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GENDER, DISABILITY, AND LITERATURE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: NEPALI WRITERS JHAMAK GHIMIRE AND BISHNU KUMARI WAIWA (PARIJAT) by Tulasi Acharya A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL August 2012 Copyright by Tulasi Acharya 2012 ii ABSTRACT Author: Tulasi Acharya Title: Gender, Disability, and Literature in the Global South: Nepali Writers Jhamak Ghimire and Bishnu Kumari Waiwa, Parijat Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Mary Cameron Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2012 This thesis explores gender, disability and literature in the Global South through an examination of the writings of two physically disabled contemporary women writers from Nepal, Bishnu Kumari Waiwa and Jhamak Ghimire. I show how these renowned contemporary writers challenge stigmas of the disabled body by deconstructing the “ideology of ability” through their poetry, fiction, and autobiographical narratives. Religious and cultural values disable women’s autonomy in general, and create even greater disadvantages for women who are physically disabled. Challenging these cultural stigmas, Waiwa and Ghimire celebrate sexuality and disability as sources of creativity, agency, and identity in narratives that deconstruct cultural or social models of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty. In this thesis feminist disability and feminist theory guide an analysis of Waiwa and Ghimire’s writing to advance our understanding of gender, culture, disability and literature in the Global South. iv GENDER, DISABILITY, AND LITERATURE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: NEPALI WRITERS JHAMAK GHIMIRE AND BISHNU KUMARI WAIWA, PARIJAT Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..1 The problem perceived…………………………..……………………………...8 Thesis structure………………………………….……………………………..14 Chapter One: Feminism, Disability and Global South……………………….………..16 Feminist theory and disability….……………………………………………....16 Siebers’ ideology of ability….……………………………………………….....19 Thompson’s ideas on disability and extraordinary bodies…..………………....20 Culture as disability.………………………………………………………………...….24 Chapter Two: Religious and Cultural Contexts: Formation of Ideology of Ability.…..26 South Asian Patriarchy………..….……………………………………………..27 Religion……….……………….………………….………………….…………31 Law of Karma………………….…………………………………………….….35 Chapter Three: Jhamak Ghimire & Parijat.……………………………………....…..…38 Parijat…………………………………….………..……………………...…….39 Ghimire and cerebral palsy…………….……………………..…………………45 Ghimire and Parijat: body and works……………………………..…….……...46 Ghimire’s shame and sexuality……..…………………………………………...57 Parijat’s writing..…………………………….………………………………….60 v Conclusion………………………..……………………..…………………………….65 Bibliography……………………………..……………………………………………68 vi INTRODUCTION This thesis explores gender, disability and literature in the Global South1 through an examination of the writings of two physically disabled contemporary women writers from Nepal, Bishnu Kumari Waiwa and Jhamak Ghimire. These renowned contemporary writers challenge stigmas of the disabled body by deconstructing the “ideology of ability” through their poetry, fiction, and autobiographical narratives. Religious and cultural values disable women’s autonomy in general, and create even greater disadvantages for women who are physically disabled. Challenging these cultural stigmas, Waiwa and Ghimire celebrate sexuality and disability as sources of creativity, agency, and identity in narratives that deconstruct cultural or social models of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty. Disability garners different negative cultural constructs or “ideological categories,” such as ugly, old, aberrant, deformed, derailed, debilitated or feebleminded, and all of them devalue the human body. In her book Extraordinary Bodies (2004), Garland Thompson, a prominent theorist of disability and feminism, explains this prevalent cultural paradigm when she writes, “Culturally generated and perpetuated standards as beauty, independence, fitness, competence, normalcy exclude and disable many human bodies while validating and affirming others” (p. 7). The disabled are deemed to fall under the category of “aberrant human beings” (Garland-Thomson 1997) 1 The term Global South refers to countries in South Asia, and they are generally viewed as Asian. The term is also used to distinguish these countries from the Global North which is generally viewed to comprise Western largely European countries. 1 who fail to confirm the cultural embodiment of a normal body. As bodies interact with socially built environments and social expectations, they expose and proliferate ideologies of varied degrees of disability. Disability is more than ideas built on the social environment that shape our understanding and perception of what it means to be able bodied. It is gendered, as well, and colludes with cultural ideas about gender in specific ways. In the case of women, since they are already deemed “the second sex” or “the other” in the vast majority of cultures anthropologists have studied, female disability is even more poignant. This ideology regarding ability preserves and validates what it means to be normal by limiting women to certain “normal” standards. In her book Disabled Women: An Excluded Agenda of Indian Feminism (2002), Anita Ghai highlights culture as the cause of disability based on her research on disabled women in Indian culture. Concurring with this culturally-based concept of disability, Garland-Thomson writes, disability provides for the able-bodied “cultural capital to those who can claim such status, [and] who can reside within these subject positions” (1997, p. 25). In other words, this ideology about disability produces more disabilities and conforms to the binary normative standard of ability vs. disability. Thompson further states, “disability as a significant human experience occurs in every society, every family—and most every life... And it helps integrate disability into our knowledge of human experience and history to integrate disabled people into our culture” (2004, p. 26). Indeed, each human being eventually undergoes a phase of ‘disability’; an old person or sick person is often called disabled. What is disability, then, as I am using the term in the context of this thesis? 2 For the purposes of my analysis, disability can be understood as a kind of discourse that generates an “ideology of ability.” The ideology of ability is a concept Tobin Siebers introduces in his book, Disability Theory (2010). Siebers introduces the concept as an outcome of how an ideology is created in particular cultural and social contexts. A human being is abled only when s/he fits into the category of what it means to be an able human being. If one does not fit into that category, one is considered abnormal, not fully human, different, deviant, other, and therefore disabled, beings fallen from the “baseline of humanness” (Siebers, 2010, p. 10). The baseline of humanness has to do with the human body and mind that “gives or denies human status to individual persons” (Siebers, 2010, p. 10). To emphasize, Siebers’ understanding of an “ideology of ability” points to certain religious, cultural and social values playing a significant role. Those values reflect the patriarchal ethos in the society where attractive and able bodied women are more valuable than disabled. According to Siebers, this ideology of ability is an outcome of such a built social environment or cultural construct. An abled body is marked with certain cultural/social normative standards that give humans qualities of ability. Since a human being is a social being and her consciousness is determined by a specific social milieu and with whom she interacts, one judges others based on preconceived social recognition. For example, the same abled body in one sociocultural context can be a disabled body in another sociocultural context. Thus, there is not only one ideology of ability, there are many ideologies of ability. To borrow from post-modern theory, there is not only one signified concept of ability, but rather many signifiers to define ability. Thus so are the concepts of ability when one is stripped of one’s social and cultural biases of what it means to be able 3 bodied. To understand this, one needs to study the religious and cultural contexts and values of the society because human activities, perceptions, behaviors, and interactions are shaped by such values. For example, a few years ago, a baby with three arms was born in the countryside of Nepal where I, too, was born, raised and spent most of my life. The media reported that villagers considered the baby an incarnation of a god. Nepal is predominantly a Hindu country where exist many gods with more than two arms. Villagers paid homage to the god-baby with flowers and garlands in their hands as offerings. At that time, the child’s body was not perceived as a disabled one but as one that Garland Thompson would call an “extraordinary body.” In her book, Extraordinary Bodies (2004), Garland Thompson defines extraordinary bodies as differently abled bodies and the body of ability in a different way or in an extraordinary way. The child described above born in a different geographical location other than that region of Nepal would likely be considered disabled. Such kinds of religious beliefs guide human consciousness and transcend the common “ideology of ability.” In Nepal, many cultural factors play a crucial role in forming an ideology

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