Salman Rushdie's Women: Strategic Transgressions and Agency

This paper discusses Salman Rushdie's five major novels to examine how the sexed or gendered codes of feminine passivity are called into question and even reversed in a subversive manner. In the process, the female body becomes no longer docile, feminine, or abject as a site of domesticity, sexual reproduction, patriarchy, colonial or nationalist discourse. I mainly draw on theories and ideas of Gayatri Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha whose concerns with the postcolonial predicament on the one hand and strategy on the other hand can contribute to the emergence of agency - the ability to resist or transform hegemonic power - on the part of women, so that they can become subjects of their history and experience. While I acknowledge the strategic use of essentialism in giving voice to the marginalized, I also stress that the politics of resistance and transgression operates in a relational manner, necessitating ethical behavior on the part of those in power as well as setting the limits of transgression.