From Words to Empowerment: Gender Inequality in Literature

What do you pay attention to first when you read a book? Which elements make you think the most and determine your comments about the book? For me, one of these elements is how a writer handles a character of the opposite sex. Today, the interest in male characters written by women and the fact that this situation is a topic that is discussed and thought of a lot supports my tendency. We clearly have different expectations from the way a female writer portrays a man and handles masculinity. We have a hunger for women to express not only the characters but also love, pain, and maybe just a memoir. More generally, reaching the true and essential expression of a situation or emotion that is the subject of art is not possible only with the way men handle it and their perspectives. In fact, many of my value judgements about my history and culture have the signature of a man. Although we did not think that this was an important detail, I believe that we are struggling with inequalities arising from this point, and I dream of a utopia where I hear all the stories from the women at the center of those stories.

What enlightened me in these thoughts was a thesis I came across in my research on gender and gender roles. According to this thesis, depictions and descriptions of women by men; It has caused the formation of an ideal female figure by affecting the perception of the society, from the way women and their frequency of speech, to their clothing, to the way they socialize, often according to a hierarchy determined from the man’s perspective.

Women did not have a say about their own borders and liberties. In this circumstance, how can we think that these borders and liberties reflected on us are true? In another source I examined, a manipulation similar to the one mentioned above is explained with an example involving religious and political laws. According to the source, most of the religious and political laws that have been created so far have not been regulated by prioritizing people’s value judgments, in other words, according to the ideals of the society. The laws were made according to the idealized order, society, morality and lifestyle of the ruler of the period or the person who has religious authority and it was expected to be accepted as a principal by the society to which it is addressed. Just as the man shapes the woman according to his own ideals. So if the woman does not live in the manner that man idealized, it is considered absurd. Nevertheless, women have declared at every opportunity that they do not fit into this bell jar given to them, and that they do not bow to the imposed forms and stereotypes.

Even if it gets easy by day, those declarations and rising against norms, which are not as easy as the word is said, have not reached the desired momentum and effect from yesterday to today. Maybe that’s partly why, none of these statements relieves the pain of women’s identities that have been compressed by their opposite sex throughout history, and this hunger is still hidden and lives on in the minds and hearts of this gender, even in the small issues of my generation, such as the choice of books. This situation pushes me to think about the source of gender inequality, which reaches a different dimension with gender roles. Many historians and researchers have managed to address and define the concept of gender from different perspectives. Because gender is a concept that is highly influenced by the cultural structure of society and diversifies in this context. The historian Joan Scott expressed one of the comments that I think is quite interesting and profound about this concept: “Gender is the essential element of social relations based on perceived differences between the sexes; is the primary way of showing power relations.” This expression clearly points to the main reason, the source of the greatness of the impact of inequality on our lives. Gender is a formation whose rootedness and traditionality are already utilized and that can be brought to the agenda with many different intentions in many different fields. For this reason, we may encounter a perception of gender and witness inequality in every common ground of society, especially in the social and mainstream media, even within the borders of our own homes and living space.

So what is this gender inequality? Gender inequality, which has become the constant topic of our agenda, is a kind of expression of the dominance of the masculine approach, with society pointing to the masculine order based on the differences between the sexes. At this point, the social definitions of the masculine and feminine binary system and what they represent in the social process of history should be discussed; It should be observed by going down to the basis of how inequality spreads to various areas of our lives. As I have mentioned before, there is androcentrism in the foundations of human history, and this consciousness, this mentality has greatly affected the culture of the society. Androcentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing a masculine point of view at the center of one’s worldview, culture, and history, thereby culturally marginalizing femininity. The related adjective is androcentric, while the practice of placing the feminine point of view at the center is gynocentric. Our desire to look from the woman’s perspective and to understand the story with the woman’s words is based upon this. To see women and femininity as marginal, to make women’s nature absurd, is to legitimize the constant intervention of men.

This naturally paves the way for inequality at the social level. In order to be able to talk about gender equality that manifests in every part of society, we must first accept the existence and individuality of women and what their nature brings. Otherwise, all research on this subject, including this essay, will remain as inculcations that are tried to be adapted to society.