A Study of Gender Identity and Resistance in the Select Works of Meena Kandasamy

Abstract

Meena Kandasamy (b. 1984) is among the most outspoken voices in contemporary Indian writing in English. A poet, novelist, translator and activist, she has built a body of work in which gender, caste and political violence are examined together. This paper studies gender identity and resistance in her select works: the poetry collections Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010), and the novels The Gypsy Goddess (2014) and When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017). It argues that Kandasamy constructs gender identity as a contested, performed and politically charged position, not as a natural essence. Her resistance takes several forms: the deliberate use of the female body and of erotic language as a means of protest, the reworking of myth and epic from a woman's and a Dalit's standpoint, formal experimentation that refuses linear, authoritative narration, and the transformation of writing itself into an act of survival. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Gayatri Spivak, Gopal Guru, and Sharmila Rege, the paper shows that Kandasamy's feminism is inseparable from her anti-caste politics and her Ambedkarite and Periyarist inheritance. The study concludes that her writing extends the range of Indian feminist literature by connecting intimate domestic violence to the wider structures of caste and patriarchy.