“Foregrounding Sexual Politics Through Textual Politics”

Abstract

The concept of modernity conjures images of rising regional inequities in the global economic system, the rise of nation states, and the rise of capitalism and industrialisation. Many significant cultural and social shifts have occurred throughout this time period. Gender has arisen significantly as a basic axis along which people are exploited and civilizations are stratified in the current day. To explain the subordination and oppression of women all over the world, feminist scholars have turned to the concept of gender as an explanatory model, and they have condemned a society built on dichotomies. The search for one's identity, especially a woman's identity, is destined to be elusive in a society of binaries, in which roles are divided into the ideal and the real. Gender, or the social meanings linked to male and female, adds complexity to a basic biological base, with ramifications for both physiology and psychology. Feminine and masculine ideals are constructed at the cultural level.

To deconstruct the male/female dualism, or the ideal/real identity dichotomy, would be to see the spectrum of identities that we fail to see when we limit ourselves to just two categories. Researchers in and out of academia have tried to learn more about the sexual politics of pictures, or how women reacted when their idealized selves collided with their actual selves.