Kathryn Lasky, “Women’s Voice Counts” (Published)
The American women did not await the 21st century to express their disapproval of matters of general interest. At every stage of human history, they always assert their presence as agents of social development and promoters of liberties; they prove their ability to serve humanity. In all parts of the world, despite the deliberate ideological restrictions inflicted upon them, they show integrity, decency, and honesty; their pragmatism, literacy, actions, and ideas serve as bow. Those qualities enable them to free themselves from all forms of ostracism and subjugation. Along the march of history, when defending their common cause, some of them sometimes lose their lives, others are incarcerated, but the survivors remain committed and hopeful. They continually fight to climb the social ladder. In socio-professional and political sectors where men are hostile, they demonstrate absolute resilience. A retrospective glance at the US history helps to revivify the American women’s involvement. Labeled as vulnerable and passive beings, they embark on a timeless struggle whose purpose is to restore their tarnished image and dignity. Better still, their awareness enables them to eradicate the prejudices, social inequalities, and barriers, which disadvantage and devalue them. Like other Western countries, the United States has a long tradition of marginalizing women. Its excluding policy is narrowly connected with patriarchal tradition; a practice, which emerges not only in the family sphere, but also on the political stage, where women are deprived of their suffrage. In such circumstances, they suffer from male domination with impunity. That burning social injustice is pictured by writers, such as Kathryn Lasky whose literary works pay tribute to the American suffragists for their boldness and great sense of duty in the construction of democracy in America. As a field par excellence for the symbolization of social facts, literature appears as a location where the American women’s bravery and ingenuity are realistically expressed. Therefore, the study of Laskian female characters’ trajectories through the textual prism is advantageous. For that purpose, the use of Derridean deconstruction as a methodological tool will be helpful. This will scrutinize the political scope of Laskian female characters’ struggle for suffrage through two axes: “A masculinized political system” and “women’s awareness and US democracy.”
Keywords: Freedom, Resilience, ostracism, suffrage, woman
Oral Literature and the Representation of the Image of the woman in the Contemporary African Context: The Study of Nso, Mbum and Idoma Proverbs (Published)
The paper investigates the representation of the image of the woman in oral literature using selected proverbs from Nso, Mbum and Idoma oral communities. The paper is anchored on the prediction that these proverbs are both ideologically and aesthetical relevant to the communities that produce them. The thrust of argument of this paper resides around the premise that the languages of the people are vectors of their significant view points, and collective cultural experiences. The study holds that as an aspect of oral literature, proverbs serve various functions and one of such is that as mirrors of the social and cultural experiences of the people they can be read as instruments that reveal how women are viewed, thought of, expected to act, live and behave in the society. From the functionalist perspective and the relevance theoretic lens, the paper sees proverbs as contributing in uncountable ways to the positive transformation of oral communities due to their dynamic and transcendental character. The analysis revealed that the selected proverbs under scrutiny in this study are effective instruments through which one can perceive the representation of the image of a woman in most African oral communities for a better transformation, recognition, and reevaluation of developmental policies.
Keywords: Oral literature, Proverbs, Representation., image, woman
The Arab Woman in Confrontation with The Forbidden Trinity (Published)
The oppressive reality of the Arab woman has undoubtedly made Arab feminist literature its own features. The woman’s search for freedom is undoubtedly more able to express her injustice and oppression than the man because she suffers most from tyranny and oppression. Thus, feminist literature is the best experience for the woman to extract her rights, restore her deprived freedom through writing, raise her voice and exercise the freedom of expression that she has been deprived of for so long. She took out her pen and started “talking like Shahrazad”, reveʿAling with her tongue her experiences and desires, and expressing her concerns and pains. In recent years, she is no longer writing to defend what has been stolen from her demanding change and freedom. Writing for her is no longer a defensive device, but an offensive system in which she condemns and retʿAliates against the man. In her revolutionary feminist narrative, she demonstrated her offensive tendency against all the taboos of the forbidden trinity: politics, religion, and sex, and demonstrated a clear challenge to social norms as well as the literary norms that were established by the masculine establishment. This study, therefore, shows how Arab women writers are able to break the forbidden pillars of the Forbidden Trinity by presenting each other’s experiences and testimonies in their quest to challenge this oppressing trinity and to face its censorship powers.
Keywords: Arab, confrontation, forbidden trinity, woman