Subversion of Gender Relation in Shobhaa De‟s Surviving Men: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Staying on Top

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates that the gender crisis by questioning long established gender norms and behaviours in Shobhaa De‟s Surviving Men: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Staying on Top. This study explores not only the subversion of gender role, but also reflects the shifting gender relationship. This study is to bring feminist discourse with hegemonic representation of women, critical analysis and establishing the importance of women‟s role in the society. Moreover, De uses the power of fiction to criticize dominant patriarchal structures by questioning and subtly reversing patriarchal discourses to serve a feminist cause. My investigation into potential to overcome traditional conceptions of gender roles is based on theoretical ideas on sex, gender, power and sexuality put forward by the 20th century scholars Michael Foucault and Judith Butler. According to Foucault, power always produces and therefore encounters resistance, and in this sense literature can be seen as a warning sign of and interference to a long era of suppression fostered by patriarchal structures and its institutional arrangements of power. This thesis is Foucault‟s and Butler‟s assumption of the constructedness and hence flexibility of gender identities in the analysis of gender subversion.