Abstract

Foregrounding Women’s Body and Sexuality:

A Major Concern of Indian English Women’s Novels in the Twenty-First Century

The rich arena of Indian English fiction has received a significant output from women
writers in contemporary times. This paper reads the foregrounding of issues relating to
women’s body and sexuality as an ‘in’ trend in these novels by women. Substantiating it
with instances taken both from ‘literary’ and ‘pulp’ fictions of the twenty-first century,
the paper also tries to identify the factors, which have contributed to the emergence of
such a discourse concerning women’s bodily desires and experiences, till recently
unarticulated. This discourse is paradoxical in nature as it serves two contradictory
purposes, that is, first, it caters to the ‘base’ demands of the masses, and, second, it raises
serious feminist concerns regarding women’s empowerment. Without being judgmental,
the paper argues that because of this market viability factor and its political edge this
literary practice is going to remain in vogue for quite some time in future also.