Ami Bonolota Sen Likhchi : Re-thinking Femininity and Feminism in South Asian Literatures Communication dans un congrès

This paper explores the reappropriation of Western feminist claims and discourses in South Asia, where women’s struggle is rooted in a cultural context where the relations to men, nature and traditions are certainly specific. It shows the way contemporary feminist cultural production (literature, but also cinema) in South Asia calls for a particular and alternative culture where the notion of gender and the difference between sexes intensively draw in complex traditions and mythologies of femininity and masculinity. If, for example, Mallika Sen Gupta’s essays on gender (such as Strilinga Nirmana, “The construction of Womanhood”, 1994 and Purush Noi Purushtantra, « Not man but Patriarchy », 2002) are certainly nurtured by contempoary Western discourses on gender issue, her poetry is however crossed by a oral folk culture which belongs to the traditional women whom Mallika aims to speak to.