WRITING WOUNDS, RECLAIMING BODIES: GENDERED VIOLENCE, MEMORY, AND FEMINIST RESISTANCE IN THE POETRY OF MEENA KANDASAMY AND WARSAN SHIRE

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Published ID: IJNRD2608112

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ARAVIND. R

Meena Kandasamy, Warsan Shire, feminist poetry, gendered violence, body as archive, testimony, Dalit feminism, diaspora, postcolonial, differential witnessing, feminist resistance, traumatic memory

This article undertakes a comparative feminist literary analysis of the poetry of Meena Kandasamy, Indian Dalit feminist poet and activist, and Warsan Shire, Kenyan-born Somali British poet, examining how both writers engage gendered violence, traumatic memory, and feminist resistance as the central concerns of their respective poetic projects. Drawing on collections including Kandasamy's Touch (2006), Ms Militancy (2010), and Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You (2023), and Shire's Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022), the study argues that both poets construct the female body as a primary archive of collective and personal trauma, deploy testimony and witnessing as modes of feminist counter-discourse, and enact resistance through the formal and rhetorical resources of the poem itself — its grammar, its address, its refusal of silence. The article employs a tripartite theoretical framework that brings together Judith Butler's theories of gender performativity and precarious life, Elaine Scarry's phenomenology of pain and language, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's postcolonial feminist account of the subaltern voice, supplemented by Adrienne Rich's feminist poetics and Ann Cvetkovich's theorisation of trauma as a cultural and political archive. While both poets use the wounded body as a site of testimony and the poem as a weapon of resistance, the study demonstrates that their strategies differ significantly: Kandasamy's verse is confrontational, collective, and caste-conscious, drawing on Dalit feminist epistemologies that are absent from existing comparative frameworks; Shire's poetry is intimate, diasporic, and affectively immersive, situating gendered violence within the broader structures of war, forced migration, and racial precarity in the Global North. The comparative discussion yields the article's central original contribution: the concept of 'differential witnessing,' which names the distinct epistemic and affective positions from which each poet speaks and to which each poet directs her testimony.

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ARAVIND. R (August-2026). WRITING WOUNDS, RECLAIMING BODIES: GENDERED VIOLENCE, MEMORY, AND FEMINIST RESISTANCE IN THE POETRY OF MEENA KANDASAMY AND WARSAN SHIRE. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NOVEL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, 11(8), b100-b116. https://ijnrd.org/papers/IJNRD2608112.pdf

Volume 11 Issue 8, August-2026

Pages : b100-b116

Paper Reg. ID: IJNRD_327711

Published Paper Id: IJNRD2608112

Research Area: Arts All

Author Type: Indian Author

Country: -, -, India

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