Reading Things. Gender and Material Culture in Contemporary Anglophone Women’s Writings

We are living in an epoch in which the Cartesian vision of reality, based on the presumption of mentality over materiality, needs to be revised from a new symmetric point of view. Never have the effects of nonhuman agency been more evident than in modern times, when it is increasingly clear that material entities are far from being passive matter waiting to be manipulated by humans depending on their needs. On the contrary, things actively shape our way of being in the world and making sense of it by becoming vital matter with action potential. The subject-object debate, however, has not yet been applied as a tool to explore the cognitive dimension of things in relation to gender. Hence, in order to bridge this gap in research and invert the universalizing tendency of material culture studies—which have often undermined the specific experiences and exchanges between the object world and humans as gendered subjects—I inject feminism into the discourse around things in the literary field. Through a series of critical analyses of contemporary Anglophone texts by women writers, I will demonstrate that gender is no less physical than an object. It can be materialized either through the externalization of thoughts and ideologies or through the internalization of the physical object world. I will focus specifically on the field of contemporary Indian women’s writings, which provides a significant demonstration of the meaningful link between gender, literature, and the material world, but the scope of this work goes beyond the geographical limits of the fiction analyzed herein. My object-oriented readings represent a relevant case study laying the groundwork for new research perspectives in literary criticism as well as women’s studies and demonstrate that as long as the semiotic apparatus tells stories of objectification and marginalization, it constitutes significant reading matter.