The Prisoner of Gender: Panopticon, Persuasion, and Surveillance of Women in Kavita Kané’s Menaka’s Choice

Abstract

In the mythology-inspired novel Menaka’s Choice (2016), Kavita Kané discovers that the female body is continuously perceived both as an object of sexual desire and as an individual being by disrupting the conventional understanding of Apsara Menaka. Using Foucault’s concept of docile bodies and organic individuality the paper studies how power, in the form of ‘system’, imposes docility on women’s bodies. The paper weaves the potential for feminist thought as the novel rediscovers the recondite experiences that have been shrouded for centuries by giving central position to silent agents of Hindu mythology. Eventually, it attempts to analyse the act of seduction from the context of gender and how the individual tries to resist that disciplinary system.

Keywords

• docile bodies
• individuality
• apsaras
• hindu mythology
• panopticon