“Reading literature with a focus on gender helps to challenge the traditional notion of the canon by offering different ways of evaluating literary worth and thereby prompting us to choose new texts for inclusion in an alternative canon,” according to Prof Upot Sherine, former Dean of Literature and Professor in Mahatma Gandhi University. She was delivering a special address at the International Conference on “Histories of Gender: Transdisciplinary Approaches” organized by the School of International Relations and Politics(SIRP), Mahatma Gandhi University in association with Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and Kerala Council of Historical Research(KCHR).
Prof Upot Sherine said that it “is a fact of literary history that until recently canons in most language literatures consisted entirely or primarily of male writers. Men’s writing was promoted as the norm that represented great literature in all languages. By disregarding gender, such canons perpetuated the assumption that literature is a male province, an assumption that has been successfully debunked both by recent feminist theories as well as by the large corpus of women’s writing that has proliferated and continues to proliferate in the literary field today.” She said that “reading and studying literature today has become a multi-layered and more rewarding experience. Awareness about latent gender prejudices helps us find value in texts – stories, plays, poems – that hitherto did not fit in with any of the previously stipulated guidelines for canonization.”
She pointed out that language “is not an unmediated and transparent purveyor of reality. Neither is it an instrument that merely transmits information. Language matters greatly because it carries ideology. It has a constitutive role in the production of social reality. Language constitutes the world for us, and lets us recognize our identity in relation to gender, and in that sense structures our understanding of what it means to be a male, a female or a transgender, as the case may be, in society. A feature of sexist language that has received much attention today is the use of the nominal ‘man’ as a word to denote people of all genders and of the pronoun ‘he’ to denote everyone irrespective of gender. To be gender-sensitive today is to realize that one should be sensitive about the use of such language in speaking and writing in public spaces. Prof Sherine reminded that “ to be gender-sensitive is also to change the world. Let us all work towards creating a new world that is more equitable, tolerant, inclusive, and democratic by cultivating sensitivities including the one pertaining to gender,” she concluded.
