The Dialectic of Feminist Aesthetics: A Comparative Study of the Select Novels of Shashi Deshpande and Buchi Emecheta

Abstract

Women, hailing from the widespread continents such as Asia, Africa, South America, North America, and Europe, endorse their experiences, sensibilities, and strong feminine conventions in varied art forms. Firmly, feminist aesthetics is a boon to the academic field of women’s studies and matriarchal art. The path to aesthetics from the feminist perspective discredits domination and the universal description of women. The present thesis undertakes a study of various dominating issues and difficulties faced by women of color in the native and non-native boundaries and re-engages with zeal to question the several ‘normal’ in art and fiction by involving two of the most celebrated Indian and African writers in English—Shashi Deshpande and Buchi Emecheta. These two obvious writers inspire contemporary men and women readers to trust the variety of representations built by them on marriage, sexual intercourse, ecological destruction, and heterosexuality as an institution and an experience. The conceptual framework for this research thesis is institutionalized heterosexuality. This methodological framework is inclusive, transnational, dialectical, and appropriate for analyzing select Indian and African women’s literary writings. It strengthens both the feminist aesthetics and heterosexual expectations, which are reflected in the heterosexual characterizations the writers assigned to their heterosexual couples as normal, safe sexual beings and custodians of the earth. The collectivity of women’s reliance on ecology, matriarchal aesthetics, and access to the harmonious planetary relationship will be examined through comparative analysis of the select fictions. Also, the contemporary heteronormative motives behind natural survival, violence, and dehumanization against women, land, and animals in Indian and African cultures will be compared and polished here, considering the role of a modest comparatist and an ecofeminist. Writing autobiography, after the publication of their bestselling novels, has been a self-absorption genre for Shashi Deshpande and Buchi Emecheta. They required strong self-justifications for revealing their inner feelings and psychological and cultural aspects of heterosexual identity. One gets to learn how heterosexuality as an experience and a practice becomes the principal hindrance in the novelists’ growth and how they have to fight the dominant sexual and non-sexual conventions to make their feminine experiences political through their novel writing. In other words, their autobiographies are mirrors of their feminist consciousness. The conclusion draws on the heterosexual men and women-centered themes such as heterosexual sex, parenting, and womb. These practices are normalized for the compulsory subjugation of women, utilization of womb for research and reproductive negotiations and techniques, and the growth of male culture on the labor, meat, and energies of women, animals, and nature. These practices appear safe and lifeenhancing only for men and heteropatriarchy. In actuality, these are the real cruelties behind global consumption, objectification, and mass murder in most heterosexual societies.