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@article{203152,
        author = {Pillai Jayakrishnan Radhakrishnan},
        title = {The Paradox of Privilege: Gendered Subalternity in Lalithambika Antharjanam's Short Stories},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {12},
        pages = {11990-11998},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=203152},
        abstract = {The paper investigates a notable paradox that exists within Lalithambika Antharjanam's collection of short fiction. The women she writes about are ritually privileged, upper caste kind of people, but still, they end up suffering a lot, under patriarchal structures that keep them psychologically, and socially oppressed. This analysis draws on four stories: 'Life and Death' in Cast Me Out If You Will, along with 'Within the Veil,' 'Great Expectations,' and 'The Power of Fate' from On the Far Side of Memory. The narrative details the lives of Antharjanam women, showing how they move through a world of quietness, emotional control, domestic limits, and a patriarchal structure so fully internalized that it feels inherent and unquestionable, like part of nature. What makes their condition especially poignant is that caste privilege just doesn’t really shield them in any meaningful way from gendered suffering. Even though they hold a kind of social esteem, they stay subaltern in the most intimate sense. Like, they are silenced inside their own homes, and they get trained to treat oppression as if it were destiny. To see how this ends up happening, the paper brings together theoretical frames from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Michel Foucault alongside Sigmund Freud psychological insights, and it uses them to show the slow, quiet mechanisms where fear, social conditioning, and prolonged silence shape the female mind. In the end, the paper argues that it is exactly this internalization, when a woman stops questioning her cage, that most strongly intensifies her subaltern position.},
        keywords = {Antharjanam, inherent, internalization, paradox, patriarchal, poignant, psychologica},
        month = {May},
        }