Critical research demands that we interrogate our own positionality and social location. Critical reflexivity is a form of researcher critical consciousness that is constant and dynamic in a complex spiral-like process starting within our own experiences as racialized, gendered, and classed beings embedded in particular sociopolitical contexts. Across diverse critical methodologies, a group of graduate students and their supervisor explored their own conceptualization of the reflexivity spiral by reflecting on how their research motivations and methodologies emerged from their racializing, colonizing, language-learning, parenting, and identity negotiating experiences. In this article, they present a spiral model of the critical reflexivity process, review the literature on reflexivity, and conclude with a description of critical reflexivity as a social practice within a supportive and collaborative graduate school experience.
Choice is an illusion non-existent in the lives of mothers; and selflessness to them, is not a decision but an encumbrance. This case is proficiently presented by Jodi Picoult in her novel Handle With Care (2009). Dealing with the issues of motherhood and nuptial ties, the novel raises a few important questions in the backdrop of mothering children with special needs. The novel introduces us to a helpless mother fighting for the survival of her dying daughter and gradually moving towards a troubled marriage and dissatisfied relationships. She is committed to saving her daughter’s life by whatever fair or foul means she can think of. This study examines why motherhood, is still the least valued and what are the factors that make motherhood suffer in the hands of other familial roles a mother plays. Another supplementary source My Sister’s Keeper (2008), by the same author, has also been taken into account since it also deals with an identical maternal crisis. Under the theoretical canopy of maternal feminism put forth by Andrea O’Reilly(2007, 2010), an exhaustive critical analysis of Picoult’s plea in question is done.
In 1974, the Pakistani Constitution was amended to declare Ahmadi Muslims as “non-Muslim”, initiating a systematic and hegemonic structural attempt to restrict Ahmadi Muslims from professing and practicing the Islamic faith in Pakistan. This state-sanctioned exclusion led to the mass migration of Ahmadis out of Pakistan into diasporic contexts. Using autoethnography, this article examines how being an Ahmadi Muslim woman in Canada remains rooted in deeply divisive politico-religious conflicts that transcend temporal and spatial boundaries and result in multiple layers of marginalities in the diaspora. I am conscious that my self-formation is racialized, gendered, and classed across three primary intersections: as a Pakistani/South Asian; as an Ahmadi Muslim; and as a woman. This “triple consciousness”, a term coined by Black feminist scholars and Afro-Latinx scholars in the United States to extend W. E. B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness”, produces a liminal and contradictory space of belonging—one that requires further reflection and analysis in the Canadian context where the racial continues to dominate our social world and proximity to Whiteness is privileged and rewarded.
The Golden Legend (2017) by Nadeem Aslam is a fictional work that explores the intersectional issues of women's oppression and sectarian violence in Pakistani society. The present study aims to examine the depiction of women's oppression, exploitation, and marginalization in Aslam's The Golden Legend. It seeks to unveil the patriarchal structures that exist in Pakistani society and contribute to gender oppression faced by women on a daily basis. Sylvia Walby's work, Theorizing Patriarchy (1990), serves as the primary text for this research, which outlines six interdependent patriarchal structures, including patriarchal production mode, patriarchal paid work relations, male violence, patriarchal state, patriarchal culture, and patriarchal relations in sexuality. The research employs these structures to demonstrate how they work together to promote the ideology of patriarchal tyrants in society. Additionally, the study also highlights sectarian oppression to bring attention to the injustices faced by women from different sects. The research argues that the intersection of gender and sect is one of the major factors that exacerbate oppression in any society, which is why women from different sects are often subjected to coercion, as portrayed by Aslam in The Golden Legend. The research seeks to shed light on the urgent need to eradicate patriarchal and sectarian ideologies that perpetuate oppression in society. Therefore, the study first exposes the oppressive patriarchal structures in contemporary Pakistani society and then brings to light the oppression faced by women of the Christian faith due to their gender and sect.
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