https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.112
What are Women’s Things? Feminist Materiality in Ladies’ Coupé
MALAVIKA K. NAMBIAR
Research Scholar
Department of Indian and World Literatures
The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
Abstract: The twentieth century has seen a shift towards material culture by erasing the subject-object binary and also by validating the agency of everyday objects in constituting the subjective consciousness of the user. It goes beyond consumerism and hopes to approach material objects as extensions of the self. The paper explores how materiality negotiates with the politics embedded in everyday life, struggle, and resistance of women by attempting a close analysis of instances from Anita Nair’s Ladies’ Coupé (2001). Anita Nair deliberately picks objects like lunch boxes, saris, bangles, nose pins, cosmetics, and perfumes and associates them with her female characters to mediate the act of gender performance. In patriarchal structures, objects are also tools used to perpetuate ideology. The patriarchal society strips women of their autonomy and relegates them to the position of passive objects. However, it is intriguing to see that the novel carefully employs banal yet powerful objects from quotidian life also as sites of internalisation, resistance, awareness, and liberation. They are not restrained as metaphors for domestic femininity; rather, they illuminate female subjectivity.
The paper will scrutinise how objects and women constitute each other by adhering to prominent material culture theories propounded by Bill Brown, Daniel Miller, and Arjun Appadurai. The paper aims to draw theoretical insights from Janet Hoskins’ Biographical Objects and Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Things to conceptualise feminist material culture. By mapping the material life of women familiar to us, the paper strives to unravel the complex materiality of the human subject and her objects that permeates social relations, power, and history. Broadly, it will explore how material culture serves as a legitimate way of understanding human life.
Keywords: Material Objects, Thing Theory, Everyday Life, Patriarchy, Gender and Feminist Consciousness, Indian Writing in English
Read Full Manuscript PDF