Cafe Dissensus Everyday

The Blog of Cafe Dissensus Magazine – we DISSENT

Posts tagged ‘Gender’

Ending the Practice of ‘Witch-Hunting’ in Assam: An Interview with Archana Bhattacharjee about Birubala Rabha’s Work

By Joyce Yarrow
‘Witch-hunting’ in Assam involves branding a woman as a witch or daini, mostly based on the declaration of an Ojha or Bez (quack doctor).This usually happens when villagers approach the village Ojha about someone who has a chronic ailment and the Ojah identifies a woman as the source of the sickness and she is branded as a daini or witch.

The Mars Club Member’s Daughter

By Achyut Dutt
Jyoti Singh’s rape hasn’t changed anything in India. There is that Guinness Book record that India still holds and will continue holding – of being the place where every 20 minutes, there is a rape. That works out to 72 rapes a day, a nice round figure.

Fifty Shades of Stupidity

By Riti Das Dhankar
Fifty Shades of Grey is a stereotypical love story with a supposedly “normal” girl being a complete nut-job and the “troubled” Mr Grey being the only consistent, non-weird thing in the movie.

Persephone

By Rita Bhattacharjee
It was the night when men turned into beasts – lurking at street corners, hiding in plain sight.
Gargoyles clawed out my guts with steel-tipped talons, feasting on flesh,
each of my wounds, a vagina oozing blood.

Analyzing the Feminine Identity in Jane Austen’s Society

By Lopa Banerjee
Constructing a vivid picture of the ‘women’s culture’ that Austen herself was surrounded by, Kaplan directs us towards a central question: “What made it possible for Jane Austen to write?” Seeking an answer to this question, she illustrates the contemporary female friendships that represented the socio-cultural context of Austen’s novels.

River Deep: The Pain and Dance

By Lopa Banerjee
She floated alone like a weightless bubble in space. The moon became her pilot light; she danced to the softest of music, a quiet, unperturbed dance in her dreams, hand-in-hand with her unloved little girl. Together, they swirled and twirled, a wild fury of light, till the wake of daylight burned their fire away.

Out of Touch? How this Response to Hokkolorob at Jadavpur University Distracts from its Graded Social Dynamics

By Joyeeta Dey & Anushka Sen
The movement protesting police violence against students in Jadavpur University, Kolkata, is right now in its most vulnerable position. The marching has calmed, a high court order aimed at restoring “normalcy” to the campus has been implemented, the issue is beginning to fade from television and the public imagination, while, in all this time, not a single demand of the protestors has been met.

Caged

By Lopa Banerjee
Being born a girl, I should have sensed when invaders had pushed through the padding of closed doors, throwing me back into the irredeemable domain of bruise and hopelessness. By now, I should have learnt to focus on my own life as an outcast, to thrive in my madness and be pleased to walk alone amid the crowded city streets with impetuous fools.

Hyderabadi Muslim Women on Life and Work

By Safia Begum
In the month of Ramadan, she was observing fast and stitching the heavy dining-table cover. Since the new academic year has started, she has to pay for her children’s school fees and buy books for them. Her husband asks her to stop the girls’ education as they can’t afford to pay so much money. With a salary of three-thousand-rupees per month, she barely manages to pay for their education.

Thwarted Escape

By Lopa Banerjee
All these years I have worked to make Omaha my home with its long, tiring winter days of endless snowfall and mist, its sunlit days of solitude, its dark clouded summer evenings breaking out into violent storms and tornadoes. It is nowhere near the grandeur of experience of friends, who have been lured by the luxury and ambiance of big American cities and the dreams fostered there.