Re-orienting the Psyche through Inclusive Psychosocial Perspectives: A South Asian Literary-Cultural Analysis of Feminist Resistance in Taslima Nasrin’s Split: A Life

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the psychodynamics of feminist resistance in Taslima Nasrin’s Split: A Life, which addresses a gap in the current scholarship by largely giving preference to socio-political approaches to the text instead of examining inclusive psychic reorientation in the text. Moving away from traditional patriarchy, this research depicts the author’s fractured identity as not her weakness rather provides a revolutionary procedure to include her in the norms laid down by the society. This paper uses contemporary theories by Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy and Gayatri Spivak’s Epistemic violence that provides a new trajectory to the false happiness created by gentle patriarchy of south Asian society. This paper tries to present inclusive approach in South Asian literature as a world literature by giving it a broad spectrum drawing on Jasbir Puar’s homonationalism where bodily autonomy is negotiated within nationalist and patriarchal regimes that disciplines dissenting identities. Employing an interdisciplinary framework that synthesizes feminist theory, psychodynamics, and South Asian culture studies, this paper theorizes autobiographical narration as a site of internalized negotiation with patriarchal power. In the course of textual development, the internalization produces ambivalence, fragmentation, and conflict in the subjectivity which leads to ‘Feminist Killjoy’ in the society. Simultaneously the textual resistance does not arise as a pre determined oppositional position but rather as a continuous process of self-reorientation that is mediated by memory, affect, and narrative articulation. The study reconceptualizes aspects of feminist autobiographical writing as a critical space by mediating the interactions between conscious and unconscious in establishing subjectivity.