The Absent Women in Asian Literature: Reading Frencezca C Kwe’s ‘The Ghost Story’ and Intan Paramaditha’s ‘The Spinner of Darkness’ through Feminist Hauntology

  • Unique Paper ID: 188281
  • PageNo: 1524-1528
  • Abstract:
  • Silence, when contemplated in women’s lives has long served as a formidable vehicle for articulating what words cannot. Historically, women have been pushed to the margins of the society, their stories are always recounted form the perspective of others, as a result they have been reduced to insignificant figures in their own story but Spectrality and Hauntology provide women with the space to reclaim their agency and to emerge as the narrators, creators, authors, chroniclers of their stories. Drawing on Derrida’s notions of spectrality and hauntology the paper will attempt to reinstate hauntology within a feminist framework examining how the patriarchal constraints transform women into lifeless, listless yet visible and invisible spectres, bodies of flesh as spectres that are present in the narrative yet yield little power over the narrative but spectrality confer upon the readers the power to read and understand the silences as a resistance against the dominant narratives. Haunting has become an integral part of literature specially in context of female characters revealing power structures, traumas, process or phenomena that confer a conditioned silence on women. The paper will undertake a comparative analysis of Philippine writer Francezca C. Kwe’s ‘A Ghost Story’ (2008) and Indonesian writer, Intan Paramaditha’s ‘The Spinner of Darkness’ (2020) to study the silences imposed on the female protagonists followed by the gaps that could be scrutinized through the lens of Spectrality and Hauntology.

Copyright & License

Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

BibTeX

@article{188281,
        author = {bushra khan},
        title = {The Absent Women in Asian Literature: Reading Frencezca C Kwe’s ‘The Ghost Story’ and Intan Paramaditha’s ‘The Spinner of Darkness’ through Feminist Hauntology},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2025},
        volume = {12},
        number = {7},
        pages = {1524-1528},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=188281},
        abstract = {Silence, when contemplated in women’s lives has long served as a formidable vehicle for articulating what words cannot. Historically, women have been pushed to the margins of the society, their stories are always recounted form the perspective of others, as a result they have been reduced to insignificant figures in their own story but Spectrality and Hauntology provide women with the space to reclaim their agency and to emerge as the narrators, creators, authors, chroniclers of their stories. Drawing on Derrida’s notions of  spectrality and hauntology the paper will attempt to reinstate hauntology within a feminist framework examining how the patriarchal constraints  transform women into lifeless, listless yet visible and invisible spectres, bodies of flesh as spectres that are present in the narrative yet yield little power over the narrative but spectrality confer upon the readers  the power to read and understand the silences as a resistance against the dominant narratives.  Haunting has become an integral part of literature specially in context of female characters revealing power structures, traumas, process or phenomena that confer a conditioned silence on women. The paper will undertake a comparative analysis of Philippine writer Francezca C. Kwe’s ‘A Ghost Story’ (2008) and Indonesian writer, Intan Paramaditha’s ‘The Spinner of Darkness’ (2020) to study the silences imposed on the female protagonists followed by the gaps that could be scrutinized through the lens of Spectrality and Hauntology.},
        keywords = {Spectres, Women, Hauntings, Patriarchy, violence},
        month = {December},
        }

Cite This Article

khan, B. (2025). The Absent Women in Asian Literature: Reading Frencezca C Kwe’s ‘The Ghost Story’ and Intan Paramaditha’s ‘The Spinner of Darkness’ through Feminist Hauntology. International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology (IJIRT), 12(7), 1524–1528.

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