A Feminist Approach to Selected Works of Kamala Das and Judith Wright.

Gender is a social construct, whereas sex is a biological one. Feminism has politicized gender by showing the way it is constructed. The term 'feminine' is actually a cultural construction, a 'gender' role culturally assigned to women over generations. Simone de Beauvoir's iconic statement, "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," underlines this point. Feminist literary criticism is concerned with the way woman is presented in literature. It has two basic premises: 'Phallocentrism' (the way 'woman' is presented in literature from man's point of view), and 'Gynocriticism' (the way 'woman' is presented in literature from woman's viewpoint). Women's studies deal with women's lives and examine the social and cultural aspects of gender. This paper takes a feminist approach to selected works of two female writers from two continents, i.e., Indian poet Kamala Das and Australian poet Judith Wright, and focuses especially on how they deal with themes of love, marriage, and motherhood in their poems. Das's poems, "An Introduction" and "Looking Glass," express her determination to love the way she likes, while Wright's "Woman to Man" and "Ishtar" are comparable to that of Das in contesting patriarchal dominations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]