https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.057
Sites of Resistance and Change: Mapping Contours of Indigenous Feminism
DR. SREEKALA.K
Associate Professor
Department of English
Govt. College Chittur, Kerala
Abstract: India’s Northeast is a unique geographical space inhabited by a multitude of ethnic communities having distinct social and cultural codes and beliefs. An added lure of this land is the wide array of writers, engaged in literary and academic pursuits. This article is an attempt to analyze the interplay of gender, space and agency in the political and social context of India’s Northeast. The concept of a regional genderscape as elaborated by Anindita Datta is explored to sketch the regional differences of gendered lives embedded in patriarchal social system. Datta’s concept is integrated with the methodological strategy, namely, ‘Periscoping’, enunciated by the feminist political geographer Nancy Hiemstra. The life-world of female characters represented in the selected story of Temsula Ao, a prominent writer from Nagaland, is analyzed to examine how domestic spaces are negotiated to challenge patriarchy. Datta has attempted to define indigenous feminism as the resistance of women positioned within the genderscape of classic patriarchy, especially in Indian contexts. The story “A Simple Question” by Temsula Ao is analyzed from the perspective of periscoping to examine how gendered subjects create feminist counter spaces and script agency using embodiment as a tool. These feminist counterspaces are non-hegemonic, as they operate against the grain of hegemonic spaces, and they are multilayered, existing both in physical and experiential terms. Again, as Datta says, such counterspaces represent a temporary subversion, and also site of resistance, created by women within classic patriarchy through the deployment of banal everyday acts within the household.
Keywords: Indigenous Feminism, Counterspace, Periscoping, Embodiment
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