"WHERE IS MY PLACE IN FEMINISM
I think I must state in the beginning itself that the
essence of this article or the issues or
questions which I'm going to raise has been predominantly
influenced by my own
experiences
My experience of patriarchal social oppression was not just
about being a woman because
patriarchy is more harsher on me for being classified as
"physically disabled Indian women",
who according to the society rather needs sympathy and
special care than political and
social representation.
Recognizing my sociocultural and political positioning in a
patriarchal society like ours is a
much more difficult task for me because the already
intolerant society is more intolerant
towards me.
Initially, I thought having supportive parents is enough to be
able to led an easy or you can
say a " good" life but after some time when i
started pushing my limits to reach the goal of
living a normal life just like others then i realized that
life will going to be a much more
difficult task to pull off than i thought and this becomes a
'new normal' for me in a very initial
stages of my life and the most common instance of this was
that the patriarchal structure of
our society has titled many normal things in life as a
privilege for me like "travelling
alone"..." "Getting your work done by
yourself"... more specifically i should say that this
structure has resisted me a lot from becoming a normal
independent woman. And this
whole oppressive scenario is incomplete without those
offensive comments which I need to
bear on a daily basis which also need to get the credit for
increasing my emotional enduring
capacity to some other level.
But the purpose of this article was not to brag about my
life difficulties for being physically
disabled but the much greater reason for my disappointment
was the ignorance and
exclusion of this area of women suppression within the
feminist agenda of modern day
society. It was painful and disillusioning realization to
recognize that patriarchal
suppression of disabled women occupy a multifarious and
marginalized position especially in
Indian feminist discourse. Plural identity crises of
exploitation make our experience of
societal oppression blurred in a modern feminist discourse
and my purpose of writing this
article is to make a urge to make this specific arena of
women oppression within this
patriarchal setup more inclusive and addressable in a
popular feminist agenda of the 21st
century.
Nisha Hussain, is a political science final year student,
who firmly believes in the vision of making equality a normal public
recognition.
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