Undercutting Eurocentric (Culture), Andocentric (Gender) and Heterosexual Supremacy (Sexual Orientation)
Literary theories or cultural philosophies carry difference under three major aspects, ‘Eurocentricism’, ‘Andocentricism’, and ‘Heterosexual Supremacy’. Out of first two terms, the former talks about the western look at the rest of world as begging, illogical, unscientific and strange(Cultural sense of other) and the latter term talks about the gender level marginalization. In this dyad, the marginalization is done at the two different levels ‘Cultural’ and ‘Gender’ and all the theories which are ‘Text-led’ like Structuralism which convey the idea of finding the absolute meaning by using lexies, codes and interspersed digressions as per the system of Roland Barthes give enough opportunity to interpret the meaning of the text and the most importantly, it removes all the Western dominance or Gender biasness from the world. The third term Heterosexual Supremacy can strip the hidden fear of marginalized people on the basis of their sexual orientation as heterosexual sneaks at the lesbian or gay community which was forgotten to be underpinned by the feminism may be in fear of social milieu or ignorance but Lesbian and Gay criticism brought this type of biasness and marginalization on the surface which is on the basis of sexual orientation. Bisexuality’s support by any criticism is yet to register in the list of literary theories.
The ‘Text-led’ theories like Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Russian Formalism and Freud’s Psychoanalysis work on the text to find the generalized meaning of the text and the ‘Idea-led philosophies like Louis Althusser’s Marxism, New Historicism (hope to find meaning in the text). Cultural Materialism also seeks the same meaning with wider approach of accepting the fact that a literary work is affected by multiple causes and can result in multiple interpretations of the works. Now, rather than taking favor of one side and rejecting the other it is more practical that a new generic theory is required to encompass both the bi-polar conceptual ends and it may be called Post-Pragmatic approach which talks about the range of language aspects to the aspects of unlimited interpretations undercutting the marginalization.
Keywords: Endocentric, Andocentric, Text-led, Idea-led, essentialism, anti-essentialism, Sado-Masochistic, Butch-Femme