Katrak, Ketu 

H. Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third

World. Rutgers UP, 2006.

My own interpretation of sexuality acknowledges that it is constituted and influenced by

sociocultural, educational, and political elements. All these dimensions are rooted in our
colonial and postcolonial history. A politics of the female body must include the constructions
and controls of female sexuality, its acceptable and censored expressions, its location
socioculturally, even materially, in postcolonial regions. My Project attempts to name
sexuality as the arena where patriarchal control is exerted most distinctively over the female
body—whether in overt domination as rape, or in a variety of controls of the female body
through “traditions” of the obedient wife, self-sacrificing mother, and in discrimination
against girl children in terms of malnourishment, or, as in the last twentyfive years,
technological deployment of amniocentesis being used as an instrument of female feticide. All
these have a direct impact on women’s bodies. Xİ

The female body is in a state of exile including self-exile and self-censorship, outsiderness,
and un-belonging to itself within indigenous patriarchy (historicized within different cultures
and histories) strengthened by British racialized colonial practices in the regions of India,
Africa, and the Caribbean that this study covers I include literal and metaphoric connotations
of exile, as well as the concept of internal exile of the female body from patriarchy, and
external exile as manifest in migration and geographical relocation necessitated by political
persecution, material conditions of poverty, and forms of intellectual silencing in third world
societies. Female protagonists undergo what I term “internalized exile” where the body feels
disconnected from itself, as though it does not belong to it and has no agency 2

The experience of internalized exile unfolds as a process that includes the female
protagonists’ complicated levels of consent and collusion to domination. The unfolding,
indeed the process of the body being exiled, brings female protagonists to a “liminal” state of
consciousness, to use Victor Turner’s evocative concept. I interpret liminality as a space for
the female protagonist to cope with, and at times, to transcend exile. They resist domination
and attempt to reconnect with their bodies and communities. In resisting exile they often use
their female bodies via speech, silence, starvation, or illness. At times, resistances fail and
fatal outcomes result in murder or suicide. 2
Bodily responses by female protagonists vary from successful verbal and physical challenges
to patriarchal authority 3

A politics of the female body includes the constructions and controls of female sexuality, its
acceptable and censored expressions, its location socioculturally, even materially, in
postcolonial regions. Third world women writers represent the complex ways in which
women’s bodies are colonized. Similar to anti-colonial struggles for independence on the
macro political arena, women resist bodily oppressions by using strategies and tactics that are
often part of women’s ways of knowing and acting. A geographical deterritorializing that
forces colonizers to depart parallels how women attempt reclaiming their bodies from
patriarchal domination. 8

A politics of the body involves socialization involving layers and levels of ideological
influences, sociocultural and religious, that impose knowledge or ignorance of female bodies
and construct woman as gendered subject or object. Women writers present the struggles of
protagonists to resist patriarchal objectification and definition as daughter, wife, mother,
grandmother, mother-in-law. Sociocultural parameters of womanhood— wifehood, mothers
of sons valued more than mothers of daughters, infertility, widowhood—are grounded within
economic, political, and cultural norms that consciously and unconsciously constitute an
ideological framework that controls women’s bodies. 9