Violence againts women in Deborah Rodriguez’s Kabul beauty school: Feminist Literary Criticism

ABSTRACT

This study investigates violence against women in Deborah Rodriguez’s Kabul Beauty School (Feminist Literary Criticism). The objectives of the study are to know the kinds of violence against women and the women’s struggle to fight against the violence. The writer uses literary criticism as her research design to conduct the research, including description, analysis and the interpretation of literary work. The data are collected from words, sentences, paragraphs, and dialogs within the novel which show the violence against women and women’s struggle to fight the violence those are analyzed by using feminist literary criticism.

Thus, this study is aimed to find what the kinds of women problem covered on the novel such as violence and struggle of women that happened to the characters in the novel. To achieve the problem of the study, the researcher uses feminist literary criticism as the method of this research. The data of this research are collected from Deborah Rodriguez’s Kabul Beauty School. The researcher herself becomes the research instrument in the process of data collection and data analysis.

The results of this study show that there are four kinds of violence against women in Kabul Beauty School novel. The kinds of violence against women in Afghanistan are physical violence, psychological violence, sexual and economical violence. The struggles of women to fight against those four kinds of violence in Afghanistan reflected in the novel, are struggle in getting education, struggle to get out of forced marriages and abusive husband and struggle to make money in getting good economy.

Since this study is only analyzing violence against women in Deborah Rodriguez’s Kabul Beauty School, it is suggested that other researcher analyze another phenomenon by using other theories. Besides, the researcher hopes for the government and the legislator prioritize prevention of violence against women like awareness-raising activities regarding women’s human rights, gender equality and the right of women to be free from violence; use educational curricula to modify discriminatory social and cultural patterns of behavior, as well as derogatory gender stereotypes; and sensitization of the media regarding violence against women and take the appropriate action to help them cope their problem.