Feminist Dossier
Cassandra’s Eyes

The word extreme, so oft-used now, barely explains this counterintuitive actuality, the blood that flows, below the discursive code, the pink iceberg melting colossal neo-colonial excavations, expansions and bypasses. 

If all resistance, enunciated in signifiers—isms/counter-isms—is a poetics of un/becoming, what then is a feminist poetics of resistance?

They reminded me of her as if I were looking at her, as if sisterhood is a balcony I am on, and I’m looking at other balconies, and also there’s a gentle earthquake going on.

It was an ordinary morning, or was it? 
All mornings were weighed down by those phantom expectations that always came along with an anticipation of inevitable disappointments. They came slouching from across the hazy pages of the days and months of her forced amnesia. 

“You have probably guessed it by now; I do not know what to do with myself. Sometimes it is too much and sometimes it is not enough,” you write.

A woman can only be considered a hero when she has walked many miles to ensure justice. The problematic aspect here is that - the constant portrayal of a savior as hero/heroine invalidates the struggles of a victim. A   rape victim’s will to live with the trauma and a prostitute's way of negotiating her place within the society as a part of reality is never shown as heroic, despite the struggles the choices come with.

How can the paradigm of a woman’s sexuality get revolutionized in a religiously restrictive country like Bangladesh? Can we ever understand the complexity of female sexuality through critical eyes? Will rendering voices according to political or social contexts be enough? We need to dig deep to sort out the mud.

Considering the debate regarding the rigidification of the gender roles being a colonial imposition, the exaggerated romanticization of the sustenance of marriage solely for the sake of marriage itself is mostly backed up by some oral references to the “pure” Bengali values, norms, and culture.