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The following extract draws a detailed feminist reading of Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You or A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, cantered on how the husband systematically strips the unnamed protagonist of her intellectual identity, reducing her to a body to be punished and controlled. Drawing on the concept of the body as a contested site from corporeal feminist theory, I argue that the novel maps abuse not only physically but psychologically, illustrating a battle over the woman’s agency. The research uses evidence from the novel’s narrative as summarized in Kandasamy’s autobiographical retelling and critical perspectives, including Judith Butler’s reflections on corporeality and vulnerability. We show how the husband’s tactics from controlling language and communication to physical and sexual violence attempt to erase the wife’s personhood, and how she reclaims autonomy through writing. My conclusion situates this struggle within feminist frameworks of bodily autonomy and resistance, underscoring the body-as-battleground motif.
Shalini Singh. “The Body as a Battleground: Corporeal Feminism, Domestic Violence, and Autonomy in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 1–15. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.1.
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