RESEARCH ARTICLES
Transgressive Gender Discourse in Anita Nair’sLadies Coupe’
Seema Bansal Somani& Rohit Phutela
Abstract: Anita Nair’sLadies Coupe’ is a microcosmic narrative shedding conspicuous light upon the psyche of Indian women through the lives of the six women, who have to live under perpetual constrains, haunted by fear and agony, but eventually decide to turn hostile and defiant in a bid to transgress the draconian laws. It is pervaded by fin de siècle transgressive gender discourse where Nair represents the taboo themes of female sexuality, rape, lesbianism and evil motherhood. Though these ideas got the literary voices but shunned out by critics and readers as the idea of transgressive female was not worth swallowing and digestive due to the fear factor of rupturing the codes of femininity.
Keywords: Binary, Discourse, Lesbian, Patriarchy, Transgression.
Gender relations in India as compared to west still involve politics. Women’s wing is constructed as separatist by the issues of gender, social class, caste and religion that are still lurking on periphery yet there are silent but rebellious voices echoing throughout literature registering the resilience and revolt on the part of writers as well as their textual counterparts. Anita Nair’sLadies Coupe’ does not condemn the transgressive female character, leaving her acts incomprehensible and unexplained, as in the case of many texts written by other authors of the time. Among the galaxy of emerging women writers, Anita Nair is the most promising and a writer to reckon with. Her maiden novelThe Better Man has placed her among the most sincere and self-conscious Indian novelists and her second novelLadies Coupe’ has registered her name in the hall of fame.
The novel carves a niche and manages to permit its protagonist both erotic desire and strength without presenting her in negative shades. Most of the narratives woven together are transgressive ones, in which women confess the laid boundaries of domesticity register silent resistance on their parts and acknowledge the conscious or subconscious strategies to subvert the myriad forms of patriarchal oppression. Akhila is a female character whose life experiences can be taken as sample study to reveal the hypocrisy and narrowness of the values of Indian bourgeois society. Only a handful of scholars have dealt with these transgressive issues. Due to the dearth of such excavations, it is time for an extensive gender analysis based on critical theories ofLadies Coupe’ because of its provocative representations of femininity. Butler appropriates theories for the study of gender: “A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic identity […]; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as anorigin andcause those identity categories that are in fact theeffects of institutions, practices, discourses […]” (Butler xxxi).
Through her novels Nair has presented modern Indian women’s search for liberation and transgression which are natural instincts of human beings though man or woman. She seems to be championing the cause of equality for women that the same code of morality be applied to both men and women otherwise they are bound to transgress. Hence, feminist literary criticism has become, to put it in Toril Moi’s words, “an urgent political necessity” (Moi 82). The overriding problem is now, “how to avoid bringing patriarchal notions of aesthetics, history and tradition to bear on the female traditi
