From Silence to Sovereignty: Feminist Refusal as Political Method in Contemporary Indian Writing
Author : Dr. Devashish Kumar
Abstract :
This article presents a theory of feminist refusal as a politics in contemporary Indian literature. Going beyond the discursive paradigms that read silence, withdrawal, melancholy, and anger as indices of damage, trauma, and victimhood, this article contends that these acts are strategic epistemologies and politics. Based on the theories of subaltern studies, feminist politics, affect theory, Dalit feminism, and postcolonial state studies, this article shows that contemporary Indian women’s writing inscribes silence as counter-speech, withdrawal as labor disruption, and anger as epistemic clarity. Feminist refusal is not absence but interruption—disrupting the imperative of care, nationalist respectability, and moral reconciliation. This article presents a Refusal-Sovereignty model to think through how embodied refusal produces micro-political sovereignty in literary representation. This model pushes the frontiers of Indian feminist literary studies from trauma-based interpretation to a structural account of interruption and non-compliance.
Keywords :
Feminist refusal, Sovereignty, Silence, Anger, Withdrawal, Subaltern agency, Gendered citizenship, Affect theory, Indian feminist literature, Political interruption.
