The Female Spirit By Amartya Kumar Sen

Even though humans all have the same label, preferential treatment resides with the males. This is especially true in “The Female Body” by Margaret Atwood. Considering the society’s perception of how interaction between races and genders should be, white males are at the top of the social hierarchy. In this hierarchy, the white are above the coloured and the men are above the females. Hence, women are given selective and limiting freedom and yet men are also limited by society to the point that most men do not realise they have limitations placed upon them. Nevertheless men and women do not live their lives, they survive and yet men seem to enjoy life. Therefore women are marionettes, men are puppets and society is the puppeteer.

Mahasweta Devi’s short story, “Giribala,” is about the life of Giribala, a girl of Talsana village located in India. Born into a caste in a time when it was still customary to pay a bride-price, Giri is sold to Aulchand by her father. From this point on, we see a series of unfortunate, tragic events that take place in Giri’s life as a result of the circumstances surrounding Giri’s life. There are many issues in Giri’s life in India that Devi highlights to readers. First, the economic instability of the village leads to an extremely poor quality of life for the lower, working classes. Next, the cruel role of women determined by men in society is to either satisfy the sexual desires of men or to reproduce offspring who can work or be sold off to marriages. There are also other social norms and beliefs which discriminate against women that will be discussed.

Upper caste women may undergo dramatically different experiences than lower caste women. For example, lower caste women do not practice sati, because it is mostly prevalent among upper caste women. Thus, they may not comprehend how sati may function as a tool of control of female sexuality. On the other hand, upper caste women may not comprehend the experiences of widow-remarriage as practiced by lower caste women. Granted that, Mohanty makes a great point by asserting that it is impossible to analyze and treat Indian women as an ahistorical and monolithic group of people. Indian women are heterogeneous, and significant attention must be given to the components of race, class, imperialism. Furthermore, given their background, many of Western feminists in India were supporters of the colonial government and saw themselves as agents of the civilizing mission. They believed that Indian women were incapable of speaking for themselves, and thus were also incapable of liberating themselves. They disregarded that Indian women were victims of both British imperialism and the patriarchal Indian society, and thus the oppression they faced greatly differed from that of Western women. If anything, western women participated in their

From our text, Race, Class, and Gender, we read Unit III E: The Structure of Social Institutions; The State and Violence: Policing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization; The Color of Justice; Rape, racism, and the Law; and Interpreting and Experiencing Anti-Queer Violence : Race, Class, and Gender Differences among LGBT Hate Crime Victims. We also encountered and excerpt from Social Work Practice With a Difference; The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. The first four reading from our text explore the association of the manner in which state power organizes race, class, and gender. We also get a view of how the intersectional approach of race, class, and gender may help us to understand some forms

In the first story, ‘The Five Women’ Mahasweta  Devi shows the harmful effects of the war which was an obstacle in the development of normal human relations and one of the main hurdles in overcoming the trauma. It is about five widows who must bear the brunt of the glorious war.  The five women who lost their husbands in the kurukshetra war mourn for them. These five women are asked to give company with the newly widowed Uttara, the wife of Abhimanyu. They express their way of living, rituals and culture they follow are in close association with nature. The women of the rajyavritta strictly follow the ordeal but the women of janavritta  lives life in fellowship with the natural world. This is evident when the five women state, “…the village

In her book “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Woman, and the Rest of us,” Kate Bornstein goes over a lot of the major issues regarding gender awareness and identity politics. She talks about the ideas of labeling ones self, understanding gender differences, how people view laws, behaviors, and the medical and scientific privilege that make transitioning challenging for a lot of people. Bornstein touches on many of the issues today that affect trans people. She includes poetry, pictures, quotes, essays, and a play to raise questions and discuss the idea of gender. This is a great book to introduce and discuss the issues that affect the lives of trans people as they navigate and explore the lines that define gender.

Indian men celebrated women’s roles in food providing and child bearing in religious ceremonies (64). Indian women unlike the English women of the seventeenth century had a voice. She was treated more as an equal. Even though there was still gender separation between Indian men and Indian women, in the responsibilities they share, the women were more respected. Indian women still didn’t have easy lives.

The United States of America is a wonderful country; they allow people with different backgrounds to come make a new life here, although it may be very difficult to do. America is not the perfect country some Americans believe it is; it has its faults like everything else. This can be seen in the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Her book tells the tragic, true story of Lia Lee, a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and her American doctors. The Hmong came to America in the seventies and eighties to escape Laos after the secret war. The Hmong were safe from the war dangers in Laos, but once they arrived in America they would face other kinds of problems. One problem would be the health care system. Anne Fadiman views assimilation for the Hmong as necessary, but difficult to accomplish.

Anne Fadiman’s novel The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down depicts the colliding worlds of the Western and Hmong culture in an effort to save the life of a little girl, who is diagnosed with epilepsy. The novel tells two different, but interwoven, stories in which one from the point of view of Lia’s parents, and another from the point of view of health care providers. Both Lia’s parents and health care providers want the best for Lia Lee, but due to a lack of understanding and cultural barriers, result in the tragedy of Lia. This article explains how anthropological concepts are applied into the novel, and how themes of culture and cultural misunderstanding impacted Lia’s parents and the health care providers resulting in a tragedy.

In the nineteenth century, the “woman question” became essential. This was chiefly due to the British colonial rule. However, the British disregarded what the Indian women wanted, rather their objective was to “modernize” Indian women through their own means. The “woman question” further served as a scale for the British to determine how civilized its Indian subjects were, which they used as a justification for their imperial civilizing mission. (Forbes, 1996, p. 12). During this period, there was also a new wave of Indian male reformers. For example, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar championed female education and led the campaign to legalize widow remarriage. He claimed that the Kali Yuga allowed the practice of widow remarriage (Forbes, 1996, p. 21). The Hindu Marriage Act was finally established in 1856, but it did create some further complications. Geraldine Forbes (1996) argues that these male reformers were not willing to relinquish the power of patriarchy, they continued to view women as their subjects. Rather, they did it for their benefit of modifying family

Success! That’s what we feel when artist with roots from Mexico, Elizabeth Blancas, self-identified as a Xicana, expresses her mind on a relevant issue throughout an outstanding display of empowering and freedom in the piece “Women & Two Spirits Are The Backbone Of Every Tribe”, in the corner of Saint Marguerite with Saint-Antoine West streets. In her painting, the artist presents a sexual issue and the cultural role it has in the indigenous tribes. Although the artist expertise relies on serigraphy, she blooms in the mural world hand-brushing distinguished figures by giving voice to protesters against a US company pipeline construction site, near the Standing Dakota Indian Reservation, and in special Caro Gonzales and Lauren Howland.

Connect to what you feel, allow your senses to guide you, let the strong memories wash over you and simply give up resistance to maintaining your countenance.

The Spirit that Catches you and you fall was written in the year of 1997 by Anne Fadiman. The novel describes how the struggles experienced by an immigrant family who were from, Sinyabull Province in Asia during their time at a medical center in California. Fadiman narrates about a young child named Lia. Lia is the second born in her family and is suffering from epilepsy and causes her to have seizures. The novel exemplifies the cultures differences and clashes that are interfering with her regarding the treatment she is to receive. Fadiman also describes the miscommunications of the necessary medical treatment requirements with Lia's family and their denial of accepting the treatment because of spiritual values and including distrust. Fadiman shows the medical providers lack of sympathy towards Lia's family cultural practices as their daughter’s illness.

As woman is always a sufferer for no fault of her, always victims of male dominated society. She has to play different role in her life. When girl is born, she has to become the target of criticism in many forms for being born as a girl. In her childhood she has to depend on the father. Women always depend on husband after the marriage, and in her old age she depends on the son for her subsistence. As a mother she has to obey her sons, as a wife she has to obey her husband and as a daughter she has to obey her father. Despite her great sacrifices, she faces several male-dominated sufferings. The personality of the typical woman was overwhelmingly swamped by the male dominated attitudes against the backdrop of an exclusively

Family construction in India is different. Dattani shows power of male dominant in the Indian society. Here in India, importance of male and female is different. Women’s place is in the kitchen and home affairs and men’s place is in the outside world. It means men are free to do whatever he likes. But women can’t do anything without permission of her husband. It means, Dattani shows discrimination of gender and construction of society. Gender discrimination is when people of either gender are treated unfairly within society because of their gender Dattani’s themes reflect and comment on the ordinary and everyday conflicts of so many urban people who may be living in transitional periods of history, caught between the firm under tow of tradition and