Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s’ chance of writing poetry.
That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. (116-117)
There is a danger in
the modes of liberal feminism, especially in its limitations of individualism
as it draws its impetus or identity from structural function of patriarchy,
essentialized category of women, and an insertion of women into masculine
subjectivity through equal rights which have the effect of retaining social
progress of symbolic order that reinforces category of men and women and
masculinity and femininity. Therefore, it does not reveal a fluid and
intersectional female gendered identity but a bias nature. It is ethnocentric
in nature, predominant in developed countries and does not address the problems
of women of developing countries.
Second Wave Feminism
and Women’s Body
The second wave
feminist criticism developed from the late 1960s. It has two distinct
traditions of Anglo-American and French feminist movements. It was a much more
radical feminism in turn with the publications of Simone de Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex (1949), Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women (1968) and
Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970), Germaine Greer’s The Female
Eunuch (1970) and Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1972). The
second-wave feminists uncover and critique the cultural construction of women
as object, other, while men as subject, self, and stereotypes of passive,
inferior and subordinate femininity and strong, rational, active masculinity
created by patriarchal vales and systems. In her work Simone de Beauvoir
discloses how the biological concept of sex (male, female) is expanded in
“androcentric” ideology of generating gender distinction—masculinity and
femininity: “One is not born, but becomes a woman.” In The Feminine Mystique
(1963), Betty Friedan expresses dissatisfaction and despair of women
because of the patriarchal values that affect and confine female security and
happiness. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millet reveals the asymmetrical
relation of power and misogyny of male authors in a male dominated society that
manipulates power and perpetuates phallogocentrism in all spheres of life. Some
of the key elements of this feminist criticism are: rejection of symbolic
order, women’s difference, women’s specific cultural practices as opposed to
men’s, gender equality, awareness of contraception, sexual politics, sexual
liberation from reproduction, radical and revolutionary change, personal is
political, temporality, separatism, essentialized femininity, women’s own
spaces, rejection of linear space, and establishment of matriarchy.
The
above-mentioned elements can also be found in the tradition of Anglo-American
gynocriticism of Elaine Showalter and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubarand French
feminism of Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. In her seminal
essay entitled “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Showalter develops
women’s specific cultural framework dealing with the writing and literary
tradition of women and celebration of women’s sexual differences in their
literary imagination, styles, genres, themes, structures, and analysis. She
focuses on the specificity of women’s own ideological space as reader—“feminist
critique” revealing “feminist reading of texts…images and stereotypes of women
in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and
women-as-sign in semiotic systems” (333). By “feminist reading” she emphasizes
how a feminist specific tradition can contest and displace the male-dominated
systems and retain the continuities in women’s literature. In The Mad Woman
in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubardraw on the anxiety and contradiction of
female psychological state that affect women writers in the nineteenth century
resulting from the androcentric ideology. The book shows the unconscious female
voice offering the linguistic and cultural stereotypes of irrational, outside,
displaced female body and of protesting against the exclusion and suppression
of the body from the rational mind (associated with masculinity).Therefore,
American feminism, based on distinct women’s experience and literary tradition,
comes under the charges that it fails to challenge the idea of the dominant
subject position and its linkage with canonicity. Although American feminist
criticism challenged inequality, discrimination, stereotypes, sexual bias in
its liberal and radical mode, it clings to the essentialized feminine
subjectivity, orthodox universal unity of binaries of men and women, and
representation of texts in the continuities of mimetic criticism. It is highly
ethnocentric and does not address other ethnic, marginal and minority groups.
In
contrast, having influenced by psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, French
feminist criticism focuses on the distinct theory of gendered language what is
termed as ecriture feminine(language associated with femininity)which
has its source in the female body. As anti-essentialists, French feminists
challenge Lacanian phallogocentric view of language, gender and identity that
seek everything through binary oppositions and associated with phallus,
masculinity and rationality. Such phallogocentrism acts as logos or truth and
source of all asymmetrical power relations imposing on females the stereotypes
of other, irrationality, body, passive, object, subordinate, nonlinguistic,
displaced and nonentity. Julia Kristeva rejects linguistic imposition and
masculine superiority that offers women no space within the symbolic order. In
contrast to the symbolic order under which women live and speak, Kristeva
posits the “semiotic” representing a trace of pre-Oedipal signifying desire
centred on the mother-child relation. Like Lacan’s Imaginary stage, Kristeva’s
“semiotic” irrupts into the symbolic order and disrupts the phallogocentric
discourse with the possibilities of multiplicity, fixity and diversity inherent
in linguistic structures and in the female bodies and experiences. The semiotic
also refers to the non-symbolic aspects of language, such as rhythm, sound and
tone. However, it is not inclusively
female prerogative rather an alternative female space. The French feminists
associate writing with female body from where they are dispelled and to which
they would turn. To them the body acts both as a metaphor of subject and a site
of sexual pleasure or of jouissance in language and writing in order to
subvert and disrupt the symbolic order. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Helene
Cixous reflects on the female body and its affinity with female writing while
disrupting the rigid symbolic discourse of male reservation and female silence:
Women
must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that
will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must
submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the
one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word “silence,” the one
that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word ‘impossible” and
writes it as “the end.” (886)
Therefore,
the theories of French feminists come under charges that they were
essentialists and separatists in their views of language, gender, and sexuality
because of their categorization of man and woman and mind and body.
Third Wave Feminism
The third wave feminist
criticism emerged in the mid-1990s and began in the USA. It can often be seen
in antithesis to post-feminism as it is a continuation of second wave feminism
and a reaction to second wave feminism. The term was first popularized by
Rebeca Walker in her essay “Becoming the Third Wave” (1992). In Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (2009),Genzand
Brabonstate that although it developed as a political movement with
affiliations to second wave feminists, it contrasted with the postfeminists who
were divided between the politically Riot Girls and the fashionable Spice Girls
(156). Though based on the principles of second wavers, third wave feminists
had politically and culturally different views focusing on a more contradictory
and diverse nature of gender and identity grounded on poststructuralist
framework. Like unstable nature of linguistic signs that has no fixed meanings
and no similitude between words and things, they embraced heterogeneity,
diversity, plurality, fluidity and flexibility in their discussion of gender,
identity and sexuality that go beyond categories of gender, class, race,
ethnicity, and nationality. Moreover, their approach was more assertive,
inclusive, intersecting, contesting, individualistic, diverse, and
multiplicity. Influenced by postmodernism, third wave feminists define and
redefine their positions within shifting time and nonlinear space of history
celebrating difference and diversity—ambiguous in nature. The third wave
feminists embrace multiple personalities, fragmentation of selves that do not
hold on unified or seamless sensibility like the complex and ambiguous
poststructural stance inherent in language always in the free play of meanings.
They create and practice a new theoretical space that complicates women’s
identity and gender rather than unifying it celebrating anti-essential feminine
sensibility and eschewing the utopic vision of perfectly egalitarian society or
the individualism. Even, they critically engage with popular cultural forms
such as information, media, television, music, films, fiction, internet, and
blogs. For them, this provides a space of empowerment and a space of difference
from the second wave feminists.
Postfeminist Concerns
and Women Empowerment
Although founded on
mainstream feminist concerns, contemporary postfeminists are in some sense
beyond limits of feminism, and are more unorthodox, provocative and radical (in
the sense of change, complexity, multiplicity, and deconstructiveness of their
identity and sexuality found in theatrical performance and parody of taking
drag while imitating and performing the construction of natural category of sex
and gender and cyberfeminists) intertwined with contemporary conditions of
contradiction and ambiguity. Its main focus is on liberation and representation
of women’s diverse experiences that contest the restricted views of women which
have historically subjugated by patriarcy. Postfeminists are more than individual
and inclusive and contestant and independent in their approach to gender and
identity issues. They act as a neoliberal force in the changing cultural and
political scenarios that posit destabilized concept of gender and diversity
with an emphasis on self-empowerment and splitting identity seeking in all
spheres of life. In “The Myth of Postfeminism,” Hall and Rodriguez illustrated
the four claims of postfeminism—“overall support, pockets of antifeminism,
irrelevance, and “no, but… “feminism” (881). Among these four ethos ‘“no, but…”
feminism” shows a growing concern among postfeminism that refers to a new
version of feminism whereby women do not to be labelled as feminists, but they
still support feminist goals of gender equality and empowerment (883).Postfeminists,
including Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler, Angela Carter, receive
impetus from the poststructuralist and postmodernist view of identity what they
demand is a more flexible and intersectional identity and their representations
in all sphere of their lives. They are very critical about the restricted views
of women which has retained and exercised by patriarchal subjective position.
Their struggle for gender equality that has evolved into a powerful movement
subverting all discursive forms of patriarchy and a predominantly misogynistic
society. To be fruitfully empowered women have developed an agenda for victims
of sexual assault and more opportunities for women and men to focus on the
injustices, prejudices, discriminations, violence, and sexual stereotypes
against women in a society. The issues what they emphasize much more are gender
equality, difference, resistance to oppression and suppression, tolerance
towards sisterhood, multicultural sensibility, fragmented subjectivity, fluid
identity, anti-essentialized female experience, political stance, nonlinear
space, mingling, dialogic, and ambiguous continuity and change together.
Towards
the end of the twentieth century the concept of women empowerment has been a
global phenomenon with its multi-dimensional nature of development and
progress. It has undergone a vast transformation from a limited or narrow
welfare approach to gender equitable approach. To achieve the intended goals,
the process of women empowerment aids women to continue resistance and gain
power and control over the dominant ideologies and discourses. Women
empowerment is a process of all kinds of major transformation through which
women can gain power, exercise choices, control over the factors which directly
or indirectly affect their lives, make self-confidence and contribute to
progress-oriented approach. It is a pathway to lead women to their growing
intrinsic understanding of their ontological existence, needs, positions,
creativity, dignity, representations, equality at global, national and regional
level. As Medel-Anonuevo fairly states that women empowerment “enables the
person to gain insight and have an awareness of what is undesirable and
unfavorable about her current situation, perceive a better situation, the
possibilities of attaining it and realizing what is within her reach and what
she could do to get to a better situation” (25).
Postfeminist
‘Signifying Space’
In her critical essay
“Women’s Time,” the most effective strategy what Julia Kristeva appealed to
contemporary feminists was a “signifying space both corporeal and desiring
mental space” (33). It is a space where the earlier and later feminist concerns
would be interwoven with each other in the “same historical time” (33).There
would be no the very dichotomy of man/woman, day/night, white/black gendered
identity space, aggressive and murderous forces among feminism, backed power,
power mania, disruption from within feminism, problematic nature of difference,
risk of violence, socio-symbolic constructions, and separate feminist
movements. Indeed, the space acts as a new theoretical space for the present
moment in which monolithic or dualistic concept of gender, identity, and
sexuality is challenged. It is immensely important for the newest generations
of women to assume the role of multiple female expressions and to confront the
task of reconciling female issues with historical time. Whereas earlier first
and second wavers cling to equality and difference, this space is utopian in
some sense as it is centred on difference, broad-based, and multiplicity of
female subjectivity. It is a more progressive approach derived from Derridean
“free play” of meaning challenging the very traditional notion of fixity as the
subjectivity of man or woman is generated in language and never offers stable
position or meaning. It is a space of free and fluid identity transforming and
changing itself. It can be seen as an attempt to bring about harmony and
reconciliation, the singularity of each person and the multiplicity of every
person’s identity. Thus, such a convincing approach will help women to take
part in constructing pluralistic identity and in destabilizing discursive and scientific
events of the historical time position based on enlightened modernity. It is a
way of undoing totalization process which has the effect of essentializing
gender identity into the categories of masculinity and femininity.
Gender Performativity
Another distinct
postfeminist concern about gender equality is that how gender is constructed
only to essentialize the sex or gender distinction as being natural. How is
gender performance legalized into the established masculine-designated subject
positions through an extension of the effects of the socialization and
materialization process of gender category? Questions concerning about identity
and gender have been an integral part of feminism that critique social power
relations of symbolic representations and cultural embodiment in constructing
and regulating gendered identity and subjectivity. In Gender Trouble and Bodies
That Matter, Judith Butler, ant-essentialist, develops the notions of
“gender performativity” and “gender performance.”In the former she elaborately
discusses gender that is not a natural category into which one is born but a
matter of performance, not what one is but what one does.
In
Bodies That Matter, she illustrates that like sex and gender, the body “is productive, constitutive, one might even argue performative,
inasmuch as this signifying act delimits and contours the body that it then
claims to find prior to any and all signification” (6). The body is constructed
in the symbolic space of the discursive norms that name it and regulate it:
The
symbolic is understood as the normative dimension of the constitution of the
sexed subject within language. It consists in a series of demands, taboos,
sanctions, injunctions, prohibitions, impossible idealizations, and
threats—performative speech acts, as it were, that wield the power to produce
the field of culturally viable sexual subjects: performative acts, in other
words, with the power to produce or materialize subjectivating effects. (70-71)
In terms of performativity, all aspects of femininity
are re-inscribed in discursive patterns that compel forcible citations for the
constructed subject rather than offering ontological existence. Butler (Gender
10) stated that “gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural
inscription of meaning on a previous sex (a juridical conception); gender must
also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves
are established.” For this reason, according to her, there is no distinction
between sex and gender, as both are given gendered categories, in which through
gender the discursive practice on a “natural sex” is repeated and produced.
This production of body or sex as the pre-discursive ought to be understood as
the effects of the apparatus of cultural construction imposed to maintain the
norms of heterosexuality designated by gender itself. The body is only a
passive receiver of the cultural impression constraint by language itself. In
her account gender hierarchy and its performative mode of production (i.e.
materialization of gender and female body as performance) is done through the
discursive practices. She (Gender 12) further argues that “‘the body’
appears as a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed or as the
instrument through which an appropriative and interpretive
will determines a cultural meaning for itself.”
Gender Gap
Another significant
concern about gender equality is gender gap. It is a gap between men and women
across social, cultural, political, economic, and intellectual attainments. The
reasons for this gap are the established biases that are repeated or symbolic
acts or traditional stereotypes. In so doing, generally women are more deprived
of their equity in various domains of their lives. It is the unequal
distribution of life improvement factors such as health, education, economics,
and politics between men and women. Apart from the developed countries, the gap
is very wide open in most of the developing countries especially in the field
of politics and economics. There would be immense possibilities of better
economic attainment if gender equality is implemented.
Discrimination and
Violence against Women
The symbolic function
of socio-cultural construction of gender identity has become very explicit
through different forms of discrimination and violence against women.
Discrimination and violence against women are main barriers to women
empowerment and gender equality. They are many in forms and biased in nature.
However, they often go unnoticed and unresolved. In every field of violence
wherever in the world, in general, women are often seriously affected. This has
been done to them through the historical process of exclusion, bias, forcing,
restraints, sexual stereotypes, exploitations, displacements, slavery,
superiority, misogyny, entertainment, inequality, privileged authority, and
unjust punishment. Generally, women are victims of domestic violence,
gender-bias violence, economic exploitation, and exclusion of political
participation practiced by individuals, organizations and enterprises. Thus,
the “United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women”
defines violence as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is
likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to
women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprived of liberty,
whether occurring in public or private life.”
Different Aspects of
Women Empowerment
As an umbrella term,
women empowerment comes in turn to all round development of women. This
multidimensional approach, which has its origin in feminism, emphasizes the
importance of the interrelationship between gender equality, economic growth,
and the attainments of all human development indicators. There are different
aspects of women empowerment. They are as follow:
Personal
It refers to a change
of perception about oneself. At this level, women have awareness of her
position, dignity, respect, personality, responsibility, visibility and
individuality that will ultimately lead them to think empowerment. Through an
intrinsic self-confidence and an inner transformation one can approach to
overcome all external barriers or discriminations to gain empowerment.
Social
The societal aspect
emphasizes that women can involve themselves in articulating individual as well
as collective consciousness against the false value systems and patriarchal
ideologies prevalent in society. To ensure their values and societal
relationship, women can transform traditional gender norms and work through
democratic principles. If women build a positive image in a society and
recognize their contributions to all spheres of their lives, this act would be
more helpful in securing their rights, development, equity, and
empowerment.
Economic
The economic element
shows that women have access to and control over economic resources that can
ensure their economic autonomy. Apart from some Western countries, in most of
the developing countries women are financially very poor. Lack of economic
opportunity is the most common barrier to women’s progress and advantages. If
the economic component is fulfilled it would precisely lead women to better
productive activity, utilization, transmission, autonomy, and empowerment.
Psychological
The psychological
aspect shows that women can act at both personal and societal levels to improve
their individual status and the society in which they live. It is a growing
intrinsic consciousness to bring about a change in the society.
Political
Women’s political
participation is another significant aspect of empowerment. Women have the
ability to participate, analyze, organize, and mobilize for social change in
and development. At this level, the important issues to be measured are female
voting percentage, presence in administration, seats in parliament, female role
in decision-making policies, and female development. The report of the United
Nations Millennium Project Task Force notes that gender equality and
empowerment cannot and will not be achieved without the female leaderships to
create policies for social change: “without access to resources and
opportunities, both political and economic, women will be unable to employ
their capabilities for their well-being and that of their families,
communities, and societies” (32).
Education
Education is the most
important aspect of all progress and empowerment. Though the literacy rates and
enrolment have gradually been increasing over time, the overall performance of
women is not satisfactory yet. The issues of female literacy rate, drop out,
enrolment, stages of education help women measure educational opportunities and
take necessary steps for their improvement.
Employment
This area shows that
job opportunities and earnings are more likely to empower women if they go
through appropriate environment and make decisions about their own earnings.
Education and household structure play a key role in affecting women’s
financial autonomy.
Physical
It refers to the
psychological processes of gaining control over one’s body and sexuality and
the ability to protect oneself against stereotypical sexual violence in the
empowerment process. Its main focus is on control through intellect and how to
eschew violence.
Health
Poverty
and lack of sufficient nutrition are the ground reality of life in the Third
World countries for the vast majority of women. There is a need to focus on
infant mortality, maternal mortality, health facilities, life expectancy,
contraceptive use and nutrition levels of women. However, there is an essential
need to invest in securing women’s health.
Media
Women’s
less exposure to media secures their disadvantageous position in relation to
men with regard to empowerment. They need more active participation in media in
order to use this as a medium of exposition and assertion of their world along
men.
Women’s
Studies and Activism
To be more aware of
their conditions and to develop universal sisterhood and consciousness, women
need to form the study of women’s writing and literary tradition of what Elaine
Showalter termed “gynocritics.”They need to share new knowledge with different
organizations, practitioners, academics, teachers, and the general public. They
should promote general awareness and practical strategies for gender equitable
education through a series of seminars, conference, workshops and a range of
book publications. It would be more invaluable for females, if gender study is
taught as a part of syllabus in from the lower classes. Reviving the canonical
tradition of female writing that has been a greater concern for feminists must
be preserved. To make women empowerment more unified, advanced, active, and adventurous,
the discipline of women’s studies is very important at academic as well as at
non-academic levels. Such an attempt needs cooperation and self-empowerment in
order to articulate, revive, preserve, and disseminate those issues related to
female identity and equality.
Challenges to Women
Empowerment
There have always been
challenges for the progress of women empowerment in the feminist discourse
itself. Third world feminism (synonymous with post-colonial feminism) emerges during the 1980s as a distinct
category oriented against mainstream feminism, because third world feminism’s
categorization of “othering” and marginalization in the mainstream feminist
discourse which has ethnocentric tendency and essentialist view in its
separation from black feminism and third world feminism. Though based on liberatory
experience, awareness, common goals of opportunities, equality, empowerment,
addressing silent or oppressed subject and sexist stereotypes, mainstream
feminism does not cope the multiple experiences of third world feminists who
are triply colonized in colonial society, postcolonial society and their own
society. Despite the charge of undermining and dividing western feminist
tradition, third world feminists receive impetus from the mainstream feminism
and envision their goals of exploring female experiences, empowerment and
equality.
Developing
countries are not yet free from traditional biases or stereotypes through which
the status of a woman is dehumanized and subordinated. In many ways it is often
seen that patriarchal society is more biased in favor of a male child in the
belief that the male child will inherit the clan. Another attempt is
attributing essentialist nature to women which decides the role of women as
natural. Women are still marginalized in patriarchal society which operates
through the concept of “phallogocentrism” that is associated with masculine and
symbolic meaning. There are many constraints including poverty, lack of
awareness, lack of support, lack of job opportunity, lack of money, lack of
inheritance, illiteracy, prudish participation, threat, violence, less media
exposure, and lack of courage to confront the situations or claim their
rights.
Conclusion
Last but not least,
females are always stereotyped everywhere, shown as an object of desire; less
are talked about their individuality, equality, and empowerment. Postfeminism
is not a discourse, rather it is a task for females to discover how females can
become individual and ask for right to live and think freely. It is the bold
assertion of the sexuality and there should be the liberation of an individual
being from the very discursive function of gender and sex.
It can be said that various
regional, national and international conventions, organizations, provisions,
and laws are to be framed to empower women against discrimination and
marginalization that exist at every level of society. In most of the developing
countries women are poor and underprivileged. A few women are engaged in
services and other activities. They need a more human and bottom-up approach for
their development in economic, social, cultural and political spheres. Truly,
the women in the developing countries need to be empowered but it is not
possible without their own understanding of the reasons of their disempowerment
and the realization of their position and collective strength in which the
essence of empowerment lies. There is also a need to break a number of real
dichotomies affecting women. Women need to stop the undesirable, to transform
biased practices and create new visions. Mere access to education, employment,
and development cannot help them in the process of empowerment. It requires a
positive approach to their all-round development in a given society.
To promote gender equality and
empowerment, the women’s issues must be implemented accordingly. It cannot be
possible unless women can come with awareness and help to self-empower
themselves. By challenging and subverting gender bias and unequal discursive
power relations women can gain power, visibility of their representation in all
spheres of their lives. However, to conclude, it can be said that more work
needs to be done at every level to create an atmosphere of positive attitude
and collaboration.
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