Constructing Silence, Reclaiming Voice: Gendered Subjectivity in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You

Abstract

This paper offers a critical reading of Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife through the dual frameworks of social constructionism and postcolonial feminist theory. Often classified as a testimonial narrative of domestic abuse, the novel is reinterpreted here as a trenchant critique of the ideological structures—marriage, nationhood, and language—that construct and constrain female subjectivity in postcolonial India. Drawing on Berger and Luckmann’s theory of social reality and Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, the study examines how patriarchal power operates not only through physical violence but also through discursive conditioning that enforces silence, obedience, and moral surveillance. The protagonist’s enforced roles as dutiful wife, cultural custodian, and symbol of familial honor are shown to be socially fabricated performances, normalized through repetition and coercion. Further, engaging with postcolonial feminist thinkers such as Mohanty and Spivak, the paper contends that the narrator’s acts of writing, refusal to name her abuser, and narrative self-reclamation constitute epistemic resistance. Through language, she contests the very structures that sought to silence her. When I Hit You is ultimately a radical narrative of reconstruction, where the female subject dismantles socially inscribed roles and reclaims agency through storytelling.