Literary Authorship & Portrayal of Gender-Based Violence in Select Writings

Gender Based Violence is a critical lens through which the understanding of gender as a social category can be achieved. In its interaction and engagement with power structures, gender as a social formation is thus vulnerable to violence, coercion and oppression-both overt and covert. Literature, at the intersection of Liberal Humanities and Social Sciences, has a unique role of intervention. As a discipline, it not only explores narratives and aesthetics of representing gender; literature must also ask questions about politics and ethics of the said representation. The literary writer, hence, is neither 'third person ', nor ‘objective’ , nor are they politically neutral. The ideological position of the literary writer informs the aesthetics and ethics of what they represent. Portrayal of violence and the gendered nature of violence falls within this purview of literature as ethical activism. Thus, literary authorship works within a field of ideological construct, which goes on to shape the reader's outlook towards a social issue. This paper looks into select writings of Mahasweta Debi, Meena Kandaswamy and Oodgeroo Noonuccal to explore how literary authorship engages with the portrayal of gender based violence. All three writers have also been activists in various causes of social struggle, their work and political views informing their writings and their attitudes towards writing. The paper intends to examine the ways through which these three writers have engaged with the question of gender, violence and indeed literary authorship.

Keywords: gender based violence, literary authorship, power structures, ideology