COLLECTIVE UTOPIA: TOWARDS POST-STRUCTURALIST FEMINIST GENEALOGIES STUDY OF “SULTANA’S DREAM” BY BEGUM ROKEYA

Abstract

It has been long believed by feminists that men in this world consider women as mere extensions to themselves. They consider them to be some kind of ladder on which they can stand and reach the higher levels of their career. They only considered them to be mere bodies that have only one aim in their lives that is to satisfy men’s desires and needs. They have never considered them to be the persons who can stand equally next to them or who can be respected in their own right. For long time women have been suppressed and kept away from social, economic and political centers of power. And when they started asserting their rights as human beings, they have been called radicals or raging feminists. In this research the researcher is going to analyze a short fiction story “Sultana’s Dream by Begum Rokeya through the lens of post-Structuralist feminist theories, in which critics tends to raise a question that whether the gender is innate or God given or it has been socially constructed and therefore is mutable which can be put into play and can be deconstructed. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain is an Asian writer who belonged to India and who aimed to embrace feminism in her writings and is well known for her feminist utopian fiction writings. She has fictitiously portrayed the need of women’s rights to be fulfilled by using a very distinctive technique like utopia in her writing. In this research the researcher is going to analyze the aforementioned writing under the lens of Helen Cixuous’s Idea of L’ectriture Feminine which means a female writing. It will be discussed in detail that when a female writes about herself, she reverses the system of binary oppositions like men/women, in which the term on the right side is always suppressed and the term on the left side is always privileged.