Section 2 The Literary Body

#### **Chapter 5**

## Perspective Chapter: Subjectification and Objectification of Women in Media

*Eni Maryani and Reksa Anggia Ratmita*

#### **Abstract**

This chapter will elaborate on the objectification and subjectification of women in the media. The dilemmatic situation between the process of objectification and subjectification of women in television dramas will have implications on women and ultimately on how society sees and positions women. One of the media realities in Indonesia, soap operas, has become a television product that is very popular, especially among women. Currently, soap operas generally occupy prime time which is owned by almost all televisions, therefore the advertising revenue from these shows is very tempting. A popular soap opera can reap advertisements in one episode up to billions of rupiah. Meanwhile, television viewers to date also occupy the largest audience percentage compared to other media. The question is what are the implications on the self-development of women's audiences and society's view of women. Based on that, this chapter will discuss an introduction to the subjectification and objectification of women in the media as a phenomenon, both conceptually and theoretically. Various realities of objectification and subjectification that occur in several media and will also be described, the last section will describe a critical study of the existing cases and how changes were made possible and by whom.

**Keywords:** subjectification, objectification, women, media, soap opera

#### **1. Introduction**

This article discusses the position and role of women in the media or specifically, discusses the representation of women's positions and roles in soap operas produced and aired on Indonesian television. Soap operas in Indonesia are considered popular television programs and therefore generally become shows that occupy primetime television. At the beginning of its development, soap operas in Indonesia aired once a week, but later the most popular soap operas eventually broadcasted every day and are known as on-running soap operas. In addition, the duration of 1 hour per one broadcast would later eventually increase to 1.5 hours per one broadcast, which would be added up by the television station into 2 hours or even increased into 3.5 hours during special events such as New Year's Eve in one broadcast. Television station's policy in extending broadcast hours can be accessed through news uploaded by online media, with an additional note at the end of the news that said that "the program may change their broadcast hours according to the TV station's policy" [1, 2].

The existence of soap operas which are quite intensive both in terms of duration and frequency affects the audience, who are generally women. This condition is assumed to have a significant effect on women as the audience. The representation of women in the media, which is continuously accepted by the audience, can eventually be considered as a true representation of the reality of women. This assumption is in line with one of Gerbner's cultivation theory hypotheses which states that "the more time a person spends watching television, the stronger the tendency is for that person to equate television reality with social reality" [3–6].

In line with some of these views related to the reality and representation of gender in the media, Brodolini et al. draws the conclusion that although audiences have the option to either accept or reject content from media and the meaning of the content itself [7], the media system still has the power to own the decision of which gender would appear and be represented as role models. All media content eventually becomes an important source of information about a gender that imposes or challenges our own ideas in regard to said gender itself [8].

Meanwhile, other studies [9, 10] raised their findings of how media content shows or tells women could only offer their bodies or their faces, and in regards, women spend a lot of their time taking care of their physical appearances. In other words, the struggles of feminists who are trying to fight for gender equality are not only dealing with patriarchal culture and men's perspectives, but also media content that subordinates, weakens, and objectifies women. Therefore, media content needs to be continuously criticized regarding the unfair representation of women's values and how this representation is carried out.

In addition to raising the values of gender bias found in Indonesian soap operas, this paper will also reveal the involvement of women as subjects in making soap operas and how the position of women as subjects in stories actually plays a role in the construction of a representation of women and its perspective in the media. This discussion is important in reference to Gill Rosalind [11]'s findings and analysis which highlighted the occurrence of sexual subjectification among European women. According to Rosalind, sexual subjectification occurs when they observe the existence of women as a subject, through their appearance, consciously making themselves sexual objects within their own community.

Rosalind observes that one of the best-selling T-shirts from a British high-street fashion store French Connection which read "fcuk me," taking inspiration from "fcuk football," was a huge success. Said T-shirt is seen worn by young women everywhere, emblazoned on their chests, competing on the street, in the club, and on the tube with other similar T-shirts declaring their wearer a "babe," a "porn star," or "up for it," or giving instructions to "touch me" or "squeeze here" [11]. According to Rosalind, this surprised him not only because of the sexual self-presentation the women offered but also how alienated these women actually were and how terms that objectified women developed. Only one generation before, women were fighting not to be objectified, not to be reduced to the size of their breasts, or not to be consumed as a mere sexual object; yet now the women paid a lot of money (the T-shirts are not cheap, with \$30/£20 per use) to show their self this way [11].

In line with Rosalind's view, this paper is also based on the idea that women's involvement in the process of sexual subjectification is more worrying than women who are sexually objectified by other parties, whether it is by men or by culture. Efforts to encourage women to be more educated and have a variety of abilities that

#### *Perspective Chapter: Subjectification and Objectification of Women in Media DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110903*

are not inferior to men in the public sector are one of the hopes so that they are able to be the subject of their own lives. However, in line with the phenomenon observed by Rosalind, the women, who are positioned as subjects in several soap operas in Indonesia actually objectify other women or even themselves.

This condition challenges the women's movement in making various efforts to restrengthen women's awareness that their ability or inability is not determined by their gender. To complete the data related to subjectification and objectification through the media, this research will focus its observations on two popular soap operas in Indonesia, namely soap operas titled *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta*. These two soap operas are assumed to contain contents that represent not only the objectification but also the subjectification of women.

Observations were made on the two operas from November to December 2022. During this period, the researcher chose 3 episodes of the soap opera *Ikatan Cinta* (episodes 896, 897, and 898) and the soap opera *Cinta Setelah Cinta* (episodes 257, 262, 263). Episode selection was carried out qualitatively based on the data needed to get an overview of the subjectivity and objectivity issues of the two soap operas.

Referring to the narrative aspects of the film included plot, premise, characters, and conflict [12]. The data for the three elements were obtained from the scripts of the two soap operas studied. A script is a story evolved through pictures. It has a subject, usually the main character, happened in a place, while doing their thing which is called action [13]. To understand the narrative of a story, Branigan [14] claimed that there are two different sources. The first source is diegetic or information that can be accessed easily by the characters in the story. Information is available in the narration. The second source is non-diegetic or information that can be accessed directly by the audience. In other words, the narrative of a film, in this case a soap opera, provides a way for the audience to feel certain emotions and the audience can choose to accept or reject them [14]. Therefore, to obtain an overview of the attitude of the audience towards the two soap operas, interviews were conducted with six viewers. To get an overview of the context of the audience, the informants were selected with different gender, ages, and work backgrounds.

#### **2. Subjectification and objectification**

This theoretical framework places the body and position of women in the family and the community based on the sociocultural context with the aim of explaining the position of women in the media and the objectification of women in the media. Based on the theory of objectification, the main meaning of objectification refers to the attitude of men who explicitly make sexual innuendo or comments focusing on women's bodies. Usually, the objectification of women is related to their sexual objectification, which arises when a woman's body is considered separated from herself as a human being and the woman is seen as a physical object of male desire [15].

The objectification of women makes them vulnerable to experiencing oppression or violence regarding sexual harassment. However, in general, women are not aware of objectification towards themselves because culturally, women are constructed to see the world through a man's point of view. Objectification theory also suggests that many women are sexually objectified and treated as an object which is judged on the basis of their usefulness to others [15]. In general, objectification theory assumes that the objectification of women affects how women see themselves.

Objectification experienced by women can occur directly or indirectly. When this happens indirectly, it will involve the internalization of women's experience of objectification, which then turns into self-objectification [9]. Self-objectification makes women see themselves only as a body and not as whole human beings [16].

The objectification of women arises because of patriarchal habits and culture which consider women as weak creatures so that they are objects that can be controlled by men. According to Nussbaum, there are seven indicators involved in treating an object: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity [17]. Women unconsciously develop behaviors that tend to obey and support self-objectification as a result of patriarchal culture. This behavior is known as self-objectification. Calogero [18] explains that self-objectification arises when an objectifying view develops among women themselves so that they see themselves through the point of view of those who supervise or control them and women participate in supervising themselves to be in accordance with said parties' perspectives itself. Sexual objectification produces self-objectification, which then turns into self-surveillance, and causes psychological and mental health consequences that threaten the [9].

Self-objectification affects how women live and interact socially. According to Saguy et al. [19], objectified women tend to limit their presence in social interactions by speaking less when the other person is a man. Women who are influenced by an ideology, for instance, a sexist attitude, will increase their level of self-objectification [20]. Self-objectification can be considered as a consequence of an ideological pattern that justifies and preserves the status quo socially [21]. Other research has shown that the more materialistic women are, the more likely they are to adopt an objective view of themselves and monitor their bodies more closely [22].

Sexual objectification based on the female body is considered to be the most common and obvious form of patriarchy and sexism. Sexual objectification of women appears as a fragmentation of a sexual nature so that women are only seen apart from their physical appearance and separate from their personality. According to Ref. [23], women internalize messages that are objectified and make themselves an object to be seen and assessed based on all attributes that are not competency-based. The other concept is sexual subjectification which occurs when the existence of women as a subject, through their appearance, consciously makes themselves sexual objects within their own community [11].

Cupo [24] introduces "women subjectivity," an analysis that explains how women's subjectivity removes the subject status out of women's bodies. They argue that the female body is a subjectification because the female body is a manifestation of male power in a patriarchal culture. Women, in women's subjectivity theory, cannot be fully said to be oppressed because they can be involved in the pressure, inequality, and exploitation that occurs to themselves. Women can position themselves as a subject who consciously participates in this inequality. Women also have the opportunity as subjects who consciously make themselves subjects even though they are aware of the pressure and exploitation that occurs.

Based on the theories and various concepts that have been developed, the reality and representation of women include the process of subjectification and objectification. This process is a challenge for feminism which seeks to improve the position and role of women, or even otherwise support patriarchy and male perspectives that weaken and harass women.

#### **3. Soap operas and their development in Indonesia**

The dynamics of the development of Indonesian soap operas began with the creativity and needs of media practitioners to develop media content both as works of art and as commodities in the media industry. This section will describe the development of soap operas in Indonesia and two soap operas that have been very popular in Indonesia for the past 2 years, titled *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta*.

#### **3.1 The development of soap operas in Indonesia**

Soap operas are called electronic cinema, or Sinema Elektronik (Sinetron), in Indonesia, a term coined by Sumarjo, one of the founders of Jakarta Institute of Art (Institut Kesenian Jakarta-IKJ). It refers to a series of cinematic broadcasts that can be watched through electronic media (television). This term is then used to call serial drama broadcasted on American television, known as soap operas. Soap opera first appeared in 1930 in the form of a serial drama broadcast on American Radio. At that time, the drama series was very popular among housewives who liked to listen to the radio in their spare time or while doing household chores. Referring to this phenomenon, this drama series program promoted a golden opportunity for companies whose target market is housewives to advertise various soap products, namely laundry soap and bath soap, and this led to the term 'soap opera'. Around 1940, serial drama or soap opera which was originally broadcasted on the radio then switched to color television created by Peter Goldmark. In Spain, soap operas are also developing and are known as telenovelas [25].

The development of soap operas in Indonesia began with the broadcast of a television series called *Losmen* on TVRI Indonesia, which was produced by senior Indonesian theater players at that time, Tatiek Maliyati and Wahyu Sihombing. As a television series, *Losmen* was taken very seriously, supported by well-known artists at that time such as Mieke Wijaya, Mathias Muchus, Dewi Yull, August Melasz, and Ida Leman. This series tells the Life of Mrs. Broto who manages an inn (in Indonesia called losmen) with her family and the various attitudes and behaviors of the inn tenants. Mrs. Broto's family as the inn manager is shown as a family that has a harmonious relationship with their tenants. The simplicity shown by *Losmen* and its ability to present the daily life of Indonesian people very well made *Losmen* one of the most popular events at that time [26].

Entering 1995 to 1998, many private broadcast stations were produced and existed at that time. Accordingly, the theme of the soap operas on private television slightly shifted in terms of story ideas, taking and adapting stories from feature films of the 80s instead of doing original work, such as *Lupus, Olga*, and *Catatan si Boy*. Then in 1998, Multivision Plus, one of the film-making companies in Indonesia, made the soap opera *Tersanjung*. This soap opera is the longest-running soap opera in 1998, consisting of 356 episodes which are divided into several seasons [25]. In line with the rating system that has become a reference for television producers for advertising purposes, the presence of soap operas is increasingly associated with obtaining ratings issued by the AC Nielsen rating agency. Ida Farida, one of the Indonesian women filmmakers, decided to move to the television industry after filmmaking activities in Indonesia declined in the 1990s. She wrote and directed soap operas for television and thus marking the start of the production of soap operas by women.

This consideration resulted in soap operas that were very different from the soap opera *Losmen*, both in terms of story ideas, filmmakers, and the artists who became the main characters. In addition, the soap opera production system that succeeded in attracting the audience's attention shifted from weekly broadcasts into daily broadcasts, then known as on-running broadcasts. In such a production process, the actors are forced to memorize the scenarios and understand the story as fast as possible. There is little to no opportunity to explore the characters or the situation and context of each scene.

In this context, acting is merely a technical work for the actors so that they can appear and speak as written in the scenario. There is very little chance that every scene contains some kind of depth of acting from the actors. Because of this, some female actors do not even have the opportunity to understand how women are positioned or identified in soap operas that involve themselves as women.

#### **3.2 Popular soap opera: Ikatan Cinta and Cinta Setelah Cinta**

This section is based on a narrative analysis of the content of two popular Indonesian soap operas and interviews with female viewers of the two soap operas. The soap operas studied are *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta*, which are two soap operas that are currently very popular in Indonesia.

*Ikatan Cinta* is currently being aired daily on RCTI (Rajawali Citra Television) at 20.00 (GMT + 7). It first aired on 19th October 2020 and has 1.025 episodes as of now (22 January 2023). *Ikatan Cinta* is telling the story of Andin and Elsa, two sisters who like the same man named Nino. Their relationship got worse when Elsa knows that Nino will be married to Andin. Elsa slandered Andin and said that Andin is getting pregnant with another man's child. She also said that Andin has killed the man. Because of Elsa's words, Andin got jailed and Nino did not want to admit that Andin is indeed pregnant with his child. After Andin got out of jail, she met with Aldebaran, Roy's brother, who seeks revenge. However, Aldebaran fell in love with Andin and decided to adopt Andin's child, thinking that the child is Roy's child.

The duration per episode is variative, between 60 to 120 minutes. Five days after its first being aired on television, *Ikatan Cinta* got the highest rating for the program that aired on prime time. Museum Rekor Dunia Indonesia (Indonesia Museum of World Record) named *Ikatan Cinta* as a prime-time soap opera that has the biggest national audience share. It broke the record to have more than 40 percent of the audience share in 100 days constantly. It also got a lot of awards, both domestic and international awards. One of the biggest awards that it has achieved is the award from the Indonesia Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy as the best creative economy creation with the highest audience share. But *Ikatan Cinta* was losing its audience when Arya Saloka, the main actor in the soap opera, got into a scandal and needed to leave the soap opera. However, because of the demand of the audiences, Arya got cast again and *Ikatan Cinta* now has a stable rating again. Not only because of the change of the main character, but *Ikatan Cinta* also lost most of its audience share because of the new soap opera aired by the rival television channel.

*Cinta Setelah Cinta* is a soap opera that airs on SCTV (Suryacitra Television) every day at 19.00 (GMT + 7). Because it airs in prime time, *Cinta Setelah Cinta* is one of the biggest rivals of *Ikatan Cinta*. The story goes with Starla and Niko that are happily married to each other. They have a daughter and a son together and everyone thinks that they are the perfect family. Little did they know, Niko is having an affair with Ayu, their old friend from high school. Ayu's husband knew about their affair

*Perspective Chapter: Subjectification and Objectification of Women in Media DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110903*

and tried to catch them but he, Ayu, and Niko got into an accident. Ayu's husband is declared brain dead and he donated his heart to Niko. Being thankful to Ayu, Starla never suspected Ayu and Niko's relationship. When Starla found out about the affair, she asked Niko to divorce her but Niko insisted that he will never leave Starla.

*Cinta Setelah Cinta* first aired on 16th May 2022 and now it has 360 episodes (22 January 2023) with a duration of about 60 to 100 minutes per episode. It was nominated as the most popular primetime program at Indonesian Television Awards 2022. Their main actor and actress also got nominated at the same event. The program itself is not only being aired on television, but also on the VOD platform called Vidio.

The reason why we chose these two soap operas is that *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta* are two primetime programs that have a high audience share. The scriptwriters for these two soap operas are also women. They also have the same stories that revolve around women and their struggles in married life. The women characters got betrayed by their husbands but they still need men to continue with their life. These two soap operas showed women's subjectivity as being the subject of patriarchy. Despite the same main theme of the stories, their audience shares are still higher than any other programs that air at primetime.

#### **4. Women in Indonesian soap operas**

Based on the narrative analysis carried out on the two soap operas *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta*, there are various visualizations, symbols, and dialogs that weaken and marginalize women and position them as subordinate to men. In addition, it was found that several women who acted as subjects objectified women as well. The objectification of women in this study is interpreted as a process of degradation of women's roles and abilities.

#### **4.1 Women in Indonesian soap operas**

The decline in Indonesian local film production in the 1990s made many filmmakers turn to soap operas, and women filmmakers were no exception. One of them is Ida Farida, who made her debut as a soap opera writer and director in the 1990s [27]. This marked the beginning of the emergence of many female filmmakers in the television industry.

The director in *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta* development is a male director, but the screenwriters for the two soap operas are women. The screenwriter for *Ikatan Cinta* is Donna Rosamayna, who uses a pen name Theresia Fransisca. The development of *Cinta Setelah Cinta* also involved a woman screenwriter, Serena Luna.

In the textual system, it is assumed that content created by women usually constructs a narrative motif based on women's wishes and processes what is received by the audience based on women's point of view [28]. However, based on an analysis of the content of the soap opera *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta*, the storyline and characterizations of female subjects still reflect women's views that are in line with men's perspectives as well as gender-biased patriarchal values. The storyline and the characterization of female subjects in the soap opera contain various objectification of women.

The female screenwriters in the two soap operas are subjects who have the power to make powerful stories, but instead, they create storytelling that weakens and demeans women. The objectification carried out by female screenwriters also

produces female characters who, as subjects, are also involved in objectifying women. There is a scene in the soap opera *Ikatan Cinta* that depicts a female entrepreneur declaring her resignation as the head of the company because she thinks that a man, her son-in-law, is a more suitable person to become a company leader. The built-up story does not present scenes related to aspects of competence for someone who deserves to be a company leader, only that he is a man of the family and he is the one who has the right and ability to be a leader. Another scene reveals the thoughts of a woman who is able to work professionally so that she has a higher career position than her male partner, but then thinks that her success is the reason for her partner leaving her. In addition, in *Cinta Setelah Cinta*, there is a scene that represents a wife who at first dares to express her life choices but ultimately chooses to remain silent when forced to comply with her husband's decision, even though it differs from her wishes and/or life choices.

Referring to these findings, women screenwriters as subjects actually objectify women. In addition, the representation of the main female character in the storyline of the soap operas they wrote also objectifies women themselves. The perspective of women in soap operas, instead of giving views that are unique to women and siding with women, reinforces men's perspectives and existing patriarchal values. The existence of women writers as subjects actually become a subject that perpetuates women's unconsciousness toward the objectification of themselves. The audience is only seen as a segmentation that needs to fulfill their desires or be supported by their way of thinking (even if it harms them) so that soap operas can be easily accepted and enjoyed by many women [28].

In the end, media content is in line with the media agenda, which prioritizes its interests to have high-rating soap operas. In other words, female screenwriters play a more important role in maintaining the audience segmentation of soap operas as a market and the high rating obtained becomes a reference. When the storyline and characterizations of the characters in a soap opera produce high ratings, no changes are deemed necessary. Therefore, the existence of women writers as subjects of power in writing soap opera scripts has not been able to produce various alternative thoughts to make women respect themselves more and have more confidence in their own abilities.

Based on several descriptions of the content of the two soap operas analyzed, it can be said that a woman who makes up a story in a film is not necessarily able and aware that, as a subject, she can produce images of women who are not gender biased or objectify women. In other ways, a story about feminists is not always determined by a female writer or director, but by whether gender-biased values and the process of objectifying women are contained therein or not [29].

Encouraging and supporting women to act as subjects in the media industry is not enough to influence media content or soap opera stories that are pro-women. However, efforts are needed to build awareness about women's perspectives on women as subjects who can be involved in producing content that are more prowomen by not demeaning women and subordinating women to men.

#### **4.2 Narrative analysis of women in soap operas**

Subjectification in soap operas occurs when women have a position as a subject, either as a screenwriter or a female character in the story, which will still represent objectification to herself, or a woman who does not fit her position as an autonomous subject. Meanwhile, objectification occurs through thoughts, attitudes, or behaviors

#### *Perspective Chapter: Subjectification and Objectification of Women in Media DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110903*

that demean women both in terms of weakness, incompetence, and inappropriateness in their position as autonomous subjects.

The soap opera *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta* present women as the main characters that construct reality both about themselves and about other people. The depiction of women shown as subjects in both soap operas is deemed quite interesting, in which there are women as wives who are described as having independent characteristics and able to survive when their husbands are not around. Apart from that, there are women who succeeded in their careers, women who are mistresses, and women who are cheated by their husbands.

Based on the narrative analysis of the soap opera *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta*, this study examines four elements of narrative which include the plot, premise, characters (characterizations), and the conflict that occurs [12, 13]. Through this narrative analysis, the objectification of women will be revealed in the content of soap operas whose scripts are written by women, meaning that as a screenwriter, she has a position as a subject.

#### *4.2.1 Storylines that subordinate women*

Based on the analysis of the storyline, it was found that the plot that directs the women's lives tends to be very dependent on men and even becomes subordinate to men. The storyline of *Ikatan Cinta* follows how Andin, as the main female character, has to go through various trials and sufferings caused by the struggle between a man and her sister, Elsa. Her sister even slandered Andin in order to get the man she wanted resulting in the destruction of Andin's household and Andin had to be imprisoned.

Even though the plot of *Ikatan Cinta* develops and Andin later finds her happiness with another man, Andin is still placed in a subordinated position. Andin still places herself as a woman who depends on men, in this case, her own husband. In episode 397, Andin said that she was very grateful that her husband had returned because the integrity of the family was in her husband's hands. In episode 398 Andin also said that she was sure she would be fine because her husband would take care of her when she was sick.

This is reinforced by the meaning created by the audience who say that the title literally means "bonds of love." The use of the word 'bond' becomes the main thread that there is an understanding that both parties are bound to each other, in this case, the main character involved. However, when the "bond" is associated with the word "love," the meaning of women and men becomes different. Culturally, the bond of love that occurs between a man and a woman will make a woman an unequal partner regarding the continuity of the bond of love. In a romantic relationship, culturally, Indonesian society tends to place women as the party responsible for its continuity. Therefore, women must place themselves lower, be more patient, or be more supportive of men or their partners because if the bond of love cannot be maintained, the woman tends to be blamed. Even women feel they have no right to sue their partners when they are unfaithful.

One of these thoughts is manifested in the soap opera *Cinta Setelah Cinta*, which tells the story of the struggle to get a man between the female characters in this soap opera. In the soap opera *Cinta Setelah Cinta*, two women who are bound by a debt of gratitude fight over one man who then brings a lot of problems in everyone's life. Starla, the main female character, has to accept her destiny of losing her husband, who in the story is taken by another woman. The soap opera also creates a storyline

that places Starla as a woman who feels that she cannot fight or defend her marriage. This happens a lot because the woman thinks it is her fault or she does not feel worthy of demanding her husband respect her marriage.

It's not enough to place Starla as a woman who cannot do anything when her husband treats her badly, this soap opera also creates a storyline that depicts Starla's husband considering Starla a lowly woman because she cannot do anything about his affair. Then his partner not only has an affair but marries his mistress even though he has not divorced Starla. The storyline seems to place Starla as a weak person, causing her husband to marry another woman, showing that again the woman is blamed.

Even when a woman does not feel guilty for breaking up their relationship because a man or his partner broke or weakened the bond of love between them, she will look for other women to blame instead of blaming the man or her partner. This happened with the emergence of the term "*pelakor*" (mistress) in the soap opera. In episode 262, Starla and her husband argue about her husband's affair. Starla then said the term "*pelakor"* toward the woman who is having an affair with her husband. The term "*pelakor*" among Indonesian women refers to the abbreviation of the phrase "*perebut laki orang*" (taking other's men) which means that it is the mistress themselves who seize married men or not because the men are unfaithful or even like to chase other women who do not like the man at first or do not want to accept the man. Even though there is a possibility that the mistress may seduce others' husbands, as a man, he also has a responsibility to avoid these temptations and commit himself to the bond of love with the woman he has chosen as a lover or wife. The word "*pelakor*" does not see that possibility or does not think in that way, the term represents the way of thinking that women are wrong and they should be responsible for supporting men so that they can become good men. They have to be there to please and support men even when they hurt them.

Referring to the discussion above, the title of the bond of love (*Ikatan Cinta*) in terms of the storyline has directed to a story that places women as the subordinate of men, especially in their love relationships. Meanwhile, the issue of infidelity and the term "*pelakor*" in the soap opera *Cinta Setelah Cinta* emphasizes that a woman's job is to support a man and must try to prevent a man from making a mistake. Therefore, wives and women who are seduced by men must be able to act to make the man a loyal husband. It is the wife's fault if her husband has an affair with another woman. It is the woman's fault if a man is tempted by her, but if a man seduces a woman, then it is the woman's fault if she is tempted. Therefore, the existence of women is for the benefit of men and makes men become respectable or good figures even though women have to make sacrifices to achieve this. If it does not work then as a woman, she is a failure, as a wife, she deserves to be betrayed, as a woman who has an affair deserves to be blasphemed as a seducer of married men (*pelakor*).

#### *4.2.2 Men in Women's life*

The premise is important in the narrative analysis of a film because the premise contained in a film will color the entire storyline. Through the premise of women, the soap operas *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta* build storylines about the female characters in the two soap operas. The question that arises is what kind of premise does to the story of *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta* have or is based on.

Based on an analysis of the soap opera *Ikatan Cinta* through the life stories of its female characters (Andin & Elsa), a conflict is presented between the two women

#### *Perspective Chapter: Subjectification and Objectification of Women in Media DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110903*

because they love the same man, Nino. Nino, as Andin's husband, also secretly accepts Elsa's presence as his life partner. This situation led to various conflicts in the lives of women so it became an obstacle to the happiness of the two women. A woman's life is centered on a man as a partner or a person who is loved by both women. The happiness of women and their sadness too originate from men. In other words, this soap opera turns women whose roles are protagonists into subjects who, through their choices, then objectify themselves by making a man who is unfaithful to their marriage as a subject that determines their happiness.

The premise that men are the determining subject of happiness in a woman's life even though the man hurts her is also reflected in the soap opera *Cinta Setelah Cinta*. In the soap opera *Cinta Setelah Cinta*, there is a woman named Starla, whose life seems perfect, but later her husband commits an affair and marries another woman without her knowledge. Starla's life then becomes full of suffering because she has to accept her husband's infidelity in her marriage.

The two soap operas with hundreds of episodes continue to extend the story to tell the story of a woman's struggle to get happiness from the man she loves even though he has betrayed her. Some of the good scenes in *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta* even suggest that women chosen as the mistress only have a negative impression. There are efforts to make men as parties who actually become victims of the women they are having an affair with. Meanwhile, the female antagonist in this soap opera also ends up regretting all of her actions. She feels that she is living uncomfortably after getting the man she originally wanted because the man is not what she expected. In other words, men are again positioned as the center of women's lives.

In addition, although Andin as the main character is a woman who works as a lecturer, the soap opera *Ikatan Cinta* emphasizes Andin's role as a wife. As a woman, her role as a wife is more dominant. She does not forget her main duties as a wife and as a mother who continues to take care of her child while her husband focuses on his career. Other women in the soap opera *Ikatan Cinta* are also described as women who have power and appear actively in public spaces such as working and having high positions in a company, but they still place themselves under the power of men. In episode 896, Andin's mother says that Andin's husband is now responsible for all company decisions. Even though the owner of the company is Andin's mother, she still gives full power to men, in this case, her son-in-law or Andin's husband.

#### *4.2.3 Women and femininity*

Feminine or femininity should be understood as the attitude or behavior shown by someone [30] both male and female. However, feminine characteristics are then better known as attitudes and behaviors attached to women. Research reveals that when women confirm feminine values in themselves, this will affect their attitudes and behavior [31].

The female characters in both soap operas, namely Andin (*Ikatan Cinta*) and Starla (*Cinta Setelah Cinta*) are described as independent women but still spoiled. She is also an obedient figure to her husband who is a perfect embodiment of a wife in a patriarchal view. This view was received by the audience who revealed in the interview that Andin is a pious wife because she obeys her husband's words. In episode 397 there is a scene showing Andin trying to serve her husband in the car by providing him with a drink and asking if his husband wants a massage.

Besides that, the spoiled nature that is attached to women also appeared in episode 896 which was shown in the scene at the hospital, when Andin said that she could

only fall asleep if her husband came to sleep with her because she was sick. This dialog provides a view that women feel weak and need protection from men who are considered stronger.

The female characters in *Cinta Setelah Cinta* are described as women who have problems with their household life. Starla as the main female character has a character that tries to look tough but the soap opera, through its narrative, also shows that Starla feels weak. The character Sukma in episode 167 also describes a woman who accepts all the circumstances and problems she faces as a form of women's responsibility that must be able to save their own household life. When they cannot overcome problems in their marriage, they think they have to accept this fact and keep it to themselves. Because as a woman, Sukma understands that the failure of her marriage will be judged by society because she cannot become an ideal woman with the feminine values she should have had.

#### *4.2.4 Women's conflict as the Core of the story*

In general, the conflicts presented in the soap operas *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta* are conflicts between women and themselves and other women who both make men the center of their lives. Men, with all their betrayal toward women, are still considered as a source of women's happiness in these two soap operas. Women must fight so that in the end it is her who is finally chosen by men in their life.

In the soap opera *Ikatan Cinta*, the female characters Andin and Elsa experience conflict because they want the same man, Nino. When Nino became Andin's husband, Elsa had a personal conflict with her feelings of jealousy. The conflict developed into an open conflict against Andin when Elsa slandered Andin to destroy her household.

In the soap opera *Cinta Setelah Cinta*, the main conflict that occurs is the affair committed by Starla's husband. This conflict becomes the culmination of various problems that occur in the lives of the female characters. Starla must be faced with her husband's infidelity and their divorce. The female character named Ayu is a woman who is involved in an affair with Starla's husband and gets bad views from those around her with the nickname *pelakor* (a woman who takes another's husband). This means that Ayu is considered to be the person responsible for the affair itself.

The female characters in these soap operas are generally involved in various conflicts motivated by their dependence on men. The conflicts they experience with themselves or other women are generally due to men's attitudes and behavior that do not align with their expectations. The interesting thing is that these soap operas emphasize the open conflict between women rather than the open conflict between women and men.

#### **5. Discussion**

In soap operas, the presence of women is represented in two modes of existence, namely discursive and material [24]. They are represented in a discursive fashion through images, symbolic systems, and language. In the material mode, women are represented as they really are through their physical appearance, physical strength, and ability to speak and act. Both of these modes are present simultaneously in the female characters depicted in the two soap operas analyzed in this study; women, both as screenwriters and their works as well as female characters in the various characteristics and roles that exist in said soap operas.

#### *Perspective Chapter: Subjectification and Objectification of Women in Media DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110903*

The presence of women as screenwriters, independent wives, and entrepreneurs or professionals who are successful in their careers is the material presence of women which provides an alternative to the image of women that are considered as mere objects. However, discursively in the dialog that occurs or in the narration of the thoughts of the female characters presented in the soap operas as material subjects, they still represent women as objects or subjectification. These women present ways of thinking which are represented in various visualizations and dialogs both symbolically and narratively in various storylines.

A female screenwriter has a position as a subject who has access and power to represent women in a way that is different from the male point of view, both from the discursive and material existence of women. However, access and power are not enough to make a female subject able to become one that is not gender biased or different from the male perspective towards women. A female screenwriter as a female subject can also objectify women or self-objectify in accordance with the perspective of men who objectify women. Referring to the involvement of women in the process of objectifying women in soap operas, a narrative analysis of soap operas as media content is needed. Based on the narrative analysis which includes the storyline, premise, characters, and conflicts, there are important things that can be understood in the two soap operas studied.

The storyline of soap opera *Ikatan Cinta* and *Cinta Setelah Cinta* is an illustration that serves as an example of self-objectification by female screenwriters and the characters she created. What the female subject does, as a screenwriter, makes women, in this case female characters and female audiences, participate in positioning or accepting the role of women as objects.

This situation makes women increasingly alienated from their subjectivity as Rosalind has observed towards women in Europe who presented themselves as objects [11]. This is also in line with the idea that states that the results of self-objectification make women more vulnerable in fighting against an unjust gender status quo and also in their participation in collective action aimed at fighting the status quo itself [20]. The storylines and female characters in the two soap operas studied cannot be separated from their underlying premises. Both soap operas were built on the premise that men are the center of women's lives and also the main source of women's happiness.

Women who are involved in objectifying women, either themselves or other women, ultimately place themselves as a powerless woman. Loughnan et al. [32] also found that women who recalled situations that involved themselves objectifying other women led them to see their own as inhumane and immoral. Therefore, the consequence of selfobjectification experienced by women is a change in their personal free will, including the perception of their right to make their choices freely and consciously [33]. Referring to the soap operas studied, the conflicts that arise describe more conflicts created by women, both conflicts within themselves (internal conflicts) and conflicts with other women (external conflicts). There is a tendency that the conflicts that arise are conflicts based on women's choices to make men the source of their happiness and think that this is what they have to fight for, even though the men ignore or hurt them.

The analysis of the soap operas studied show that media content still reinforces the power of patriarchal culture and the male perspective on women, which makes women as objects that are degraded, marginalized, and oppressed in their life or social relations by men. Female audiences are convinced by the soap opera that a wife is very dependent on her husband, a woman is not worthy to be a leader, or a woman who is successful in her career or has a higher position than her partner will be abandoned by her partner.

The findings above are in line with other research regarding the representation of women's images in the media, the media constructs women as a form of fulfillment of the gender dichotomy. Women still have an image that reinforces masculine hegemony in media [34]. More specifically, the results of this study are in line with Supratman [34]'s research which also confirms Chesney-Lind's argument, that the image of women is shown through female characters that are dependent, friendly, fragile in relationships, and submissive in their domestic life. This image is considered as an answer to discriminatory practices against women. This is also the reason why women are often portrayed as victims while men are portrayed as perpetrators in the media. The media's construction of women's images is still considered as fulfilling the institutional system of gender and women's subordination because the media's image of women is still in the character of being dependent on men, resigned to life, taking care of children, or fragile in maintaining relationships [34].

#### **6. Conclusion**

The feminist movement, especially those that focus on the influence of the media on gender-biased or unfair social constructions towards women, still has big challenges. The first conference of the Council of Europe Network of National Focal Points on Gender Equality [35] concluded that the media's treatment of women and the reproduction of female stereotypes are related to violence against women in everyday life. Stereotypes and sexist representations affect women as citizens and violate their human rights. It should also be noted that all the processes that occur in the media today do not only make men as subjects who objectify women but also actively involve women in objectifying women.

Further studies are needed on media content related to stereotypes and sexism, freedom of expression and gender equality, the position of women in the media, and new media as a tool for positive change. Referring to the study conducted on soap operas in Indonesia, the Indonesian government needs to encourage the inclusion of gender issues in the education curriculum from an early age so that a perspective that is not gender biased can be built from the start. The government must also push for the enactment of the Broadcasting Conduct Guidelines and Broadcasting Standard Guidelines which prohibit the publication of content that objectifies women, contains sexist values and is gender biased in broadcast media, especially television, without violating freedom of expression in the media.

Feminists must work together with independent groups regarding control of media content, whether with academia, women's groups, or an alliance of media professionals to develop awareness regarding the influence of media on audiences. In addition, cooperation is also needed in an effort to develop awareness about gender values that are fair to women and women's perspectives that are different from men's perspectives on women.

#### **Acknowledgements**

We thank the Faculty of Communication, The Center for Research of Gender and Children, and The Center for Study of Communication, Media and Culture, University of Padjadjaran for supporting this research.

*Perspective Chapter: Subjectification and Objectification of Women in Media DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110903*

#### **Author details**

Eni Maryani1 \* and Reksa Anggia Ratmita2

1 University of Padjadjaran, Bandung, Indonesia

2 University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture, Paris, France

\*Address all correspondence to: eni.maryani@unpad.ac.id

© 2023 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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**Chapter 6**

## A Study of Nomadism and Rhizomatic Consciousness in Kamila Shamsie's *Burnt Shadows*

*Munazzah Rabbani*

#### **Abstract**

Past and present postmodern nomadic epistemologies as well as the gendered dimensions of nomadism have often served as intellectual sites of resistance to destabilize totalizing hegemonies and ideologies often sustained in the name of nation-states and nationalisms. In this context, this study traces the nomadic post/ trans-national ventures of Shamsie's protagonist Hiroko Tanaka, in *Burnt Shadows*, that define her life in an anti-genealogical spatial stance akin to rhizomatic existence rather than in a chronological temporal frame. For this purpose, this research employs Braidotti's notion of nomadic subjects as nomadic polyglots along with Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of nomads as war machines external to the state apparatus. Through the multiple geographical, cultural, national displacements and the resultant nomadic becoming experienced by her protagonist, Shamsie seems to question the relevance of nationalism as an over-arching grand narrative in the works of second-generation writers of Pakistani origin. And by contextualizing her work as a tale of spatiality rather than of temporality, Shamsie seems to map the alternative fictional terrain of history, which is not concerned with the chronological mapping of national spaces; it is rather concerned with discovering new forms of nomadic interconnectedness without being bound to a single space or teleological purpose.

**Keywords:** nomadism, rhizome, de-territorialization, nationalism, global imaginary

#### **1. Introduction**

*It's great to have roots, as long as you can take them with you. Gertrude Stein*

Kamila Shamsie's fiction is multi-faceted and is difficult to categorize under a single label. Four out of the six novels that she has penned so far deal with national politics and its ensuing impact, predominantly, on women who, in most cases, reside in Karachi. In most of her works, "violence is caused by national politics" ([1], p. 386). But, in her fifth novel *Burnt Shadows* (2009), she deviates from this tradition of Karachi novels and pens a work that spans two continents, six decades, and events ranging from the Nagasaki bombing in the Second World War in 1945 to the 9/11

destruction of Twin Towers in the US in 2001. It was in *Burnt Shadows* (2009) that she "broke away from her focus on Karachi and Pakistani politics" ([1], p. 391). On the other hand, Western perception of literatures being produced in the third world countries by writers like Shamsie essentializes a homogenous reading as made evident by Jameson's quite famous yet controversial construct of National Allegory in his work "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" [2] that scrutinizes, in a totalizing mode, the production of third world literary representations in the form of 'national allegories' with univocal, political, nationalistic and, to some extent, binaristic constructions of meaning as opposed to, what Jameson believes, the Western individualistic construction of meaning so rampant in Western literary representations. Jameson's construct of National Allegory limits and/or privileges the literatures being produced by the once colonized nations as national allegories dominated by the political turmoil(s) taking place in these nations. But this simplistic or rather naively unitary perspective becomes susceptible to re-signification in the times of globalization. In this context, Shamsie's fiction that deals with national as well global issues needs to be investigated to probe the kind of allegories/narratives being produced in her works. *Burnt Shadows* (2009) deals with the displacement(s) of a global nomad Hiroko Tanaka in a postnational setting. It revolves around the life of a Japanese woman Hiroko and her emotional mapping of the global events and spaces. So, in this study, Shamsie's *Burnt Shadows* (2009) has been probed as a work of nomadic feminist allegory rather than a national allegory that includes Braidotti's reading of nomadic subjects [3] along with Deleuze and Guattari's Rhizomatic consciousness [4] and their conceptualization of nomad as a war machine (2010). This work also probes how nationalism as an over-arching construct limits and/or privileges nomadism among the male and female protagonists in Shamsie's narrative.

#### **2. Nomadic imaginary and rhizomatic consciousness**

Rosi Braidotti, in her noteworthy study of nomadism (1994), exposes the arbitrary and constructed nature of cultural and national affiliations and posits a theory of female subjectivity based upon multiplicities and a strong sense of deterritorialization to resist totalizing hegemonies and ideologies often sustained in the name of nation-states and nationalisms. Being a nomad means, for Braidotti [3], being "a subject in transit" (p. 10); it refers to "the permanence of temporary arrangements" (p. 11) and "the nomadic tense is the imperfect: it is active, continuous" (p. 25). It is founded upon a state of "unredeemed otherness" which involves physical and esthetic mobility not as an imperative but as a willful choice directed against territorializing oppressive forces to resist "assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self" (p. 25).

The past and present nomadic epistemologies bear little resemblance and are quite significant in the context of this study. The nomadic subject in this postmodern global/ urban world does not necessarily bear resemblance to the ruthless male nomadic subject portrayed in the myths as violent or as "War Machines" [5] external to the state apparatus involved in looting or sacking the cities. This "(neo)Nomadism of suburban unrest" ([3], p. 26) is concerned more with the metropolitan space(s), rather than the traditional nomadic trajectories. Hiroko, in *Burnt Shadows* (2009), also moves from one urban space to another in an act of "molecularisation of self" ([3], p. 16).

Of particular significance, in Braidotti's nomadic imaginary, is the figure of nomadic polyglot which is highly relevant to this study. Braidotti believes that nationalism feeds on the exaltation of a particular language, usually the mother tongue of

#### *A Study of Nomadism and Rhizomatic Consciousness in Kamila Shamsie's* Burnt Shadows *DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110904*

the majority group in a nation-state, and that particular language is used to reinforce national identities and cultures. Nomadic polyglot, on the other hand, does not believe in the supremacy of any particular language and exists in-between languages which gives her/him a vantage point to deconstruct identities. The nomadic polyglot understands language/words to be in a state of transit, with meaning forever on the move, and hence, disavows the concept of steady identities and mother tongues.

Deleuze and Guattari [4] establish the relation between the individual nomadic body and the state apparatus. Basing their work upon Foucault's biopower which perceives and exposes the relationship between the individual body and the state power as linear, structured around an hierarchy, Deleuze and Guattari perceive the nomadic subject as a flat surface/body (in opposition to the vertical, temporal perception of subjectivity so dominant in Western critical tradition) devoid of hierarchy and defined by spatiality rather than temporality, and this subjectivity tends to be selfsufficient; in fact, they term nomadic subjectivity as a "body without organs" to resist territorialization and exclusionary state practices.

Closely associated with nomadic subjectivity is the figure of rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari [4] introduced it to explain nomadic consciousness in opposition to the figure of tree that has vertical/linear roots. Rhizome also denotes underground roots, but these roots grow sideways, horizontally, not vertically. Rhizomatic consciousness is central to the nomadic imaginary as it puts an end to teleology in Nomadic ontology. As Deleuze and Guattari [4] put it:

*A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb 'to be' but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, 'and… and…and…' The conjunction carries enough force to force and shake the verb 'to be'…… The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end (p. 25).*

This state of interbeing, in-between-ness, non-fixity is closely associated with the emphasis on de-territorialization in these times of globalization. The politics of location that it entails involves a repudiation of the notion of rootedness or roots, and emphasizes the significance of 'routes', of passages, of states in transition. The figure of rhizome is particularly relevant for the understanding of Hiroko's post/transnational ventures that define her life in anti-genealogical spatial stance rather than in a chronological temporal frame.

#### **3. Nomadic imaginary, linguistic polyglot and nomadic desire**

Shamsie's *Burnt Shadows* (2009) is a work of nomadic allegory that traces the dis/ re-locations of Hiroko Tanaka who hails originally from the war-torn Japanese city of Nagasaki but goes through an empowering process of metaphoric nomadic becoming. Shamsie, in her work, has situated her protagonist in post-national nomadic imaginary and, through her multiple geographical, cultural, national displacements, Shamsie questions the relevance of nationalism as an over-arching grand narrative in the works of second-generation writers of Pakistani origin. Nomadic consciousness resists and challenges all sorts of situated rootedness in the form of nationalistic,

linguistic, cultural belonging and emphasizes "blurring boundaries without burning bridges" ([3], p. 4). This "permanence of temporary arrangements" (p. 11) entails a "kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior" (p. 5). Hiroko and her fiancé Konrad display this resistance to established norms and patterns of existence along with Raza—Hiroko's son—whose nomadic performativity involves a different kind of mapping or tracing.

Shamsie has also placed Hiroko in contrast to the other nomads in her narrative—particularly her son Raza who is a nomad very much like his mother but who prefers adherence to the past nomadic trajectory rather than the postmodern nomadism of his mother. The gendered dimensions of nomadism have been highlighted by Shamsie in her narrative as the nomad as an "open-ended, interconnected entity" cannot be homogenously categorized by assimilating or negating the differences "between men and women" on the one hand and "among women" on the other hand ([3], p. 158). For this purpose, this study, first, draws parallels between Hiroko's and Konrad's nomadism and then between that of Hiroko and her son. In the end, it briefly touches upon Kim's nationalistic revival that refutes the notion of women as a homogenous nomadic category.

As mentioned earlier, *Burnt Shadows* (2009) is a tale of spatiality rather than temporality. It maps different spaces in an act of defining the "fictional terrain" ([6], p. 198) of history; it is not concerned with the chronological mapping of national spaces. It encompasses, through the characters of Hiroko and Konrad, "a reterritorialization that has passed through several versions of deterritorialization to posit a powerful theory of location based on contingency, history and change" ([6], p. 198). Konrad, due to his multi-national lineage (a German who lives in Japan and has an English halfsister who lives in India), is an apt example of nomadic post/trans-national performativity. When he is sent by his British brother-in-law James to Azalea Manor in Nagasaki, Japan, to take care of his inherited property, he is fascinated at once and the most by the photographs displayed in that house; photographs that contain the hint of a promise, a visionary promise akin to the nomadic "visionary epistemology" ([7], p. 31), photographs that show "Europeans and Japanese mixing uncomplicatedly" ([8], p. 6) and he instantly believed in that promise. As the allegorical representation of nomadic imaginary, he manifests faith in discovering new forms of interconnectedness without being bound to a single space or teleological purpose. His nomadic performativity is evident from his act of keeping diaries, his purple notebooks which contain "research and observation about the cosmopolitan world" ([8], p. 9). His very act of keeping and maintaining these notebooks can be deemed as an act of subverting the linear form of national history based upon exclusionary practices. As the nomadic rhizomatic consciousness is "the opposite of history" ([4], p. 23), so his notebooks can be termed as works of alternative "fictional terrain" ([6], p. 198) that challenge the sedentary nature of national linear history by highlighting the fascisms inherent in national discourses. Hiroko describes Konrad's desire to write these notebooks in these terms: "I always thought his obsession grew from a need to believe in a world as separate as possible from a Germany of 'laws for the protection of German blood and German honour'" ([8], p. 69). This desire to rebel against or challenge the macro/micro-fascisms inherent in national discourses is an integral part of nomadic becoming which entails a need to challenge the hegemony through the act of moving away and also through the act of imagining or envisioning an alternative intellectual terrain, an alternative epistemology, which is represented through his notebooks. His notebooks also express a move away from the national discourses towards post-national cosmopolitan imaginary which is an integral part of the global imaginary. His rhizomatic becoming (spaced in three countries across two continents) expresses the very act of subverting hegemonies

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and macro/micro-fascisms which are often the consequence of narrow and suffocating nationalism. As the nomadic consciousness is both an act of de-territorialization and also of re-territorialization, so Konrad's act of moving away from the micro/macrofascisms inherent in German linear nationalism during the second world war is both an act of de-territorialization which leads towards re-territorialization. His disavowal of the German nationalist ontological space as an act of de-territorialization leads him to Japan in search of "a pattern of people moving towards each other" ([8], p. 68); hence, his act of moving away from micro/macro-fascisms is also an act of moving towards a visionary space which Benhabib terms as a Utopian "no-place". This Utopian space is a "space of critical no-whereness" (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32) where exclusionary practices are not legitimized, where hegemonies are challenged, a space enclosed in the intellectual terrains of Konrad's purple notebooks as works of alternative fiction. This Utopian "no-space" is the space of no labels, be it national, ethnic, religious, or cultural; a "no-space" devoid of strangeness or alienation or othering bestowed by these labels; a desert nomadic terrain containing the map of "a world in which he [Konrad] could have arrived in Delhi to see his sister… as an equal and not found that his Germanness, her Englishness, were all that mattered" ([8], p. 69). But this Utopian impulse was burnt to ashes in the Nagasaki bombing when, ironically, everything else in the neighborhood except the tree on which he had hung his notebooks remained unburnt, uncharred. The annihilation of Konrad's visionary notebooks which contain the map of nomadic Utopian "no-place" is highly significant and highlights the resistance faced by nomadism as a visionary epistemology at the hands of the sedentary forces of nation-states or nationalism.

Hiroko, on the other hand, can be termed a nomadic polyglot. She displays a kind of identification with the nomadic symbolic imaginary that makes her resist the idea of fixity and rootedness. As mentioned earlier, nomadic epistemology is premised on the idea of "permanence of temporary arrangements" ([3], p. 11) which involves physical as well as intellectual dis/re-location. Hiroko goes through this process of dis/re-location multiple times. She manifests strongly the tendencies of postmodern urban nomadism in contrast to her son Raza who exhibits an ambivalent relation to the past nomadic epistemology. Her identification with the nomadic imaginary is quite strong and can be traced in multiple ways. Her multiple dis/re-locations present a "fictional terrain, a reterritorialization that has passed through several versions of deterritorialization to posit a powerful theory of location based on contingency, history and change" ([6], p. 198). This 'powerful theory of location'—location as both the geographical location as well as a "notion that can only be mediated in language and consequently be the object of imaginary relations" (Rich as cited in [3], pp. 21–22)—entails also the notion of identification as an introspective process mediated via language through her multiple dis/re-locations. Hiroko's first act of dis/re-location was a deliberate choice and an act of refusal to identify with the identity bestowed upon her by the war, the 'hibakusha'—the person affected by the big bomb. It was this fear of reduced identity that led her to identify with the nomadic imaginary and to give up the sedentary nature of national being.

*It was the fear of reduction rather than any kind of quest that forced her away from Japan. Already she had started to feel that word 'hibakusha' start to consume her life. To the Japanese she was nothing beyond an explosion-affected person" ([8], p. 49).*

Her disavowal of the national location (Japan) to mediate through language the imaginary relations based upon identification is an act of nomadic becoming. This

geographical mapping is also an act of cartography—to exist in a mobile manner, to draw maps of the places visited, to contextualize one's existence without the need to cling to situated form of being or of rootedness. This disavowal also entails an unhinged form of existence, liberation from the normative modes of nationalist being and freedom to practice or embrace the horizontal modes of rhizomatic becoming. Here, the relevance of Jameson's National Allegory (1986) does become questionable in Shamsie's narrative as it is only when the protagonist has liberated herself from the identity imposed upon her by an event associated with the national imaginary (the bombing) that she is able to attain subjectivity and centralize her existence; it is only when she becomes a globe-trotter and steps into the in-between space(s) of nomadic becoming that she is able to sever her national ties and visualize a rhizomatic "No-(wo)man's land" ([3], p. 19).

*She had not thought of destination so much as of departure, wheeling through the world with the awful freedom of someone with no one to answer to. She had become, in fact, a figure out of myth ([8], p. 48).*

Hence, her identification with the nomadic imaginary gets intensified when she gives preference to routes not to roots, to departures not to destinations, to the act of transit and not to the teleological purpose behind it. And when she arrives, all of a sudden, at James and Elizabeth's home in India, she did appear to James as a 'figure out of myth' ([8], p. 48) as it was utterly impossible for him to categorize or label her. Her refusal to cling to national/gender/class identities or labels renders her into a figure utterly alien, impossible to be categorized according to the normative 'malestream' ([3], p. 6) patterns of existence.

*James was oddly perturbed by this woman who he could not place. Indians, Germans, the English, even Americans… he knew how to look at people and understand the contexts from which they sprang. But this Japanese woman in trousers. What on earth was she all about? ([8], p. 46).*

In the 'male stream' ([3], p. 6) national imaginary, hence, Hiroko has no space; she is an alien with no recognizable fixed roots or rather she is rooted in non-fixity, in non-belonging, and her roots are spread not in a linear sedentary mode rather in the horizontal spatial mode of rhizomatic being. She is a figure devoid of nationalities as a nomad has "no passport—or has too many of them" ([3], p.33); she is an alien body that resists assimilation or amalgamation. As a male patriarchal figure, James finds it difficult to comprehend this 'woman in trousers'. Hence, Hiroko as a nomadic figure challenges the phallogocentricism inherent in the national imaginary which categorizes masses especially women on the basis of their appearance and dressing.

James' wife Elizabeth, at that moment, also realizes and appreciates this challenge to phallogocentric monologism of 'male stream' thinking and wonders when did she start believing that "there is virtue in living a constrained life?" ([8], p. 46) Hiroko is a nomadic figure with a desire very much like that of Konrad to find Benhabib's Utopian "no-place" (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32) devoid of labels or nationalities and her presence turns Elizabeth into a desiring subject too. Elizabeth's very act of relinquishing her relationship with James and traveling to New York is also an act of giving up on the sedentary situated nature of marital life and shifting to nomadic existence as she does not want to be the "Good Wife" ([8], p. 117) anymore. Her move from India to London and then eventually to New York where she spends the rest of her life manifests identification with that mode of nomadic imaginary

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in which transit or move from one place to another is more internal rather than external. In this respect, she offers a contrast to Hiroko's nomadic wanderings from Nagasaki to India to Istanbul to Karachi and then to New York. Elizabeth's nomadism is more internal than external; one that does not require change in the nomad's habitat or place as she decides to get anchored in New York but it is a part of nomadic imaginary as nomadism, basically, involves "subversion of set conventions… not [necessarily] the literal act of traveling" ([3], p. 5).

Through her multiple willful dis/re-locations, Hiroko allegorically epitomizes the role of pre-state matriarchy in opposition to the patriarchal nation-state. The pre-state matriarchy which is nurturing and protective in contrast to the patriarchal nation-state which is imposing and controlling makes itself manifest in Hiroko's attempts to shield her father—"the traitor" ([8], p. 15)—from state control and brutality. Her father who is an "iconoclastic artist" ([8], p. 13) is repeatedly tortured and arrested for speaking out against the military and the emperor. The patriarchal nation-state arrests her father, bars her from working in the school where she went to teach German language and sends her to work in a munitions factory instead. Hence, rather than being nurtured and protected by the state, she and her father are banished and stigmatized. This control and manipulation are quite reminiscent of, what Kortenaar as cited in Lee [9] describes as, the reduction of people "to a single known quality" (p. 139). The patriarchal nation-state further banishes her and Sajjad and bars them from entering into India after partition. The role of nation-state can be further perceived through Raza's "teenage rebellion" when he yells at his mother: "I can't ask any of my friends home…with you walking around, showing your legs. Why can't you be more Pakistani?" ([8], p. 130) She also tries to protect Abdullah—her son Raza's childhood friend—and tries to smuggle him to safety in Canada. Hence, Hiroko allegorically symbolizes the nomadic maternal (no)space with no boundaries or labels, which is nurturing and yielding rather than controlling or unforgiving.

Shamsie has also employed various metaphors to symbolize nomadic and nationalistic modes of existence. Birds have been used by Shamsie as an ambivalent metaphor—a metaphor of nomadic becoming, non-belonging, and non-fixity as well as the representative of bloodshed and turmoil in the name of nationalism and nationstates. The birds carved on Hiroko's back symbolize the ravages of the 'new bomb', the horrors of war, the 'hibakusha'. The "three charcoal-coloured bird-shaped burns on her back, the first below her shoulder blade, the second half-way down her spine, intersected by her bra, the third just above her waist" ([8], p. 91) symbolize the impact of nation-states engaging in brutal acts of terror. Hence, the bird shadows burnt on Hiroko's body allegorically represent the nation-states and their strifes. But these birds also allegorically stand for the nomadic wandering spirit; they also represent the resistance to "assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self" ([3], p. 25). Sajjad also highlights the ambivalence in this metaphor as he resignifies the scarred back of Hiroko as "birdback" because everything about Hiroko is "beautiful" ([8], p. 91). Repeatedly, Shamsie employs birds as an ambivalent metaphor of horrors of nationalistic wars and the hopeful spirit of nomadism. Birds leave their comment in the form of "white streak" (p. 10) on Konrad's purple notebooks hung under the leaves; the silence in James' home at Delhi is only shredded by the "vibrant bird calls" which assure Hiroko that "there was nothing here she couldn't leave without regret" (p. 58); at Qutb Minar in Delhi, Hiroko circles the minaret like a bird while Sajjad thinks of her as a "wounded bird" but with "something more feral in her" (p. 81). For Sajjad, birds symbolize the permanence of Dilli in contrast to Delhi for "no matter how often he circled Delhi he would always return to world of Dilli" (p. 106).

Birds, here, allegorize Sajjad's rootedness in contrast to Hiroko's non-rootedness; his enthusiasm and spirit to belong to a certain place in this case the old Dilli which is in contrast to Hiroko's non-belonging nomadic spirit; his sedentary nature of belonging in contrast to Hiroko's rhizomatic non-linear consciousness. It is due to his belief in the sedentary nature of existence that he is the most distraught when he is forced to give up his Indian nationality at the time of partition. "They said I'm one of the Muslims who chose to leave India. It can't be unchosen. They said, Hiroko, they said I can't go back to Dilli. I can't go back home" ([8], p. 125). Birds as a representation of nomadic existence also appear in Karachi at Hiroko and Sajjad's home where she is fascinated by the "sudden chittering of sparrows" (p. 130). Birds as a metaphorical representation of the new bomb haunt Hiroko's life, especially when she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, she realized that "the birds were inside her now, their beaks dripping venom into her bloodstream, their charred wings engulfing her organs" (p. 222). Birds as an ambivalent allegorical representation of nationalistic violent belonging and nomadic becoming stand in stark contrast to the metaphor of cashmere jacket which was given to Sajjad by James. James also understands the imperial symbolic value of this act as he muses: "Discarded clothes as metaphor for the end of empire…I don't care how he looks at my shirt so long as he allows me to choose the moment at which it becomes his" (p. 35). Bilal [10] interprets this symbolic gesture as an act of transferal of agency from the colonizer to the colonized with the "discarded clothes" acting as the metaphorical representation of the empire. Shamsie interprets this metaphor as an act of discarding the empire and maintaining the persona of being in control when in reality the English had lost control and were being driven out of India (Shamsie as cited in [10]). Shamsie and Bilal [10] both interpret the cashmere jacket or the "discarded clothes" (p. 35) as an imperialistic and colonial metaphor. After her father's death when Kim gets hold of the jacket—the discarded clothes—in Raza'a apartment, she puts it on, and "it fitted almost perfectly—the sleeves only a little too long" ([8], p. 325). This borrowing and perfect fitting of a highly imperialistic and colonial metaphor is quite significant as it foreshadows the revival of nationalistic spirit in Kim which eventually leads to the undoing of both families—the Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs.

As mentioned earlier, Hiroko allegorically represents the role of a feminist nomadic polyglot. Polyglots comprehend and understand the slippery and treacherous nature of languages, their arbitrary constructed structures and the elusiveness and multiplicity of signifiers. Nationalism usually establishes a linear relationship with a particular (mother) tongue with chronological tracing of its evolution while nomadism deconstructs the idea of fixity and nostalgia for an origin that is associated with a mother tongue. Mother tongue, as Braidotti [3] puts it, "feeds into the renewed and exacerbated sense of nationalism" (p. 12) which makes the nomad pause and critically view the notion of steady national identities to burst open "the bubble of ontological security that comes from familiarity with one linguistic site" (p. 15). Hiroko exhibits this nomadic skepticism towards national languages/mother tongues right from the beginning of the narrative. It is her ability to move in-between languages that first brought her in contact with Konrad. More specifically, it was his visionary notebooks that contained the traces of a futuristic Platonic "no-place" (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32) that brought them close as Konrad wanted a translator to translate the letters for his visionary book. Their conversations always moved between different languages such as German, English and Japanese. As Braidotti [3] says that "being in-between languages constitutes a vantage point in deconstructing identities" (p. 12) so it provides both Hiroko and Konrad with a "vantage point" to perceive and challenge the constructed and arbitrary nature of national identities

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and identifications. It made Konrad understand and challenge the nationalistic and suffocating world of Germany and her laws, and it was due to her familiarity with multiple linguistic sites that Hiroko was able to give up her national space (Japan), work with the Americans as a translator right after the Nagasaki bombing, and move to India. It was her ability and desire to deal with multiple languages that brought Hiroko and Sajjad close to each other as she wanted to "learn the language they speak here" ([8], p. 57). It is due to her ability to move in-between languages as a "polyglot has no vernacular, but many lines of transit, of transgression" ([3], p. 13) that she is able to move in-between borders and cities, to be always in a state of transit.

Being a nomadic polyglot, Hiroko is able to perceive languages and history in a horizontal spatial frame rather than in chronological linear setting. For her, all languages and signifiers have a rhizomatic non-sedentary relationship which makes it possible to comprehend the "fictional terrain" ([6], p. 198) of history in rhizomatic and non-linear fashion. As Hiroko is unable to 'settle' into a single linguistic point of origin, similarly she is unable to believe in a single version of history; for her the events that took place in Nagasaki in 1945 belong to the "fictional terrain" of alternative rhizomatic history. She conjures up "fairy tales" ([8], p. 177) to word her stories of pain and horror of Nagasaki bombing.

*The one about purple-backed book creatures with broken spines who immolate themselves rather than exist in a world in which everything written in them is shown to be fantasy. The woman who loses all feeling, fire entering from her back and searing her heart,… The men and women who walk through shadow-worlds in search of the ones they loved. Monsters who spread their wings and land on human skin, resting there, biding their time. The army of fire demons, dropped from the sky, who kill with an embrace ([8], p. 177).*

This description of alternative rhizomatic history which is non-linear, in which there are no victors or losers, where there is merely the space to suffer and mourn, and where the human suffering has been transported to the domain of fairy tales and demons, displays Hiroko's nomadic critical sensibility which makes it possible for her to be a subject always in transit, always on the move—be it between borders or between fairy tales and linear history. To her "language came so easily it seemed more as though she were retrieving forgotten knowledge than learning something new" ([8], p. 60). For her, the very search for linguistic origin entails not something associated with national language or mother tongue, rather it is the acceptance or embracing of the arbitrariness of language(s), to recognize their futility and hollowness but despite that ascribe to signifiers that aspect of "visionary epistemology" ([7], p. 31) that makes her perceive their porous interconnectedness, their transformative potential that destabilizes stereotyped commonsensical meanings to resist established structures of power and to re-define subjectivity; in short, to word a personalized version of alternative history. By wording her personalized fairy tale version of Nagasaki bombing, she attempts to make manifest history at corporeal lived level of her body by turning her body into a text, a signifier, a corporeal language with fairy tales inscribed onto it.

Hiroko's son Raza is also a nomadic polyglot who exists in-between languages and is "struck by the maddening, fulminating insight about the arbitrariness of linguistic meanings" ([3], p. 14). For him, like his mother, languages contain the map or the cartographic illusion of the transformative "no-place" (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32), the "visionary epistemology" ([7], p. 31), to hinder the "free fall into cynicism" ([3], p. 14). His ability to converse in different languages seems to mirror

the non-sedentary and non-linear nature of his existence. His very name "Raza Konrad Ashraf" is an amalgamation of multiple nationalities—German, Indian, and Pakistani. His features make him susceptible to different labels—Japanese, Chinese, Afghan, Pakistani, and when he joins CIA in Afghanistan, he acquires the broadly homogenous label of Third Country National.

Raza's nomadic existence, despite being a polyglot like his mother, is different from the one his mother adhered to. It is premised upon a sense of lack—a lack developed by his failure to obtain the ontological grounding imperative for a sedentary nationalistic notion of subjectivity. Repeatedly, Raza is deprived of ontological grounding or roots while living in Karachi as he is teased due to his features:

*…a wretched group of children who had danced around Raza earlier, tugging at the skin around their eyes while chanting, 'Chinese, Japanese..' ([8], p. 182).*

Being deprived of ontological grounding in national/istic terms renders Raza into a global nomad in contrast to his mother Hiroko who herself had disavowed the national space for a nomadic existence. After the start of Afghan war, Raza is repeatedly asked about his nationality as he was frequently mistaken for an Afghan from the Hazara tribe. His desire to acquire new words, new languages, seems to be consequence of his lack; it seems to be an effort to fill the gaping void left by the absence of an over-arching grounded national identity through signifiers.

*I want words in every language….I think I would be happy living in a cold, bare room if I could just spend my days burrowing into new languages ([8], p. 146).*

For him, belief in a single "linguistic site" ([3], p. 15)—a mother tongue—fails to provide the ontological grounding which his body has also denied him; his desire to dive into new words, new vocabulary, and to transit between them hints at his desire to establish a de-territorialized identity through language.

As mentioned earlier in this section, Hiroko's feminist nomadism is more prone towards postmodern nomadism that deals with cities, urban unrest, not necessarily with the desert spaces. In contrast, the past nomadic epistemology that Raza identifies with has traditionally been associated with spaces outside the city, an exteriority, not an interiority, existing outside the state apparatus. Deleuze and Guattari have discussed the functioning of past nomadic apparatus in their work *Nomadology: The War Machine* (2010). Deleuze and Guattari define it as "the mechanisms" used by "the counter-state societies" to challenge and prevent the dominance of nation-states (p. 15). These mechanisms, Deleuze and Guattari believe, can take two forms: huge mechanisms spanning the entire globe or "the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of state power" (2010, p. 15). Hence, these dissenting sections of society challenge and resist the hegemony of the state through nomadism. But there is no denying it that the first form of nomadism contains the propensity to evolve into a hegemonic system as Deleuze and Guattari have included the global systems of economic control and the global wars in this category.

Deleuze and Guattari [5] further highlight the ambivalent role of religion in traditional nomadic imaginary. Religion is considered to be part of the state apparatus that is used to construct a certain interiority, to impose a certain nationalistic version of history. Bhabha as cited in Lee [9] terms it as the "pedagogical" role of the state in which education is used to condition the masses to accept a certain nationalistic

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religious viewpoint (p. 3). But "religion is fundamentally a center that repels the obscure nomas…nomads do not provide a favaourable terrain for religion" ([5], p. 47). Both Hiroko and Raza exhibit their nomadic resistance towards state's control and manipulation of religion. The "pedagogical" (Bhabha as cited in [9], p. 3) role of the state has been highlighted by Shamsie through the repeated failures that Raza has to go through in his Islamic–Studies intermediate exam. He failed that exam twice because "the jumble of words only grew more jumbled, bright spots of light appeared before his eyes as he tried to read, and nonsensical answers to questions he didn't even understand kept coming to mind in Japanese" ([8], p. 144). His absolute failure to respond in a coherent way to ontological queries left him bewildered and he simply wrote, "There are no intermediaries in Islam. Allah knows what is in my heart" ([8], p. 144) and handed in his paper. Nomads, as Deleuze and Guattari [5] put it, do have a sense of the absolute, but this internalization of the absolute may be difficult, for the nomad, to reconcile with established religious forces because of the dissenting nature of their existence. It is due to the insistence of the state on "devotion as a public event, as national requirement" ([8], p. 145) that Raza fails to perform in Islamic-Studies exam. His nomadic becoming is hindered or impeded by sedentary forces of religious nationalism. The "fictional terrain" ([6], p. 198) of nomadism does not "provide a favaourable terrain for religion" ([5], p. 47) as is evident from Hiroko's unease at the "new wave of aggressive religion", which made youths with "fresh beards" come to a book shop in Karachi to vandalize it for selling "unIslamic" ([8], p. 142) books.

Raza's polyglot nomadic becoming, moreover, is quite different from that of his mother's feminist nomadism in its propensity to function as a "war machine" [5]. Hiroko's postmodern urban nomadic becoming is premised on the notion of escape: escape from the ravages of war by moving from one urban city space to another—be it the bombing of Nagaskai in 1945 or the looming possibility of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan or the World Trade Center bombing in 2001—she is always in a state of transit, of becoming. To escape war, she does not revert to the traditional desert space of nomadism existing outside the state apparatus; it's the urban landscape of the global imaginary that fascinates her. Raza, on the other hand, displays the classic nomadic tendency to move to the desert spaces, not to seek an escape from war, rather to flee towards it; he reverts to the spaces created by the forces existing outside the sphere of the nation-state, an exteriority, not an interiority. He manifests this tendency, first, when he escapes to the war camp of 'mujahiddin' in Afghanistan. Ironically, it was the imposed identity of 'hibakusha' that made him escape the national space just like his mother, but unlike his mother, rather than escaping to the urban spaces of transnational nomadic imaginary, he escaped to the "barren planet" ([8], p. 214)—the harsh region bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan. The imposed identity of 'hibakusha' that had turned his mother into a postmodern nomadic globetrotter turned Raza into an alienated nomad who reverted to war to escape the labels imposed by the national imaginary. His very escape allegorically represents resistance to the enclosed space of national imaginary based upon the ethos of exclusion, not inclusion.

*…he realized he had been waiting a long time for confirmation that he was…not an outsider, no, not quite that. Not when he had lived in this mohalla his whole life… Not an outsider, just a tangent. In contact with the world of this mohalla, but not intersecting it. After all, intersections were created from shared stories and common histories, from marriages and possibilities of marriages between neighbouring families—from this intersecting world Raza Konrad Ashraf was cast out ([8], p. 189).*

Raza's escape, hence, to the war camps is outcome of the deterritorialization of the national space when due to his shared stigmatized identity with his mother and his "unPakistani looks" ([8], p. 259) he was made to feel like an outcast. Again, later in the narrative, Raza's decision to work as a translator for the private military contractors in Afghanistan and other war torn regions is an act of nomadic becoming. Hiroko also opted to work for Conrad as a translator and later for the Americans, but all her ventures were motivated by her desire to escape the ravages of war, unlike Raza who retreats to war-torn regions. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the form of nomadology as "huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relation to the states" (2010, p. 15). These private military contractors working on the global scale outside the boundaries of the nation-state act as an exteriority, not an interiority. Their form could not be reduced to the enclosed space of the nation-state but exists outside and above it. Raza's decision to join the private military contractors functioning in war torn regions is an act of merging or amalgamating the two forms of nomadism i.e. the "huge worldwide machines" and "the local mechanisms of bands, margins and minorities" ([5], p. 15). Both forms of nomadism are forms exterior to the national space and time; they exist as an exteriority, outside the "polis" (p. 51), the state law. But these private military contractors also highlight the ambivalence in the functioning of the nomadic war machine itself when this machine has been appropriated by the state, to do the bidding of a particular nation-state and impose its "aims" upon other states (p. 96). This duality in the role of these war machines is made evident when Raza fails to make his cousin Sajjad comprehend the difference "between working for the American military and working for a private military company contracted to the American military" ([8], p. 259).

Being a nomad is being deprived of history as "nomads have no history; they only have a geography" ([5], p. 62). They have no shared history as history represents linear hierarchical becoming. The only have shared geography and alliances. So, Raza exists only in different spaces; he is relegated to a spatial existence, not necessarily temporal—Karachi, Afghanistan, Dubai, Miami and other parts of the globe. This non-sedimentary rhizomatic spatial existence is emblematic of nomadic becoming outside the domain of the nation-state. Nomadic becoming is also closely related to the familial alliances forged due to the "potential of a vortical body in a nomad space" ([5], p. 24). These familial alliances are an act of rhizomatic horizontal becoming as in the case of Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs. The alliance of Elizabeth's family with Hiroko's family is an act defined by the rhizomatic consciousness: an act of conjunction, of interbeing, not of subjugation or linearity. But this alliance is threatened or rather put to an end by Kim's nationalistic revival which resulted in Raza's arrest in the process of saving Abdullah. Raza's final act of attempting to save Abdullah also manifests the revival of state's efforts to control the 'exterior' ([5], p. 51)—the migrations and the nomadic movements, populations and paths. His final act is also an attempt at transformation from being a war machine of past nomadic imaginary to the nomadism of the postmodern nomadic imaginary. His final act of surrender to the state's polis, the law, to save Abdullah is an act of Utopian re-vision and emancipation for Abdullah quite akin to Konrad's faith in a Utopian "no-place" (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32), a belief in nomadism as a "visionary epistemology" ([7], p. 31) to challenge and subvert hegemonies and binaries imposed by nation-states. Ironically, this very act of nomadic salvation was rendered almost futile by the nationalistic spirit of Kim who acted as the allegorical representation of the territorial nation-state. She not only did put an end to Raza's nomadic transformation from past to postmodern

#### *A Study of Nomadism and Rhizomatic Consciousness in Kamila Shamsie's* Burnt Shadows *DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110904*

nomadic imaginary, she also doomed the spatial alliance of Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs. Her nationalistic act was an act of subjugation, of hierarchy, of linearity, and a rejection of alliance and rhizomatic conjunction. Hence, the nomadic imaginary is overtaken by the national imaginary.

#### **4. Conclusion**

It can be safely said that Shamsie, in *Burnt Shadows* (2009), presents an allegory of nomadic becoming in global post-national setting. The presence of global deterritorialized forces of nomadism question the relevance of nationalism as a singular unitary perspective to evaluate the works of second-generation writers of Pakistani origin. *Burnt Shadows* (2009) cannot be labeled as a National Allegory as Shamsie situates her protagonists in a global deterritorialized world and their multiple dis/ re-locations emphasize that they traverse borders and boundaries without being situated in a single national location. Moreover, even within the nomadic epistemology, Shamsie highlights the ambivalence through the protagonists' identifications with the past and the present urban nomadic imaginaries. It emphasizes the gendered dimensions of nomadic epistemology, particularly in Hiroko's and Raza's cases where Hiroko's nomadism led her to urban spaces while Raza's nomadism led him to wartorn regions. Moreover, Kim's refusal to identify with the nomadic epistemology that resulted in the shattering of the spatial alliance of Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs also highlights that women cannot be labeled as a homogenous, non-chaotic nomadic group. The disruptions that exist within female subjectivity cannot be negated; rather Shamsie's narrative reiterates the need to comprehend female nomadic subjectivity in all its multifariousness and complexity.

### **Author details**

Munazzah Rabbani The Women University, Multan, Pakistan

\*Address all correspondence to: munazzah.6198@wum.edu.pk

© 2023 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

### **References**

[1] Bhattacharji S. Kamila Shamsie. In: Shamsie M, editor. Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English. Karachi: Oxford University Press; 2017. pp. 384-395

[2] Jameson F. Third-world literature in the era of multi-national capitalism. Social Text. 1986;**15**:65-88

[3] Braidotti R. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press; 1994

[4] Deleuze G, Guattari F. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 1987

[5] Deleuze G, Guattari F. Nomadology: The War Machine. Seattle, WA: Wormwood Distribution; 2010

[6] Kaplan C. De-territorializations: The rewriting of home and exile in Western feminist discourse. Cultural Critique (Spring). 1987;**6**:187-198

[7] Yaeger P. Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing. New York: Columbia University Press; 1988

[8] Shamsie K. Burnt Shadows. London: Bloosmbury; 2009

[9] Lee J. Aesthetics of deterritorialization: The nomadic subject and national allegory in James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (unpublished doctoral dissertation). Madison: University of Wisconsin; 2011

[10] Bilal M. Writing Pakistan Conversations on Identity, Nationhood and Fiction. UP, India: HarperCollins Publishers; 2016

### **Chapter 7**

## Perspective Chapter: The Female Body on the Phallocentric Altar – Appropriations of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Feminist Manifesto

*Moffat Sebola*

#### **Abstract**

This chapter reflects on how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in multifarious ways, projects and confronts a nuanced (and blatant) exaltation of maleness over femaleness in her fiction. Adichie's fiction mainly presents (Black) women as constantly living in patriarchal and repressive spaces characterised by multifaceted discriminations, marginalisation, abuse, commodification and censorship, all of which are protracted by the notion that femaleness should live in total subjection to maleness. To instantiate her opposition to this practice, Adichie accords authoritative roles and voices to her female characters, despite their living under repressive and constraining spaces. Reliant on the postcolonial feminist theory, this chapter analyses some of Adichie's prose works, namely; *Purple Hibiscus*, *Half of a Yellow Sun*, and *The Thing Around Your Neck* to foreground appropriation of her feminist manifesto. The analysis positions Adichie's prose as one that falls within the ambits of contemporary literary works that project women confronting and contesting hydra-headed manifestations of patriarchal repression, its attendant practices and ideologies, and gender inequality. Adichie's prose is herein appraised as a literary space within which varied socio-cultural trajectories and gender inequalities in particular are expressed in a postcolonial context.

**Keywords:** body, freedom, maleness, patriarchy, postcolonial feminism, woman

#### **1. Introduction**

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is perceived by some scholars as a novelist par excellence [1–9], making her part of what Ayodabo [10] delineates as "a recent and interesting period in Nigerian literature" in the postcolonial context. This period views issues such as "identity and displacement, political conflict, postcolonial disillusionment, multiculturalism and globalisation, cultural shock and poverty" in a serious

light ([10]:549). In expressing her ideological and authorial vision, Adichie thematises "contemporary issues which bother the postcolonial subject" ([11]:11), focusing largely on "gender, origin, race, and age" ([9]:122; [12]). Murphy [13] proffers that Adichie writes from different perspectives and yet, such perspectives still harmonise in diverse ways towards the fulfilment of her authorial objectives. In lieu of this, this chapter considers an analyses of some of Adichie's creative oeuvre as "an entirely legitimate endeavor" ([9]:112), mainly because it "offers the unique advantage of condensing critical issues such as [the] conflict of powers, the reconfiguration of gender relationships…" ([14]:2). Furthermore, this chapter argues that Adichie confronts patriarchal domination whilst concurrently promoting "a progressive view of […] gender roles." ([15]:421). For expository convenience, this paper aims: (a) to reflect on Adichie's confrontation of the pre-eminence of the male as a theme that is largely 'normalised' in (African) literature and culture; (b) to discuss how Adichie confronts the ideologies of 'male supremacy', while at the same time, repurposing the debate and discourse on gender (in)equality within the broad spectrum of contemporary African literature and criticism; (c) to attend more closely to the antithetical stance assumed by Adichie's female characters as defiance to the exaltation of maleness at the expense of women; (d) to highlight the effects of patriarchal control and intolerance in Adichie's fiction. To achieve these aims, Adichie's two novels, namely; *Purple Hibiscus* (2003), *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2006), and her collection of short stories, *The Thing Around Your Neck* (2009), are synthesised analytically to highlight both her activism in literary feminism and her contestations of the exaltation of maleness in what may be read as a postcolonial feministic context.

#### **2. Background: thematic Inclinations of Adichie's Selected Texts**

To coordinate the reader's understanding, it is essential to provide a brief background of each text selected herein for analysis, particularly in relation to the paper's focus. In *Purple Hibiscus*, fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. Although for the most part of the novel they appear live in a caring family, later on, however, one realises that they live under their father's repressive and abusive religion. They even attend an exclusive missionary school, and this in their father's view, is to totally shield them from the 'sins' of the world. However, Kambili soon reveals in her account that, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa (Kambili's father) is generous and well respected outside the home, he is fanatically religious and dictatorial at home – a home that is asphyxiating. Although the novel thematises other aspects such as the country beginning to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili's major focus is her discovery of a life beyond the restrains of their father's autocracy at her aunt's home. At her aunt's home, there are not only books, curry and nutmeg to enjoy, her cousins' freedom and laughter in their home make her realise the contrast between her home and her aunt's. When she returns home, her father's abuse escalates, and Kambili must come up with ways to keep her family intact. Put succinctly, *Purple Hibiscus* foregrounds the turmoil of adolescence, the place of family in society, and the desire for freedom in a repressive world.

*Half of a Yellow Sun*, on the other hand, returns to a precarious moment in the contemporary history of Nigeria. Shortly after Nigeria gained independence from Britain, follows a massacre of Nigerian people. The Igbo tribes of the southeast seceded and established The Republic of Biafra, resulting in three years of civil war as Biafra was slowly strangulated into submission by violence and starvation. In the novel, Adichie

#### *Perspective Chapter: The Female Body on the Phallocentric Altar – Appropriations… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110476*

writes about the lives of three characters who were involved in the unrest of this war, namely; Ugwu, Odenigbo and Olanna. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu works for Odenigbo, a pan-Africanist university professor full of revolutionary zest, as a houseboy. His girlfriend, Olanna, is the London-educated daughter of a tribal chief turned businessman. She abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for her new lover. As Nigerian troops advance and the characters must flee from murderous armies, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another. The novel emphasises moral responsibility, the cessation of colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class and race – and the multifaceted ways in which love can obfuscate them all. Broadly speaking, the novel evokes the promise and the distressing disillusionments that marked this time and place. Common between the two novels and her anthology of short stories, *The Thing Around Your Neck*, is the implication of women, marriage and gender roles as recurrent themes even amid the discussion of nationalistic and global issues such as war, racism and colonialism. Many of the stories in *The Thing Around Your Neck* focus on fraught relationships between men and women. Specifically, Adichie explores the roles women are asked to play within their birth families and then in their romantic relationships, and it is the latter that drew the attention of the present paper.

#### **3. Theoretical consideration**

This chapter's theoretical lens assumes anchorage upon Chambers and Watkins' [16] remark that, it is axiomatic that most significant work in Postcolonial Theory and Criticism deals with questions of gender and sexuality. Therefore, the theoretical fulcrum of this paper is Postcolonial Feminism, by which it is meant a sketching out of the "processes by which gender and sexuality are necessarily imbricated in colonialism and its legacies", which "cannot be neglected by postcolonial critics ([16]:297). Clearly, "feminists collide with postcolonials on the understandings of the 'third world women' and the overruling of gender hierarchies in racialized spaces" ([17]:371). Also, Parashar (ibid) states that Postcolonialism and Feminism "as critical discourses have enriched the understanding and explanatory potential of international relations" where "these two theoretical approaches have grown exponentially in their capacity to embrace diversity and unpredictability of global political and social life". Postcolonialism and Feminism merge successfully because they both "stand resolutely in support of subversion and change in the political, cultural and social landscape; not just to bridge the distance between the centre and the margins but also to bring the knowledge of and from the margins to the centre" (Parashar, ibid). Postcolonial Feminists thus essentially "argue for the historical and geographical specificity of feminisms, and their capacity to engage productively with difference" ([16]:299). Put more tersely by Parashar, Postcolonialism offers Feminism the conceptual tool box to see multiple sites of oppression and to reject universalisms around gendered experiences of both men and women ([17]:371). In this chapter, I, in accord with Nwachukwu and UnekeEnyi [18], argue that the quantum of Postcolonial Feminism's grouse is, at the literal level, the idea that males primarily appropriate discourse and write females as footnotes in male history, to emphasise the superiority of maleness over femaleness. Linked to this grouse is also the belief that "agency is denied female characters in male discourse where they are treated as appendages and chattels in the treasure troves of patriarchy" ([18]:44). Hence, since the 1980s when the term "feminism" was first coined, "it has sought to upturn the so-called "complacent" social order which feminists claim, is patriarchy-focused" ([18]:44). I further

contend that this feminist grouse is evinced in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's prose, where she labours to enforce a belief in sexual equality in the postcolonial context. As if in consensus with Etim [19], Adichie views "the men-women binary" as indicative of "the relationship between post-postcolonialism and gender" where "the liberation of women is central to the liberation of Africa". I draw Adichie's prose into sharp focus whilst considering that feminism's theoretical-ideological stance generally yields a cacophony of voices, which basically results in an interminable list of feminisms, i.e., "Marxist feminists, Black and African, Asian, Women of Colour, American, French, Irish, Black British, Gynocritics, Gynesis, Psychoanalytic, Myth, Third World/Third Wave, Deconstruction, Misandrist, Femalist, Motherist, Womanist" ([18]:44). This is why Nnolim [20] posits that the feminist house is divided - a division which he further compartmentalises into: feminists, womanist/accommodationists, reactionaries, middle-of-the roaders and gyandrists. Notwithstanding these, I nevertheless locate Adichie's fiction under the ambit of Postcolonial Feminism, despite Nwachukwu and UnekeEnyi viewing her as part of 'new' female voices who insist in their attempt to castrate males. Ostensibly, in their commendable efforts to corroborate the latter view on Adichie, Nwachukwu and UnekeEnyi, conclude that "rather than being conciliatory, Adichie is unabashedly pensive and combative" ([18]:45). Although I concede that, for Adichie, feministic postulations entail a deployment of varied arsenals aimed at dismantling patriarchy, and to some extent concurrently entrenching matriarchy, even if by implicit means, I do not concur that Adichie intends to castrate males, as Nwachukwu and UnekeEnyi [18] claim. On the contrary, I argue that Adichie's feminism is geared towards exposing and confronting gender imbalances for the purposes of encouraging a reconfiguration of the possibilities of attaining the equality of sexes, as espoused by her *Dear Ijeawele or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions* (2017). I also purport that Adichie's fiction "necessitates a movement towards fashioning a newer, fresher and a more foregrounded (estranged) terminology to account for the changing complexion and habits of Africa's postcolonial criticisms, as a way of responding to emerging realities" ([19]:1). While there may be instances where I admit that "Adichie is yet to abandon the vindictive urge to get even with men" ([18]:47), I am also not oblivious to the realities in the contemporary African critique-scape which predisposes one to contemplate the idea that, perhaps, there is a need for a re-assessment, refocusing and repositioning in postcolonial hermeneutics on gender discourses (see [19]). Hence, I maintain the stance that Adichie's fiction "suggests a need for reorientation" on gender discourse ([21]:159). I agree with Nwachukwu and UnekeEnyi [18] that "Feminism [can be] reactionary", that, it can be "the explosion of an aggregation of bottled-up fuse of female frustrations regarding what they perceive as patriarchal; culturally-conditioned constructs where women are systematically subjugated and furiously fenced-in at the lowest rung of the social ladder". In reading Adichie's fiction, I also notice her insistence on the vocalisation of such frustrations, which span from the 1890s to the intense agitations of the 1960s to the 1980s down to the present. Thus, in my view, Adichie, as a woman 'liberationist' or feminist, vociferates "on a coterie of grievances on perceived complexes and connivances ostensibly by all males against all females" ([18]:42). Overall, my ideological premise is that the sum of Adichie's feminist activism is twofold: a desire to work with women's issues and a political conviction that women are generally viewed in a junior light while men are venerated as supreme and; therefore, this view needs to be confronted and contested. It is on this premise that the next section focuses on the so-called subalternity of women and the concurrent exaltation of maleness in Adichie's fiction.

*Perspective Chapter: The Female Body on the Phallocentric Altar – Appropriations… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110476*

#### **4. Adichie's Feminist Stance**

Within the patriarchal vertigo, one of the "maladroit practices" and yet dominant prongs it protracts is the doctrine of 'the superiority of the male' over the female ([3]:208). Linked to the doctrine is the notion that a male child ensures the protraction of the *father*' and clan's name in a male-controlled culture [22]. Therefore, a male child is foregrounded as being more important than a female child [23]. Houndjo [23] thinks that these "social imbalances between men and women are the bedrock of injustices women encounter in the world, particularly in African societies". Among the Vhavenḓa in South Africa, for example, the primacy of the male is clearly highlighted in the Tshivenḓa play, *Hu ḓo sala nnyi?* (Who will remain?) [24]. Read from a feministic perspective, the play falls short of imagining and portraying women beyond gendered roles. The play trivialises women to nothing but mere custodians of traditional values. In this way, the play surfaces as a prototype of the (male) literary tradition in Tshivenḓa (and most African) fiction that depicts women as passive and voiceless. These images serve to rationalise, and therefore perpetuate inequality between the sexes. The vignette in this play centres around the theme of inheritance, which only the male child is deemed eligible to receive. Makhado, a wealthy man, has one son, Tshiwela, who is married and has birthed only daughters. These daughters are overlooked by Makhado as eligible heiresses. Women's role in the preservation and distribution of wealth, as depicted in *Hu ḓo sala nnyi?* is to only show up either as concubines or co/deputy wives for the purposes of bearing male children; theirs is merely to be silent and submissive. Perhaps this is why "in Africa, most women are stereotyped as the submissive, while men are dominant" ([25]:15). For Makondo [22, 26], among the Shona in Zimbabwe, male supremacy is evinced even in the Shona's anthroponomastic dynamics and trends. Apparently, the "Shona oral tradition has it that the Shona society used to value more male children…a mother who bore boys was proudly named *Vachizvaramachinda* (mother of boys) and was highly valued when compared to *Vamachekanhembe* (mother of girls)" ([22]:12 original italics). Makondo also states that some polygamous marriages in Zimbabwe were due to the husbands' quest for women who would give birth to baby boys. This notion is hinted at in Adichie's short story, "On Monday of Last Week", when Kamara called on the phone Chimwe, who began to cry because "another woman was pregnant for Chimwe's husband and he was going to pay her bride price because Chimwe had two daughters and the woman came from a family of many sons" ([27]: 86). "Male children are 'favoured' "because they ensure the immediate continuation of a father and clan name" in the patriarchal society ([22]:12). With this in mind, Makondo [26] concludes:

*As a result, almost all given names this study found have subtle or otherwise traces of this gender influence in its bid to capture its deep feelings and thoughts against the perceived Shona patriarchal dominance. This male dominance dictates that women remain aliens in the families they married into.*

The idea that sons are the ones responsible for the continuation of a clan's name also links with women's quest to birth more children (sons) in marriage. Expectedly, the *umunna* (extended family members) propose to Mama (Beatrice) in *Purple Hibiscus* that Eugene (Papa) should take another wife because a man of his stature cannot have just two children ([28]:75). In *Half of a Yellow Sun*, which may be "read as a post-postcolonial work" ([19]:9), Adichie highlights why birthing a male child

is essential through Anulika, who says: "I want to have a baby boy first, because it will place my feet firmly in Onyeka's house" ([29]:119). Birthing a male child is thus viewed as a viable means for a woman to legitimise her value in the family into which she marries. By implication, should Anulika give birth to a girl, 'her feet' will not firmly stand at Onyeka's house. Birthing a girl is a cause for concern in *Half of a Yellow Sun*, as evinced when "Onunna from Ezeungwu's compound had a baby girl first, her husband's people went to see a *dibia* to find out why!" ([29]:119). Birthing a girl child is thus viewed as a misfortune, if not inconsequential. Hence, when Amala gave birth to a girl, Odenigbo's mother rejected Amala's daughter ([29]:184), on the grounds that "she wanted a boy," to which Olanna responded: "We'll keep her" ([29]:250–251). Through Olanna's acceptance of Baby, Adichie deconstructs the patriarchal ideology that a girl child is of a lesser value compared to a male child.

Adichie also instantiates how the primacy of the male pervades the Nigerian and ultimately the African context in *Purple Hibiscus*, when Mama had had miscarriages and the villagers urged Papa, her husband, to have children with someone else, more so sons [30]. It is also unsurprising to learn that Okafo and Okoye, Obierika's two maternal cousins, in the short story "The Headstrong Woman", urged Obierika to marry another wife, after his wife's third miscarriage. Furthermore, Amala is only promoted by Odenigbo's mother from being a 'helper' to a 'woman' "because she would give birth to Mama's grandchild" –a son, to be precise ([29]:238). The conception and ultimate birth of a son is such an important aspect to traditionalists such as Odenigbo's mother that, when Amala was ill, Odenigbo's mother believed it was her enemies who wanted to harm Amala's pregnancy because "they do not want somebody to carry our family name" ([29]:239). This 'somebody' who would carry the family name was, to Odenigbo's mother, a boy, who after being born, "her fellow women will no longer call her the mother of an impotent son" ([29]:238). Herein, also lies the fragility and anxiety of the patriarchal ego, because such a 'glorified' male sustains his quasi-divine status under the patriarchal gaze, only when he is able to reproduce for the sustenance of the 'family'. Through Odenigbo's mother, Adichie hints at the ambivalence and instability of the patriarchal ego in that the very maleness it worships is quickly despised (by the very system) upon the discovery of the male's impotence. This opprobrium is stressed by Nwamgba who, in the short story, "The Headstrong Woman", thought it strange of Obierika, "a prosperous man with only one wife, and she worried more than he did about their childlessness, about the songs that people sang, melodious mean-spirited words: She has sold her womb. *She has eaten his penis. He plays his flute and hands over his wealth to her*" ([27]:200 original italics). Thus, in Adichie's fiction, considerable focus is placed on how most of her female characters perceive childbirth –birthing a male child, as one of the major ways through which women can attain and sustain value in their families, communities and consequently, in the world. Adichie also shows that in instances where a girl child is born, i.e., "Baby" in *Half of a Yellow Sun*, the affection she receives from her grandmother is "half-baked, half-hearted" ([29]:184). For Adichie, however, the girl child possesses equal dignity and value with the male child, and therefore should not be viewed or treated as if she is disposable.

#### **5. Adichie on the appeasement of the (Fragile) patriarchal ego**

The patriarchal ego, it seems, chiefly wants to be in charge of everything and everyone. This desire is so deeply ingrained in Eugene (Papa) that Kambili tritely knew that something was wrong when she heard Mama on the phone because "it was

#### *Perspective Chapter: The Female Body on the Phallocentric Altar – Appropriations… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110476*

*always* Papa who placed the call" ([28]:146 emphasis added). Apart from the need to be in control, the patriarchal ego also seems to be pacified when women grovel at its feet. In the short story, "Jumping Monkey Hill", when Chioma's adulterous father had walked out of his marriage because his wife confronted and slapped his concubine, to his disgrace, "Aunty Elohor, Aunty Rose, and Aunty Uche", all came to Chioma's mother and told her, "We are prepared to go with you and *beg* him to come back home or we will go and *beg* on your behalf" ([27]:105 emphasis added). Chioma's mother, however, responded: "Never, not in this world. I am not going to beg him. It is enough" ([27]:105). Here, Adichie concurrently reveals how some women aid the perpetuation of patriarchy and how other women refuse to nurse the patriarchal ego. With the refusal to beg her husband to come home, Chioma's mother had to be prepared to see her business fail because her husband "always helped her import shoes from Dubai", hence, "she lowered her prices" ([27]:105). The idea that a wife must always fight to keep her husband is also held by Aunty Ada in the short story, "The Arrangers of Marriage", who tells Chinaza: "Don't let your husband eat out too much, or it will push him into the arms of a woman who cooks. Always guard your husband like a guinea fowl's egg" ([27]:178). Thus, encapsulated in the patriarchal agenda, is the need to have women "softened", "pliable" and "accepting" ([27]:40), so much so that Nkem is not free to even cut her hair. When Nkem cut her hair, Obiora (her husband) told her he liked her long hair and that she should grow her hair back because "long hair is more graceful on a Big Man's wife" ([27]:40). Adichie, however, simultaneously exposes the fragility of the patriarchal ego through Nwamgba's father. Ostensibly, Nwamgba's father "found her exhausting, this sharp-tongued, headstrong daughter who had once wrestled her brother to the ground (After which her father had warned everybody not to let the news leave the compound that the girl had thrown a boy)" ([27]:199). Nwamgba's father eventually allows her to marry the man she wants because "it was better that he let her go with the man she chose, to save himself years of trouble when she would keep returning home after confrontations with in-laws" ([27]:199). The patriarchal system loathes women who resist it. Adichie considers the exaltation of the male as nothing but an anxious and false superiority complex because of its double standards. Adichie cogitates the confrontation of patriarchy, irrespective of its anxiety, as a worthwhile endeavour, because this "false superiority complex attributed to maleness" pervasively translates "into other spheres of influence, such as education, sport, politics and economics" ([31]:38). Incensed by this, Adichie ably employs "exceptional artistic elaborations" to modulate "the reader's sensations by showing how the mechanisms named" patriarchy "are set up" ([3]:197).

As already indicated, in *Purple Hibiscus*, the glorification of the male is significantly personified by Eugene, who "is a tyrannical patriarch" ([15]:423). *Purple Hibiscus* implicitly links anxious masculinity, absolutist religion, autocracy in university and political corruption (Stobie, ibid). Stobie (ibid) thinks that "the key attribute linking all these harmful practices is an arrogant conviction of being right, a refusal to accept difference or engage in the give-and-take of reasoned discussion" with women. For example, when Aunty Ifeoma attempted to show Papa-Nnukwu that Eugene's problem was not that he followed "those missionaries," because she too had gone to missionary school, Papa-Nnukwu said, "But you are a woman. You do not count" ([28]:83). Aunty Ifeoma did not let this remark slide: "Eh? So I don't count? Has Eugene ever asked about your leg? If I do not count, then I will stop asking if you rose well in the morning," to which Papa-Nnukwu quickly conceded: "I joke with you… Where would I be if my *chi* [god] had not given me a daughter?" ([28]:83). Through

Ifeoma, Adichie intends to draw from the margins to the centre, female voices who not only assert their presence but also vocalise their objection to the disregard of their existence by the patriarchal exponents. Papa-Nnukwu also exposes himself as a sexist when he tells (widowed) Ifeoma that he would intercede for her to his god (*Chukwu*) so that she "finds a good man to take care of her and her children" ([15]:424). To this, Ifeoma responded: "Let your spirit ask *Chukwu* to hasten my promotion to senior lecturer, that is all I ask" ([28]:83 original italics). Through Ifeoma's 'dry' response to Papa-Nnukwu, Adichie laconically shows that there are women whose aspirations are not solely lynched to the presence of the male for their survival; some women merely want to progress academically. Adichie bolsters this notion through Aunty Ifeka in *Half of a Yellow Sun* who tells Olanna that, "You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man" ([29]:226). Nwachukwu and UnekeEnyi, however, think that "by urging women to leave their husbands and live in sin and irreverence all in the name of self-assertion, independence and individuality […]" Adichie's "feminism encourages the destruction of the communal base of the society and endangers the sense in family life in which is the root of the African society" ([18]:49). My premise is that Adichie does not advocate the destruction of neither family nor marriage, instead, she reveals how the very institutions can become a source of tyranny when they should be a place of harmony. Adichie's brand of feminism does not propagate misandry either.

In Adichie's fiction, one also notes that some women do not even have the volition to decide on who they want to marry. For instance, in the short story, "The Arrangers of Marriage" ([27]:167), Chinaza Okafor has no say in the selection of the man she must marry. In fact, she is expected to be grateful that the 'arrangers of marriage' found her a husband who is a doctor, something she must equate with winning "a lottery" ([27]:170). In this setup, Chinaza learns that in an arranged marriage such as hers, "sex was not consensual" ([27]:168). Chinaza seemingly has no choice but to thank the arrangers of her marriage "for everything –finding her a husband, taking her into their home, buying her a new pair of shoes every two years". This, for Chinaza, "was the only way to avoid being called ungrateful" ([27]:170). Chinaza is expected to stay in her marriage, however repressive, because according to Aunty Ada, Chinaza ought to realise that there are many women who "would offer both their eyes for a doctor in America […]. For any husband at all" ([27]:184). Connected to this confrontational tactic of male supremacy is Adichie's implicit dissuasion of women and girls from perceiving marriage as the only absolute aspiration for which they should sacrifice their lives and freedom. Viewing marriage and passing the 'marriageability test' ([32]:30), as the ultimate aspiration to which women and girls must strive, is projected by Ifeoma's student who came to announce that she was getting married because her fiancé "could no longer wait until she graduated" ([28]:234). The student did not call her fiancé by his name, "she called him "dim, my husband," with the proud tone of someone who had won a price" ([28]:234). She also said: "I'm not sure I will come back to school when we reopen. I want to have a baby first. I don't want dim to think that he married me to have an empty home" ([28]:234). Adichie also sheds light on this notion through Arize who is willing to give up her sewing, in preference of marriage because that is what would give her "a child" ([29]:41). When Olanna disputed her eagerness to give up sewing for marriage, Arize said: "It is only women like you who can say that, Sister. If people like me who don't know Book wait too long, we will expire" ([29]:41). To combat expiration, marriage and childbirth (of sons) are the only alternatives for Arize to justify her existence in the world. In such a context, women who are unable to conceive or have miscarriages, like Arize, may have their mother visiting often in "the first, second and third year of marriage, poking

*Perspective Chapter: The Female Body on the Phallocentric Altar – Appropriations… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110476*

at Arize's belly and urging her to confess how many abortions she had had before marriage" ([29]:130). Nwamgba's mother, in the short story "The Headstrong Historian" ([27]:198), was aghast when she (Nwamgba) told her that Obierika was the man she wanted to marry. The problem, according to Nwamgba's mother, was that "Obierika was an only child, his father had been an only child whose wives had lost pregnancies and buried babies" ([27]:199). The idea propounded here is that, for a woman to have a secure, legitimate position in her marriage, she should have several children, mainly more male children. Hence, Adichie, as Stobie [15] argues, uses various characters to raise "questions about the possibility of change within the family, the church and the nation". Adichie's questions may also necessitate a confrontation of male supremacy in *Purple Hibiscus* where Adichie criticises "dogmas such as the infallibility of the pope and the celibacy of priesthood, and offers an alternative to patriarchal and religious absolutism, shame and body-hatred" ([15]:422).

In the short story, "Tomorrow is Too Far" ([27]:187), the entrenchment of the ideology of male supremacy and how it privileges some males while marginalising females (and other males), is highlighted when the narrator says:

*Grandmama let only your brother Nonso climb the trees to shake a loaded branch, although you [a girl] were a better climber than he was…Grandmama taught Nonso how to pluck the coconuts, which were hard to climb, so limb free and tall, and Grandmama gave Nonso a long stick and showed him how to nudge the padded pods down. She did not show you, because she said girls never plucked coconuts… Grandmama presided over the sipping of wind-cooled milk ritual to make sure Nonso went first. [And when asked] why Nonso sipped first even though Dozie (a boy) was thirteen, a year older than Nonso, […] Grandmama said Nonso was her son's only son, the one who would carry on the Nnabusi name, while Dozie was only a nwadiana, her daughter's son ([27]:188).*

With the female protagonist, who was a better climber than Nonso, Grandmama would sometimes pat her back and say, "It's good you are learning, *nne*, this is how you will take care of your husband one day" ([27]:195 original italics), because only girls are expected to pass the 'marriageability test', Adichie [32] says. When Nonso died, Grandmama felt betrayed by him, "asking him who would carry on the Nnabusi name now, who would protect the family lineage" ([27]:189). Within this patriarchal giddiness, there is still Dozie, of whom it is unknown whether "he felt anything about being the wrong grandson, the one who did not bear the Nnabusi name" simply because he was born by his grandmother's daughter ([27]:192). Tactfully, Adichie highlights how the proverbial 'patriarchal tree' is climbed by the male from an early age, while the female is denied such a privilege. According the narrator, Grandmama may well have "asked Nonso to climb to the highest branch of the avocado tree to show her how much of a man he was" ([27]:194). Here, Adichie still seeks to expose the fragility of patriarchy because, when Nonso climbed to the highest branch, he fell and died, and with his fall, patriarchy had metaphorically been dealt "a dull, final plop" ([27]:194). Adichie shows how riled she is by patriarchy through the narrator who says she "knew that some people can take up too much space by simply being, that by existing, some people can stifle others" ([27]:195). Fed up with the imbalance, the narrator eventually conceived the idea of scaring Nonso when he had climbed to the highest branch. She needed to "get Nonso maimed, his legs twisted, to mar the perfection of his lithe body, to make him less lovable, less able to do all that he did […] less able to take up your space" ([27]:195). Apparently, it was easy to get Nonso to climb to the top of the avocado tree; you only had to remind him that you were the better climber" ([27]:195). Seemingly, Nonso was unaware that "the branches [of the patriarchal tree] were weak", and so, "Nonso climbed the tree. Higher and higher" ([27]:196). At this juncture, the narrator reveals that there are many ways of killing patriarchy. Among such ways, was the superficially detached but nefariously effective nonetheless, where, "you waited for that short moment when he [Nonso] was between motions. An open moment […] Then you screamed, "A snake! […] in those few seconds, Nonso looked down at you and let go, his footing slipping, his arms freeing themselves". In the end, she could absolve herself through a dismissive conclusion, "maybe the tree simply shrugged Nonso off " ([27]:196). Through this tactic, Adichie aims to deconstruct the absolute stance of traditional (cultural) assumptions that have for long protracted male dominance through an indoctrination of gendered prohibitions which also tabooed interrogation. Simoes da Silva [33] observes that, Adichie's prose, precisely her novels *Purple Hibiscus* (2003) and *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2006), "express a unique aesthetic focus that combines post-colonial, feminist and ethical concerns". Simoes da Silva avers further that, "thematically topical and polemic, the writing in both texts is raw and confrontational" ([33]:455). Adichie's brand of feminism then, not only "comes in variegated templates" ([34]:2), but aims to espouse "harmonious mutual relationships across genders as a means to creating a better world, with relationships defined along capabilities" ([1]:3).

Adichie imagines varied spheres where women are no longer repressed and censored. One such a sphere is academia. We learn through Amaka, for example, that at university, "they are telling Mom [Ifeoma] to shut up" because "if you don't want to lose your job, you shut up" ([28]:224). Such repression and censorship seemingly compel Obiora to recommend to his mother (Ifeoma) that she be fired so that they could "go to America," where "her work will be recognized, without any nonsense politics" ([28]:224). Through Obiora's recommendation, Adichie hints at some of the causes of the brain drain, particularly the migration of female academics from their home countries to the diaspora. Ifeoma, as we learn from Obiora, "should have been senior lecturer years ago," but "they have been sitting on her file" ([28]:224). However, migrating to America, which according to the narrator of the short story, "Imitation", is a place permeated by "the abundance of unreasonable hope" ([27]:26), one soon realises that Ifeoma is still likely to suffer from alienation, repression and discrimination. This is a dilemma faced by diasporic women such as Philippa. Apparently, Philippa who then lived in America, was treated "as a second-class citizen". At first, Ifeoma dismisses this statement as "sarcasm", until Chiaku informs her: "…It is true. All my years in Cambridge, I was a monkey who had developed the ability to reason" ([28]:244). Also, in the short story, "Ghosts", Ebere, a doctor in America, was interested in a post advertised (for a doctor) by the hospital board, but when she came for a job interview, the hospital board "took one look at her medical degree from Nigeria and said they don't want a foreigner" ([27]:68). Also linked to Ebere's experience in America is the stereotypic condescension that women like Kamara in the short story, "On Monday of Last Week", face in the diaspora. Kamara speaks good English and Neil is surprised upon learning that Kamara was Nigerian, implying that proficiency in English is not coterminous with being African. Through Tobechi, Adichie also reveals that diasporic women like Kamara are warned to never mention their education because disclosing this, even the fact that she has a master's, might spoil her chances of securing a babysitting job in America.

#### *Perspective Chapter: The Female Body on the Phallocentric Altar – Appropriations… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110476*

Although Chiaku's assertion may seem alien to the repressive dynamic of patriarchy, Adichie reveals that the postcolonial female academic generally lives in a repressive and alienating environment; environments where they are also commodified. In *Half of a Yellow Sun*, Kainene discloses how her parents used her and her sister, Olanna, as sexual baits to procure business contracts: "My sister [Olanna] and I are meat. We are here so that suitable bachelors will make the kill" ([29]:59). Here, Adichie pointedly highlights the refraction of the repressive dynamic of patriarchy, revealing how it ultimately links with the commodification of the female body [35]. In foregrounding women's commodification in a patriarchal world, Adichie also takes aim at the way women are perceived in various spheres of discourse in society –often highlighting "society's complicity in such" perceptions ([34]:7). For Nkem in the short story, "Imitation" ([27]:31), commodifying her body appears to be the only means for survival in a world where the men who help her do so in exchange for sex with her:

*She [Nkem] dated married men before Obiora [her husband] –what single girl in Lagos had not? Ikenna, a businessman, had paid her father's hospital bills after the hernia surgery. Tunji, a retired army general, had fixed the roof of her parents' home and bought them the first real sofas they had ever owned. She would have considered being his fourth wife –he was a Muslim and could have proposed –so that he would help her with her siblings' education.*

Tunji did not propose. There were other men after Tunji, "men who praised her [Nkem] baby skin, men who gave her fleeting handouts, men who never proposed because she had gone to secretarial school, not a university" ([27]:31). Out of gratitude for what Obiora did, which other men she had been with did not do, like taking her siblings to school, introducing her to his friends and moving to a flat in Ikeja, when he asked if she would marry him, "she thought how unnecessary it was, his asking, she would have been happy simply to be told" ([27]:32). Through Nkem, Adichie locates women who resort to the "use of sex and their bodies as instruments for survival" ([35]:15). Needless to say, debates about the women's use of sex and their bodies for survival abound within the feminist discourse. Nkealah reveals that in such debates, there are scholars who view women's use of sex to their own advantage as subversive, because it dismantles notions of sexual inequality as women re-appropriate sexual power. For these scholars, Nkealah further asserts, "women's survival under difficult conditions, social or economic, is therefore linked to sex and the body as the primary locales of female power" ([35]:63). On the other extreme of the debate, "there are scholars who argue that prostitution further deepens sexual inequality because it places men (the buyers of sex) in a position of power while women (the sellers of sex) remain in a subordinate position, depending on men for their survival" ([35]:63). Thus, by locating Nkem, Adichie intends to sustain the debate on whether women's use of sex for survival subverts patriarchal dominance and control or reinforces them.

For Ujunwa's fictional character, Chioma, in the short story, "Jumping Monkey Hill", the conditions set for her commodification are different. She is sexually harassed when she hunts for a job. Upon being called for a job interview, Chioma learns, "after the first few questions, the man says he will hire her and then walks across and stands behind her and reaches over her shoulders to squeeze her breasts" ([27]:99). When Chioma finally gets a job at a bank, and is told if she can bring in ten million naira during her trial period, she will be guaranteed a permanent position, she does not quite understand what the deputy manager means by going out to get

new accounts for the bank. Two weeks later, Chioma and Yinka visit the home of an *alhaji* in Ikoyi. He (the alhaji) looks at Chioma and says, "This one is too fine" and asks Yinka to come and sit on his lap, asking if she does not think he is "strong enough to carry her", to which Yinka agrees and smiles. Chioma learns that this, assenting to the sexualisation of her female body by males such as the *alhaji*, is what the deputy manager meant by bringing in accounts to the bank. When Ujunwa's story ended with Chioma walking away from the alhaji's suggestive remarks which were meant to solicit her consent to sleeping with him for the procurement of a contract, Edward thought the ending "to be implausible" because Chioma was "a woman with no other choices" ([27]:114). The whole story was to Edward, "implausible, agenda writing, it isn't a real story of real people" ([27]:114), until Edward learnt from Ujunwa that Chioma was actually Ujunwa, who had walked out of the alhaji's house and went home. Linked to Edward's remark is the idea that women can only succeed by sleeping their way to the top. In espousing a confrontational stance against this view, Adichie's female protagonists begin by demonstrating "a stoic refusal to contribute to cultural commodification" ([4]:41). This is where "they fight against cultural commodification by refusing to contribute to the stereotypical expectations about their country" and themselves ([4]:41–2). In the short story, "Jumping Monkey Hill" ([27]:95), such an oppositional stance against stereotypical expectations about Africa (held by Edward Campbell) is maintained by Ujunwa Ogundu. In this short story, Adichie (through Ujunwa) not only subverts Europe's desire (as personified by Edward Campbell) to lord over African literary productions, but also confronts Edward's suggestive remarks to the Senegalese woman about how "he had dreamed of her naked navel" ([27]:111). Upon hearing this, Ujunwa asked the Senegalese woman what she said after Edward told her this, but the Senegalese woman had said nothing. Ujunwa interrogates this: "But why do we say nothing? Why do we always say nothing?" ([27]:112). And yet in such a space there are still men such as the Black South African, who dismiss Edward as "just an old man who meant no harm" ([27]:112). To the Tanzanian, there was no need to antagonise Edward "because Edward was connected and could find them a London agent; no need to close doors of opportunity". Both the South African and Tanzanian tacitly regard Edward's ogling at women as something that should be seen by the women writers as "[their] due" ([27]:111), and therefore should not confront it for the sake of 'the greater good'.

When Ujunwa read her story, which was about "the realistic portrayal of what women were going through in Nigeria", Edward retorted: "It's never quite like that in real life, is it? Women are never victims in that sort of crude way and certainly not in Nigeria" ([27]:113). Edward's basis for this assertion is that, "Nigeria has women in high positions. The most powerful cabinet minister today is a woman" ([27]:113–14). At first, Ujunwa "tried not to notice that Edward often stared at her body, that his eyes were never on her face but always lower" ([27]:106). Implicit in Edward's gawking at Ujunwa is not only his sexualisation of Ujunwa's body, but also a projection of a sense of entitlement to her body. This is evidenced when Edward was looking for a seat, and Ujunwa offered him her seat saying, "I don't mind sitting in the sun…already getting up" and asking, "Would you like me to stand up for you, Edward?" to which Edward responded, "I'd rather like you to lie down for me" ([27]:106). Edward's gawking at Ujunwa's body made her feel "a self-loathing". Augmenting Ujunwa's enragement was also the realisation that Edward "would never look at a white woman like that because what he felt for Ujunwa was a fancy without respect" ([27]:109). Here, Adichie intends to show how patriarchal dominance stretches even into women's creative and artistic expressions. Adichie's literary vision thus encapsulates the conviction that

#### *Perspective Chapter: The Female Body on the Phallocentric Altar – Appropriations… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110476*

when women are actively involved in the deconstruction of stereotypical expectations about their country, they will eventually succeed in deconstructing stereotypical expectations ascribed to their gender in a patriarchal society. Thus, Adichie captures the raft ways the manifestations of the patriarchal ego's sense of entitlement to the female body. This resonates with the narrator of the short story, "The Thing Around Your Neck" ([27]:115), who speaks about how life and living in America was like home at first because your uncle's wife.

*called you nwanne, sister, and his two school-age children called you Aunty. They spoke Igbo and ate garri for lunch and it was like home […] until your uncle came into the cramped basement where you slept with old boxes and cartons and pulled you forcefully to him, squeezing your buttocks, moaning; he wasn't really your uncle; he was actually a brother of your father's sister's husband, not related by blood. After you pushed away, he sat on your bed –it was his house, after all –and smiled and said you were no longer a child at twenty-two. If you let him, he would do many things for you. Smart women did it all the time. How do you think those women back home in Lagos with well-paying jobs made it? Even women in New York City? ([27]:117 original italics).*

Adichie also indicates, however, that even in instances like the one detailed above, there are women who refused to give in; they "left still" ([27]:117). In the short story, "The American Embassy" ([27]:128), one of the men who broke into "Ugonna's mother's" house and killed her son, slapped her "behind" and laughed, "saying how soft her body was, waving his gun" ([27]:132). With this, Adichie still shows how some men feel entitled to a woman's body, and therefore can do whatever they want to it. Adichie's notion of feminism thus assumes a unique and a "significant paradigmatic visage," in that she consistently "dramatises the imperative of valuing all human beings irrespective of age, race, class and *gender*, if society must survive" in her creative oeuvre ([19]:5,7 emphasis added). Adichie is aware "of the necessity of complementarity between the sexes if the war against unprogressive forces in society must be won" ([19]:7). And so, in trying to define the ideological premise of Adichie's writing, we recognise Adichie's recurrent motif of women often living "in the face of stark, unyielding masculinity" ([1]:2). Among such women is the unnamed narrator of the short story, "Cell One", who lived in fear of the notorious thief, "Osita", about whom she discloses: "I used to look across the hedge and see him and close my eyes and imagine that he was walking toward me, coming to claim me as his" ([27]:6). Attendant to the masculine ego, Adichie implies, is a sense of ownership of the female. Hence, Adichie's artistic vision is aimed at "transforming women's identities from a position of controlled submissiveness to that of empowerment" ([1]:4). To attain this, Adichie purports that, "concerted efforts must be made to remove all barriers and structures which tend to disempower women" ([19]:7). Thus, Adichie's fiction sets out to disencumber (African) traditional cultures of their internal repressive practices and ideologies, which have over the generations structured themselves along the points of gender power. Adichie's fiction describes the challenges of Igbo people from the viewpoint of women who [are] rescued from their lower positions" ([36]:380). Although other works by Adichie, i.e., *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2006), deal "with Nigeria's civil war and military coup" ([36]:380), one still realises that "the theme of war expands into the broader theme of [a] society in which we see people struggling over problems such as gender, wealth, sex, occupation and family" ([36]:388). Thus, apart from revealing "the continuing effects of

colonisation even after independence," Adichie also "brings women into the forefront through characters [such] as Olanna and Kainene in *Half of a Yellow Sun*, reflecting women's solidity (sic) during war" ([36]:389). Connected to the latter view may also be Adichie's realisation that, "the incorporation of a full section on the roles of Biafra women during the war, […] as most literature on the topic is dominated by the experiences of male soldiers who fought in the war," ignores "the important roles played by women" ([37]:324–25). "During the war", Üyesi further avers, "these women sought better conditions for themselves and their communities" ([36]:389). Hence, the women in this short story, "A Private Experience", are projected as capable of staging a protest against the military and General Abacha, calling for democracy. Chika's sister, Nnedi, is said to be one of the organisers talking to the students about the importance of "having our voices heard" ([27]:45). In the short story, "The American Embassy", the female protagonist had stories she could tell "of her own journalism, starting from university in Zaria, when she organised a rally to protest General Buhari's government's decision to cut student subsidies" ([27]:136). Adichie's literary vision thus entails valourising girls and women. This is also notable in the short story, "The Headstrong Woman", where Nwamgba looked for the valiant spirit of Obierika in her son, Anikwenwa, but did not see it. When Mgbeke gave birth to a girl, "Nwamgba held her, [when] the baby's bright eyes delightfully focused on her, she knew that it was the spirit of Obierika that had returned; odd, to have come in a girl" ([27]:214). With this, Adichie not only valorises women and girls, but also ascribes equal value to men and women. All in all, Adichie, a feminist voice, challenges the supremacy of maleness as a means of demonstrating the need for the reconfiguration of gender discourses. With this, she impresses upon women and girls, in particular, the need to pride themselves in the distinctiveness of their gender while also prompting them to interrogate and confront patriarchal ideologies and practices. This confrontational dynamic that inflects Adichie's work also serves a decolonising aim –a sort of implicit and explicit feminist critique of debilitating traditional and modern mores which propagate female repression and marginalisation.

### **Author details**

Moffat Sebola University of Limpopo, South Africa

\*Address all correspondence to: moffat.sebola@ul.ac.za

© 2023 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

*Perspective Chapter: The Female Body on the Phallocentric Altar – Appropriations… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110476*

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