Criticism Of Discourse

Voices of violence

The pressures of our times make it impossible for us to overlook the ideological constructs of any discourse. The systematic oppression by patriarchy along with sexism has amply shown that it was never an act of unconsciousness. Language and literature is already ideologically constructed before we learn to speak or read.

As pointed out by Michael Ryne, “what begins as a parochial matter of pedagogy expands far beyond the classroom and academic politics once literature, criticism and theory are seriously taken as being about the encounter of readers with all forms of situated discourse, or, even more broadly, about language intricately marked by culture.”

Students need to be initiated into the study of literary theory and cultural studies and this can be done when teachers begin to destabilise the established “patriarchalism of traditional discourse.”

At the outset, the editor Bishakha Datta emphasises, “if I could rename this book, I would call it Trespassing in the Nude , nude because the word instantly evokes images of the body, and much of the violence described in these pages is etched on the body.”

The eleven essays in this collection take up this violence against the physical body of the woman, violence that prohibits her from even having a say in routine everyday functions such as “how to clothe, or feed… or nourish, cherish, work, entertain, pleasure, sex.” And any intervention by a woman that questions the dictates of the family or society provokes the response of violence so as to keep her in her place.

Incomplete justice

Though the awareness of the deeply embedded violence against women had largely remained invisible around the early 1970s, legal reform did receive an impetus from the women's movement in India. But unfortunately “justice for women has not even reached double digit figures.” It is for this reason that the book is aptly titled 9 Degrees of Justice .

It was in the 1980s that social activists began to speak against rape, dowry deaths, sati, domestic violence, etc, but sadly these issues still abound in the country. Add to it the violence resulting from caste, religion or class and you have women bearing the brunt of it all: ‘Women in India continue to face violence not just because they are ‘women', but because they are Muslim women, Dalit women, women of a particular tribe or ethnicity, women who are poor, or women caught in the cross fire between revolution and the state.

Offense and Criticism in the Marriage Debates « Public Discourse

, Stefan Collini summarizes our resulting hesitation toward argument by explaining how debate is shut down when members of criticized groups believe they are at a historical disadvantage. For many contemporaries, he writes, “an enlightened global politics” requires “treating all other people with equal respect and, second, trying to avoid words or deeds which threaten to compound existing disadvantages.” Given their historically disadvantaged and ostracized position, Collini reports, it is thought that some “social groups … have an equal right to hold or express their convictions without being ‘dissed’ by anyone else.” In other words, to argue against a historically disadvantaged group is apparently to commit an intrinsically hateful, bigoted, and offensive act.

Offense cannot but emphasize “the subjectivity of the person offended.” Yet Collini rightly insists that the mere fact of feeling offended is an insufficient reason to believe that one should take offense; rather, there is “some element of conviction that such a reaction is legitimate or justified.” Since one who takes offense realizes to some degree that he reacts to a case “that others will find appropriate or persuasive … about something generally acknowledged to be significant,” his mere feeling of being offended is not endowed with “unchallengeable authority.” Nevertheless, if the dominant culture is thought to be “constituted by precisely those widespread assumptions and habits” that the offended party finds offensive, appeals to general acknowledgment as the standard of legitimacy hardly settles the problem of subjectivity. Indeed, it is precisely when the majority culture is tone-deaf that an oppressed group’s subjective experience allegedly requires no other justification than its own offense.