Mae: Welcome back to Mae and Sadie’s Podcast. This Episode is called Women in Drama. In this episode,we’ll talk about all women facing injustices in all different novels and comic books.
Sadie: Are you excited?
Mae: I can’t wait. I feel like we have a lot of good segments to bring up in this podcast today.
Sadie: We want to shine a light on all the injustices women have had throughout these novels we read in english class. We will talk about The Kite Runner, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Fences.
Mae: All the injustices that will be brought up in today’s podcast are sexism, sexual assault, male domination, and discrimination. Also all of you guys have really liked the music for the past few podcasts but we had to switch the music up and make it more classical. We felt our past music was too trendy and too much for this topic we are about to discuss.
Sadie: Having trendy music while talking about women's injustices during this episode would be super lame to us so here's some nice piano music!
Mae: Where should we start Sadie, I'll leave it up to you.
Sadie: Do you want to start us off by discussing the portrayal of women in The Kite Runner?
Mae: Yes so basically during the second half of our English class we learned about different types of dramas. One of my favorite dramas we read was The Kite Runner. This book I actually sat in my bed and read instead of going online for summaries. We also got to see the comic book style of it which was pretty cool and helped me visual what was actually happening. The Kite Runner is a story of Amir, a Sunni Muslim, who struggles to find his place in the world because of traumatic childhood events.The story takes place in Afghanistan with two important main characters. We have Hassan and Amir. Hassan has a mother named Sanabubar who is known to be very beautiful. The Soviets in the book, who are taking over their home land, always have something to say about women's appearances with utter disrespect.
Sadie: Yes, men regard women as nothing more than objects for their sexual desires. For instance, in the novel, Hassan and Amir return from the theater and a group of the Soviets says offensive words about Sanaubar, who is Hassan's mother. They discuss her in a degrading manner as her only purpose is to provide for the pleasures of men. The Soviets also do not ignore her appearance and in a way make fun of it because they know Hassan is standing right there. While the portrayal of women in dramas varies greatly from different time periods and cultures, there are common themes of oppression and one-dimensional representation.
Mae: Yeah I can't imagine how the woman must have felt just wanting to leave their homes but being terrified of becoming a victim of rape or assault. One of the main issues throughout the book was how much power men had over women. In The Kite Runner, Baba and Amir were being transported from Afghanistan as refugees with tons of other women in the vehicle. The Russian soldiers would pull over each vehicle at different checkpoints so they could flirt and try to get five minutes alone with the woman/girls. If soldiers got what they wanted from the women then the vehicle would be able to continue the ride. In these situations women were scared of fighting back for themselves and knew if they spoke up nothing but bad would come out of it. This also relates to the book we read called "A Streetcar Named Desire” where women faced all the same injustices as in the Kite Runner.
Sadie: In A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the portrayal of women shifts from the traditional, one-dimensional view to one in which the women are equally if not more complex characters than the men. We have the two main female characters, Stella and Blanche portrayed in different lights. Stella represents the more traditional view of women. She is mostly docile and subservient and it seems she doesn’t hold a fraction of the...
