Oorukaval By Chela Sandoval

The trajectory of postfeminist representations and resistance in Sarah Joseph’s Oorukaval in the background of Chela Sandoval’s theory of oppositional consciousness, forms the purview of this paper. The evolution of Sarah Joseph’s feminist politics closely parallels the history of modern feminism in Kerala. The concept of feminism has been much debated over and misunderstood in Kerala as it is elsewhere. Fighting against odds, it has come a long way shifting paradigms from the site of gender inequality to that of a political mobilization, organizing debates around differences. That is to say, feminism today is influenced not only by struggles against gender discrimination, but by struggles against class, race, and cultural hierarchies. It has

Sandoval in her landmark essay, “US Third-World Feminism; The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” categorically analyses the theoretical structure of US Third – world feminism that functions outside the operation of white hegemonic feminist theory. White hegemonic feminist theory has identified a four-phase feminist history of consciousness. Feminist critics and historians like Elaine Showalter, Gayle Greene, Coppelia Kahn, Hester Eisenstein, Allison Jagger, and Alice Jardine have theoretically worked out these phases complementing and challenging one another’s feminist intellectual spaces. These four phases can be broadly segmented as liberal (‘women are equal to men’), Marxist (‘women are different’), radical/cultural (‘women are superior’), and socialist (‘women are a racially divided class’)

Raman punishes Vali with death for the sin of coveting his brother’s wife and making her his own. The people of Kishkindam could not understand the logic of such a punishment for observing a custom so common in their clan. This decolonial ideology that the enslaved community uses for resistance goes hand in hand with an oppositional feminist ideology that the women resort to in order to challenge the patriarchal logic of one woman shared by two brothers. Ruma, the wife of Sugrivan, asks, ”Raman says that he killed Vali because he lusted after me. Who will then kill Sugrivan who lusted after Thara?” (Joseph