Nihilation of femininity in the battle of looks: a Sartrean reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A temporary matter”
The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the masculine logic of Wester...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2016
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/10153/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/10153/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/10153/1/10312-38509-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals.
Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately
connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the
masculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman’s entry into a dominant
scopic economy signifies her inevitable confinement to passivity. This essay aims to examine
the sexual politics of metaphors of vision in a literary text that is controversially argued to be
a voice for the subordinated Indian immigrant women in the US. As one of the most
influential schools of thought in Western philosophy, the Sartrean paradigm of sexual
difference is employed to investigate this allegation by identifying the latent binary system at
work in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, who has garnered substantial yet controversial critical
attention over her representations of gender. Specifically, this essay focuses on Lahiri’s
prefatory story to her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies
(2000), to unravel the manner her exercise of vision in this narrative perpetuates the
dichotomies of a male subject and a female object pre-established in the traditional
hierarchies of gender in the West. In this story, Lahiri (un)wittingly privileges masculinity
over femininity and reduces the latter to a typically disgusting Sartrean female body of holes
and slime. Hence, notwithstanding infrequent emasculated images of the male subject, it is
ultimately the masculine that, in the battle of looks between male and female, nihilates the
Other to the state of “being-in-itself” and enjoys supremacy over the feminine. |
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