Critique on Dominant Culture: Representation of Islamic Women in Afghan Culture in Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Abstract

This thesis analyzes Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns to show how it critiques the dominant Afghan culture in relation to the representation of Afghan women. The dominant culture in the name of religion has affected the life of women. The major women characters in the novel, Mariam and Laila suffer in the male dominated culture. In order to prove this claim, this paper employs the theoretical concept of Sarah Franklin’s “Feminism and Cultural Studies”, and Kandiyoti Deniz’s “Bargaining with Patriarchy”, Beauvoir’s “Women as Other’, Stuart Hall’s notion of representation, Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and so on. Key words: representation, feminism, ideology, patriarchal domination, hegemony