Mapping the South Asian feminist resistance narrative : from the body to real spaces

• Main Author: Raj, Natasha
• Other Authors: Yong Wern Mei
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/152014
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis navigates the process through which narratives of gendered violence written by women can come to be narratives of resistance to the treatment of the female body in South Asia. It focusses on two texts by South Asian female writers that span over two decades - What the Body Remembers (1999) by Shauna Singh Baldwin, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) by Arundhati Roy. These texts are placed in conversation with one another while drawing heavily upon Rosi Braidotti’s theories of female subjectivity and posthumanism, as well as Foucauldian approaches to the female body and heterotopia. In doing so, this thesis traces a cartography of thought by establishing a discourse of female subjectivity that begins with an understanding of how the South Asian female is embodied, and concludes with an exploration of how heterotopic spaces function as sites of alterity, thereby playing a pivotal role in the process of meaningful subject-making for those marginalised and oppressed by South Asian patriarchy.