Department of Women’s Studies

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://ir.nbu.ac.in/handle/123456789/4244

The learners will demonstrate a mastery of the subject by detailed engagement with evolution, development, and current practices in the field of Women's Studies and learn how to effectively conduct research in the field. The guest teachers on the teaching panel have international publications and visits to their credit. Some of them are engaged in collaborative work with the university and in projects in universities abroad. The Department looks forward to producing a regular output of brilliant students and researchers.

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    Ignored Voices: An Overview of the life of the Women with Disabilities in India.
    (University of North Bengal, 2022-12) Das, Tinku
    It has been held from ancient times that men and women are not equal. Some socially prescribed identities have been forced onto both genders. Based on people's biological or physiological differences, performances, competence, retention, and other capacities, society has developed some negative conceptions and established some binaries such as normal/abnormal, able/disabled, fit/unfit, etc. In order to oppress women, patriarchal society has created separate standards for men and women. It views women as weak human beings who serve as spouses, mothers, nurses, and sisters. In a culture that is governed by men, women lack freedom and safety. Men have always held a higher standing than women and are still are viewed as more significant than women. There have been different waves of feminism with their own charter of demands regarding women’s rights but there was no particular demand for women with disabilities. It seems that women with disabilities have no purpose in this world and are considered as useless in the society. Even at the very onset the women who struggled for their rights and identities did not raise their voices for women with disabilities. Harlan Hahn, a disability activist and political scientist has observed that disabled women often encounter “asexual objectification”. Though the world of words masculine and feminine are categorized but women with disability have no category and have been deprived and treated as untouchables. The paper discusses this lack of voice in favour of women with disabilities that pushes them towards more uneasy world.
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    Gender Roles and the Quest for Identity: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence
    (University of North Bengal, 2021) Akram, Wasim
    Women in all ages remain the object of suppression. They often neither have any voice nor an independent identity of their own. Men become the deciding factor about how a woman should behave and act. They have always been taught to be docile, submissive, and conventional to be accepted by the society. They are made to behave in a certain stereotypical way to maintain the male supremacy. They are given a position inferior to men in a hierarchical social structure, controlled and dominated by men and they merely serve as objects of this control and rule. The whole purpose of their existence revolves around serving in the family as someone’s daughter, wife, sister or mother. These stereotypical gender roles assigned to them by the society keep them confined within the four walls of familial entanglement where they do not have any voice or agency. Shashi Deshpande in her novel, That Long Silence captures this traumatized and painful existence of women in a middle-class Indian family. The novelist portrays the ever-suffering existence and the quest for independent identity of women through the presentation of the character of Jaya who has to maintain silence throughout her married life for the fear of disrupting familial comfort and security. I, in my paper, will attempt to address this crisis raised by the author and also show how the society creates a boundary for women to delimit their capabilities and stifle their voice and agency in a constrictive social structure that does not allow women to speak.
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    Thinking Beyond Gender: Tagore’s Chitrangada, the Breaking of the Stereotypes
    (University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Saha, Manika