The Woman Construct: An Existential Critique

The presence of women as subjects have been ignored by the patriarchal societies and woman as a category has been constructed according to the male fantasy, the inscriptions of which we find in cultural institutions and the media. The paper revisits the question of woman construction even in this postfeminist or more further in the posthumanist era, from the perspective of the existential school of thought, putting forward some elemental questions regarding the objectification of women in this age of cultural exchanges. With the ‘self’ being already ‘split’, the modern human fails to address the degradation that is wrought not only on the body but also on the psyche of the oppressed, when put to presentation in terms of objects. The same is with the women who are represented in movies, ads, pornographic films and ideologically constructed in ways so as to believe that in such ways they emerge as emancipated women. The paper therefore foregrounds the issues of choice and consent for women which can in true terms establish them as ‘free agents’ and destabilize the master-slave hierarchical relation.