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This paper attempts a feminist reading of Anita Nair’s novel Ladies Coupe by examining how women negotiate identity and agency within a patriarchal social structure. The novel interrogates dominant cultural constructions of female subjectivity, sexuality, and domesticity across various cultures through a feminist lens. Anita Nair’s women, who boldly articulate their thoughts and ideas about their identity and freedom, are not passive recipients of patriarchal norms but active agents who develop varied strategies for self-assertion and survival. As Kimberlé Crenshaw explains, factors like ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status interact simultaneously to shape a person’s lived experience. The novel shows how the intersections of gender, caste, and class shape the lives of women across different social backgrounds and generations. Invariably, the lived experiences of the women in the novel, who come from different social and cultural milieus, vary. They try to make sense of their own existence by talking about their gendered experiences. Anita Nair skillfully crafts the ways women negotiate and resist the gendered power structures that seek to constrain them in the novel, exploring themes such as female desire, bodily autonomy, mobility, and interpersonal relationships.
Dr Dhanya S. “Transgressions and Celebrations: A Reading of Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 354-374. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.9.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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