Bodies and Beyond: Reading Liminal Corporealities in Ambai’s Short Stories

This article demonstrates how the Indian writer Ambai’s short stories construct counter-narratives to phallogocentric structures, opening up fresh avenues of theoretical engagement in the cultural context of Tamil Nadu, India. Despite advancements towards gender equality, cultural symbols and metaphors such as tali (ornament worn by Tamil women denoting their marital status), karpu (chastity), and veera tai (valorous mother), often govern the lives of women to a great extent. I argue that Ambai’s stories both resist the hegemonic constraints of such cultural symbols and also endeavour to reconfigure them. Ambai’s renderings of cultural semiotics enable women to experience their bodies removed from codified norms and offer subjectivity and visibility to women who are typically ignored as passive entities. The article argues that women’s corporeality finds extension through other materialities—nonhuman objects—in a merging that blurs the subject/object binary. The article examines three of Ambai’s short stories: “Kailasam,” “A Lion’s Tail,” and “When Things Die.” The theoretical lens of posthumanism and the new materialist feminism of Rosi Braidotti, Stacy Alaimo, and Karen Barad are utilized to discuss the body as a site which actively shapes one’s being and behavior.