Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the re-appropriation of Western feminist claims and discourses through the prism of literature in South Asia, where women’s struggles are rooted in a cultural context where the relations to men, nature and traditions are certainly specific.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the re-appropriation of Western feminist claims and discourses in South Asia, where women's struggles are rooted in a cultural context where the relations to men, nature and traditions are certainly specific. It shows how contemporary feminist cultural production (literature, but also cinema) in South Asia bears witness to a particular and alternative culture where the notion of gender and the difference between sexes are deeply nurtured by complex traditions and mythologies of femininity and masculinity. For example, if Mallika Sen Gupta's essays on gender (such as Strilinga Nirmana, "The construction of Womanhood", 1994 and Purush Noi Purushtantra, « Not man but Patriarchy», 2002) are certainly nourished which contemporary Western discourses on gender issue, her poetry is however traversed by an oral folk culture that belongs to the traditional women whom Mallika addressed to. This perspective is crucial as it allows to rethink feminist and gender theo

ries as fundamentally located and historicized, inherited from and intimately connected with a cultural and historical context, despite the universalist agenda of some Western feminist discourses.