Gender Based Violence in North East Indian Literature: Coping Mechanism of New Women

Gender based violence highlights gender inequality whether financial, economic, physical or mental, applies to both men and women. But when it comes to sufferings and endurance, it is a universal and persistent reality that women is and always has been the primary target of GBV. The term ‘gender’ unlike the term ‘sex’ which is a biological construct, aligns with reality of socially imposed differential roles for men and women which would further characterized as appropriate and inappropriate according to the given gender roles. The basic reason behind discrimination against women resides in the fact that such gender roles give birth to unequal power relationship between the two and majorly sets women at receiving end.

Gender specific reading of ‘Insurgency- Literature’ allows us to deconstruct the daily life of females who strives to survive through offensive violent acts- both physical and psychological. Some prominent female authors from NEI avails us a literary representation of a discourse where women are deprived of even the basic human rights which jeopardize their very identity. These female authors are, in fact indigenous voices of the region who unveils the ideology of self- rescue and self- recovery among the ordinary women in a conflict- zone which set them to be pronounced as ‘New- Women’. This research aims to scrutinize Insurgency narratives through the prism of Julia Kristevia's ‘abjection theory’ and Judith Butler’s concept of ‘precarity’.

Keywords: violence, gender inequality, discrimination, Insurgency- Literature, abjection theory