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The paper makes a close reading of two short stories written by the emerging Malayalam writer Shahina E.K., with a view to bringing out the shifting paradigms of societal surveillance as far as female sexuality is concerned, and the subversive strategies women adopt to politically navigate such acts of cultural vigilantism. The paper analyses women’s experience of surveillance at both ends, being the object and subject of it. It highlights how they traverse the boundaries of patriarchal control by subverting the position of being the object of selective morality into that of the subject of surveillance, assuming agency. Spotlighting the various theories of the gaze, the paper unravels the phenomenological, psychological, political, existential and philosophical aspects of surveillance. Women in these stories adopt multiple strategies of the ‘oppositional gaze’, proactively upturning the panoptic surveillance gaze into the petrifying Medusa gaze.
Dr. Sheniya Jose P.. “From the Panopticon to Petrification: Shifting Paradigms of the Gaze and Moral Surveillance in Select Malayalam Short Stories.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 343-353. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.23.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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