Desire in discourse reconfiguring sexual purity norms in select post millennium malayalam short stories

Abstract

This research foregrounds the complex interface between sexuality, morality and culture which has dominated the debates on postmodernism, globalization and women after the millennium. The aim of the research is to draw a synchronic study of the representation of desire and the purity norms in relation to ‘deviant” sexuality, especially non-conjugal and socially unacceptable ‘illicit’ relationships, in select post-millennium short stories in Malayalam. The thesis uses purity as an umbrella term with extensive connotations of sexual fidelity and the related concepts of physical and moral purity, impurity and dirt, sexual contamination, pollution and defilement resulting from contact with impure bodies, and tries to elucidate how such norms become socially, culturally and historically constructed and defined, assuming varicd forms through different periods of time.The research argues that desire and sexual purity norms are constructed and get reconfigured along the gastropolitical, spatial and discursive contours of culture. The research also attempts to bring to light the fluidity of and social fragility of such terms and how politically situated they are. It also examines how caste and chastity overlap and permeate into cach other’s signification having the same etymological and cultural roots. The research thesis consists of three core chapters apart from an introductory chapter, concluding chapter and a chapter titled “Recommendations and Findings”. The study substantiates the arguments drawing upon insights provided by a number of Western and Indian cultural theorists. The conceptual theme of research has been identified in the select short fiction of the writers S. Hareesh, Santhosh Echikkanam, Subhash Chandran, K. Rekha, S. Sithara, Unni R., Arshad Bathery, V. Shinilal, Sreclatha, Pramod Raman, Abin Joseph, Vinoy Thomas, E.K. Shahina and Yama.