(Re)locating (I)dentity With(in) Politicized (Re)presentation of Fe/Male Body in Kamala Das’ Poetry

Sharmin Sultana, Nadia Sarwar

Abstract


This paper is going to argue that the selected poems of renowned Indian poet Kamala Das are inclined to relocate both feminine and masculine identity through the politicized representation of body.  Kamala Das’ representation of body in her poems has always been viewed as a medium of re-historicizing the pain, sufferings, and psychological trauma that a woman goes through in a patriarchal society.  Though apparently female body seems to be submissive under patriarchal dominance but this paper reveals how female body in Das’ poems acts as a powerful agent over the male body. The objective of this paper is to analyze and evaluate kamala Das’ representation of body to understand the gender reality in a patriarchal society, to question the existing discourse of sexed/gendered identity, to find a new way of viewing to both female and male body. Echoing Beauvoir, Judith Butler and Hall, this paper is going to analyze how Kamala Das represents body as an important factor in her poems to fight back the normative concept of identity based on patriarchal sex and/or gender stereotypes.

Keywords: identity, body, sex/gender, performativity, representation


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