Gendered Power and Resistance: Negotiating the Self in Kire’s A Terrible Matriarchy

Abstract

The North-Eastern frontier zone is a very distinct region due to its indigenous customs, consisting of seven states with diverse languages and cultures. Easterine Kire, an Angami Naga writer from Kohima, offers profound insight into the Naga culture and gender dynamics through her fiction. Her novel A Terrible Matriarchy often challenges idealised assumptions about matriarchy, which represents a household governed by a powerful grandmother who imposes strict, often repressive control over her granddaughter, Dielieno. The text highlights how female authority can also turn into an oppressive force and shows how women themselves can engage in patriarchal violence, which silences younger female voices. Through Lieno’s experience of denial of education, exclusion of freedom, and emotional neglect, it exposes the deep-seated prejudices against daughters within tribal culture. Kire dismantles the traditional image of matriarchy and reveals the embedded patriarchal structures within domestic spaces. The study seeks to probe the situation of a silenced daughter under a powerful matriarchy. Furthermore, the proposed paperutilizes feminist literary criticism to examine how Kire’s text interrogation patriarchal structures operating in matrilineal societies, and also explicates the complexities of gender and power in her text.