Finding Identity

Nuva Rai

Who are you? What is your identity and what is it based on? Every one of us has a different identity, but when it comes to my sister and me, we have the same identity: “The daughter of Kumar Rai.” As it is not uncommon in my community for daughters’ identity to be based on their father’s identity, I never found anything wrong with this culture that we follow until I read the article “Feminist Theory.” This article briefly describes the three waves of feminism while quoting various writers and pointing out the pros and cons of each wave. While discussing the second wave of feminism, the author introduces another writer, Luce Irigaray, a feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist who stated “women are trapped in a masculine world of representation.” Reading her words made me question the base that my society uses to identify me and my sister; is our identity really just limited to who our father is?

When I reflect back on my community, Irigaray’s words become very relatable. From the moment of my birth, my identity was based on my father. Even now that I am already 20 years old, if I go to social gathering I will mostly be called “Kumar’s daughter” rather than my actual name. I love my father, but when I am continuously being called “Kumar’s daughter” I lose a part of my identity in the society. I believe that due to this culture, my identity gets trapped in my father’s essence because expressing that I do not want to be addressed in that manner means I am being disrespectful towards my father. So in order to show my respect towards my father I maintain the culture of finding my identity in my father. As our identity is tangled into our father’s identity, our actions have the ability to hamper our father’s reputation. This way our father’s identity also depends on what and who we are. Irigaray states that even though men exist

through women, women are being deprived of finding meaning in their own existence by themselves (97). So even though our father’s reputation in the society is partially dependent on us daughters, our right to make our own identity is not available. It is not only my sister and me that face this problem. Even my mother has lost her essence to my father. She is referred to as “Kumar’s wife” rather than her own name whereas my father is never called “Sheela’s husband” as it would be considered disrespectful to my father. Similarly, the women in my community are referred to as their father’s daughter, and then after marriage, they will be referred to as their husband’s wife. In this way the women in my community tend to get their identity from a male figure in their life.

The preference of male children over female children is highly prevalent in Nepal. One of the reasons may be that many Hindus believe that you cannot get into heaven if you do not have a son. As Nepal is highly dominated by the Hindu population, other cultures and communities are also influenced by it. So in Nepal, a mother’s identity is based on her “capacity to bear sons.” As Irigaray explains, a girl has no part in describing her own existence as the society expects that her most powerful feminine wish is reproduction and that her identity is based on it (97). Similarly, the identity of women in my community is trapped under the pressure of whether they can or cannot give birth to a son. My mother too has been a victim of this because she did not give birth to a son. My mother was constantly advised to try for another baby in hope of a son. My father was even advised to re-marry since my mother was not able to fulfill her most important job of bearing a son to continue my family and take them to heaven. So here we can see that a woman in my community is forced into trying to find her identity within a male figure, her son.

Thus, we can see that women in my society are forced to find their identity through reproduction where male gets their essence from, while they are constantly deprived of forming their own essence in the society. Therefore, I believe that women in my society can own their identity only after the patriarchal view of the society is dismantled. The valorization of masculinity over femininity causes the women in my community to undermine their social identity and keep repeating the cycle of trying to find their identity through their father, then their husband, and then their son.