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Tehmina Durrani My Feudal Lord Critical Analysis

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Tehmina Durrani is a prominent woman writer of Pakistan. She writes about the subordinated and marginal status of women in Pakistani society. She portrays the miserable plight of women in a so-called democratic country. Her works reflect female subjugation and sufferings encountered by the majority of women in the conservative milieu of Pakistan. She articulates her own experiences and holds the political, religious and social mechanism responsible for such plight of women in society. The present paper analyses her autobiographical novel My Feudal Lord and aims at studying various discourses like patriarchy, feudalism, misinterpretation of religion and social taboos, which, according to the novelist, are responsible for the oppression of women …show more content…

Marginal state is that position of a person in which one is deprived of some basic rights of a society. That person or community is considered insignificant in comparison to the mainstream. Peter Brooker in A Glossary of Cultural Theory writes, “Margin(ality)—Refers to the place of repressed or subordinated textual meanings but also to the position of dissident intellectuals and social groups (women, lesbian, gays, blacks) who see themselves at a remove from the normative assumptions and oppressive power structures of mainstream society (152)”. The social groups like the Dalits, women, lesbians, gay, blacks, assume that the mainstream society has acquired the central position in society. In that society, they are considered subordinated to the mainstream society and this mainstream group try to oppress these groups and if they try to raise their voices against them, they remain unheard by them. The central group makes efforts to dominate the subordinate …show more content…

The concept of acculturation refers to the social processes by which we learn the knowledge and skills that enable us to be members of a culture. Key sites and agents of acculturation would include the family, peer groups, schools, work organizations and the media. (2)
Tehmina Durrani also encounters such behaviour in her parents’ and later at her husband’s house. Due to her dark complexion, Tehmina could not become her mother’s favourite. Although she obeyed her mother’s commands, the latter was not satisfied with her:
My mother demanded total obedience and, although I always complied, she discerned early signs of rebellion in both my expression and my body language. I obeyed, but my crime was that I did not look obedient.

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