The Poetics of Affect Studies: Exploring Affective Turn to Gender, Culture and Society in Shashi Deshpande's The Intrusion and Other Stories

Abstract

ffect Studies is an interdisciplinary cognitive science that incorporates and simultaneously discusses human psychology, medical humanities, science and technology, philosophy, history, politics, sociology, ecology, gender and queer studies, literary studies and critical theory. It also manifests various mental aspects of affective consciousness that introduce the academic cross-examination of emotional responses and experienced feelings to the social occurrences and structures of our familiar world. Affect Studies, thereby, shows the effect and reflection of social factors on the mind of people individually or collectively in diverse neural communication of human brain areas to focus on personal, social, cultural, religious, historical and political affairs. It raises affect theory as a dominant paradigm of twenty-first-century literary studies that attempts to bridge the gap between biological, psychological and social manifestations in contemporary textual criticism. Affect theory is a non-linguistic literary turn or approach to gender and sexuality, culture, society, media and communication, history, and politics and that measures mankind’s automatic feelings, emotions and reactions to the social and cultural predefined characteristics of the world. Shashi Deshpande has occupied the highly acclaimed position as a women writer in Indian English Literature and most of her writings minutely represent women’s traumatic memories and psychology, dilemma, day-to-day feelings over the poignant issue of gender discrimination, sexual harassment, rape and pregnancy, domestic violence and oppression, the traditional code and conduct of the marriage system, the melodrama of the man-woman relationship, and the crisis of women’s space and freedom in the androcentric society of India. This research paper aims to examine the theoretical discourses of affective turn to the integrated but controversial relationship between gender, culture and society in Shashi Deshpande’s ‘The Intrusion and Other Stories’ (1993). It also evaluates Deshpande’s textualization of the abstract emotion, sense of alienation and despair, sorrow and pain, inner conflicts and typical unhappy feelings of Indian women in the articulation of her female characters, their struggle for identity, and their negotiations and reactions to the matter of gender discrimination and alterity, sexual violation and marital rape, unwanted pregnancy, domestic violence and exploitation, the conventional marriage system and marital discordance, and the subjugation of women’s identity.