Reclaiming the Body: Marital Rape and Self-sustainability in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You

Abstract

One of the burning issues of recent times is the domestic violence in forms of psychological tortures, physical assault, marital rape, etc., which are more or less visible in every society. This is the concern that leads this article to negotiate how individual identities get reshaped by the socio-cultural and political practices of the given systems of a society. Within this framework, this article analyses how ‘reclaiming the body’ helps ‘self’-sustenance of the female narrator while still contesting with the violated domestic life under the threat of patriarchal society in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017). In the novel, Kandasamy not only portrays her protagonist as a mere object subjected to patriarchy but also shows the ways of her constructing own ‘self’, more explicitly female subjectivity which this article intends to explore through the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler’s vision about construction of gender as mere rehearsed performative acts constructed to implement and cherish self-proclaimed supreme patriarchal ‘self’ of the society.