The history of women's struggle for self-determination and an authentic identity has been a persistent one. Their autonomous identity has long been threatened by the control exerted by dominant social ideologies. The desire for a free and empowered self-gathered momentum after the birth of Radical Feminism in the first half of the twentieth century. Under the banner of radical philosophy women writer's adopted searching queries and strategic shifts in confronting masculine myths and stereotypes regarding their gender. Poetry became a suitable genre to question the imposed identities. As a result, a reactionary " identity poetics" came into being across Europe. Poets like Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood and Adrienne Rich undertook a poetics that largely dealt with rediscovering female identity. However, Rich, while moving through different theoretical perspectives, established lesbian identity as the only possible political identity that could release a woman from all patriarchal clutches. Therefore, the paper attempts to analyse Rich's poetic quest and culmination of her search for a radical lesbian identity. The paper foregrounds it's theoretical background in feminist criticism. Besides, Rich, being herself a theorist, provides a foundational basis for her own critical concepts.
T. Shah· International Journal of Eng...· 0 citations
Through varied significant and strategic ways male, the patriarch has been able to keep captive not only the physical but also intellectual and psychological potential of a female being.And this hegemonic ideology got strengthened and promoted via social structures. As a consequence, significant ways and means of discrimination and disempowerment of the female race got embedded in the very foundations of these socio-political institutions. In this connection, the Academy embodies a symbolic significance along socio-historical lines. As an important cultural institute, the academy has been pivotal in shaping, generating and disseminating knowledge and other cultural artefacts. Throughout the ages, under the colossal impact of androcentrism, it has been the bastion of masculine power and privilege. Female writers and theoreticians across cultures have attempted a critique of the academy for its biased role in gatekeeping female agency. Adrienne Rich, an acclaimed theoretician, has attempted an exhaustive analysis of this cultural institution in promoting gender discrimination and entrapment of the female gender. Therefore, the present paper is an attempt to critically analyse Rich's radical critique of androcentric knowledge -its structural and operational components. This paper analyses the strategies Rich recommends for a feminist re-evaluation of the academy. Besides feminist theorising, the paper makes judicious use of Rich's own theoretical pronouncements as articulated in her seminal books, “Blood, Bread and Poetry” and “On Lies, Secrets and Silences”
T. Shah· International Journal of Tea...· 0 citations