Misogyny in Burmese Days

Burmese days seems to have an misogynistic male bias because it has a tendency to gloss over rape and events of sexual exploitation in a matter-of-fact manner. Rape seems to be “naturalized” and described as simply a banal, mundane, commonplace by-product of the tyrannical patriarchal imperialist regime. Rape is an event that is stripped of its symbolic meanings (brutal male violation of female individual freedom, psychological trauma) when the text either describes it as an insignificant, unremarkable event that demands no further explication or represses the event as a non-event altogether. For instance, after U Po Kyin’s callous dismissal of the young village girl with a baby (that requests to see him, claiming the baby to be his) because he did not “recognize her” since he engages in too much rape that all the girls become faceless, the third person narrator does not represent the subjectivity or individuality or point of view of the girl who was raped by U Po Kyin. She remains unidentified, unnamed, unknown--the voiceless subaltern who cannot speak. This event is then dismissed and silenced by the misogynistic text as one of the many mundane events in U Po Kyin’s life that demands no further elaboration. Thus, the text is inflicting metaphorical textual violence on the female victims of sexual exploitation; an exploitation sanctioned by the patriarchal gender politics of Imperialism, which is an androcentric male enterprise. The narrator is also disturbingly misogynistic in how he depicts Mr. Lackersteen’s sexual exploitation of the Burmese prostitutes in a comic, light-hearted and amused manner, when he jokes that “Mr. Lackersteen managed to enjoy quite a number of good times (of quickie sex with Burmese prostitutes), although they were hurried ones.” The text’s use of the subject of sexual violence as a joke to highlight the comic relations between a henpecked husband and a domineering wife is misogynistic because it trivializes and obscures the grave consequences of sexual violence and exploitation sanctioned by the patriarchal colonial regime.