Women and Emotional Variabilities: Reading of the Delicate Complexes ‘Subjecting Asha-Binodini’ in Tagore’s Chokher Bali

Abstract

Women have often been deployed from many social representational practices for their absently marked subject positions; they have been made to function as the ‘subjects’ of absent political representations. Feminism as such had no pinpointed strategy of commencing in Indian geography, except for personalities protesting against social rules to demand equal spaces for the women. In the field of Indian English Literature that can be considered as feminist writings, we indeed have remarkable contributing personalities like Mahasweta Devi, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many more. Culture functions as a foundationalist fable in shaping identities and sustaining them, and such Bengali culture has also created women as a separate entity definable by few ‘fixed’ characteristics of linguistic absence. In this regard Judith Butler beautifully stated that “Women are the sex which is not “one”. Within…a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable…women represent the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity” (Butler, 13). Rabindranath Tagore’s literary pieces has often been called feminist works for they constructively deconstructed the intricate cultural stigmas. Tagore’s presentation of women was both subversive and culturally vibrant, few dominated; while few were dominated, which my paper would try discerning by the application of queer-post-structuralist feminist theory.