Navigating the Female agency of the Third world woman between Western interventionism and Local Patriarchal Norms in Waldman’ SA Door in the Earth

Abstract

The present study is aimed to examine the female agency of the Third world woman between the Western interventionism and local patriarchal norms of the third world woman in Waldman’ s novel A Door in the Earth . The character of Parveen is dual agent between the patriarchal dominance against woman in Afghanistan and the Western interventional structures and norms of the America against Third World and its women. Parveen was born in Afghanistan and brought up in America but later on she moves to study the plight of women in Afghanistan. The theoretical insights for the present study had been taken from Mohanty’s (1988) "Under Western Eyes", which argues "Third World woman" as a universally oppressed. The findings of the study reveal that the Third World woman is not only oppressed by the patriarchal norms of the third world but by the interventionist norms of the West as well. In this way, third world woman is doubly oppressed. By interrogating the savior narrative and the internal gendered hierarchies, the study argues that A Door in the Earth, challenges the dominant discourses of liberation and oppression and how agency can be negotiated within and beyond these structures.