GENDERING THE CULTURAL TRAJECTORIES OF INDIA: A WOMAN’S VIEW ON THE OBJECTIVE VICTIMIZATION OF THEM WITHIN SOCIO-POLITICAL SCENARIO!

Abstract

Queer lens has provided us avenues to perceive everything critically. The term ‘queer’ is open-ended and it is indeed important to know how this open-endedness of the term ‘queer’ has made itself politically more efficacious. Marginalization can be considered as a chain of events taking place in a society to create certain restrictions for few and power for the rest. Gender, class and caste are further divided into layers, creating a stratified structure where power dynamics moulds and produces identities, not for recognition but for marginalization, oppression. Masculinity can be understood as those roles which are conditioned in a body, which is assigned ‘male at birth’ and is expected to be ingrained and followed, so as to maintain the “nude-make-up” of binarized naturality! Sexuality is a spectrum of desire that anatomies experiences at different stages, time and space, and Femininity stands as those socially constructed “natural” rules that makes a ‘vagina’ grow and become that successful ideal woman for whom all ‘phalluses’ are waiting. My experiences motivate me to draw the cultural context and social creation of ‘gender and sexuality, femininity and masculinity, rape and politics’ within Indian framework; how intersectionality of marginalization(s) in these already oppressed sections needs an examination and exploration along with the sense of guilt. Noting Helene Cixuos Laugh of Medusa where she presents in an exhilarating manner how the ‘subject position’ open to vaginas and phalluses are distinctive within a phallogocentric symbolic order and how therefore the representations and re-presentations of these identities undergoes a crisis, that churns from this clear source of differentiation. Hence, the aim of this article is to analyze and critically perceive how these terminologies acts as devices or political weapon and are situated within Indian cultural framework, so that, the operation of power to produce continues unquestionably.