Socio-Cultural Trauma and Gender Objectification in Haider's How It Happened: A Cultural Feminist Study
The research aims to pinpoint the socio-cultural suppressive crisis faced by the Pakistani women and tends to evaluate the standards through which Pakistani women are (mis)recognized through Shazaf Fatima Haider's How It Happened (2012). It focuses upon the internalized social norms regarding women's conduct to achieve perfection and a state of acceptability which have terrifyingly placed a question mark upon women's existence. Zeba, being the protagonist of How It Happened, undergoes anunnerving situation, being continuously displayed as an object for her marriage. Simone de Beauvoir's cultural feminist ideologies in her work, The Second Sex(1997), tend to deconstruct falsely existing cultural archetypes. She illustrates in her work the transformative stages of women's life beginning from the oppressive state towards the protesting state. Consequently, celebrating women's strength by acknowledging biological differences. Through the methodological application of a Textual analytical apparatus, this research tends to reverse the suppressive patriarchal patterns, bringing women from the periphery to the center, also providing a voice to silenced women entangled in the fabricated culture.