Subverting Gender in Laxmi Raj Sharma’s ‘Intriguing Women’

Abstract

This paper close reads the short story collection Intriguing Women by Laxmi Raj Sharma to explicate upon the theme of ideological subversion within it. Sharma deploys his female characters as agents of destabilisation that assert their own identity and thus question the dominant social constructs. In doing this, these characters raise questions about the ruling ideology and its established norms of behavior, selfhood and performance. While Sharma’s usage of motifs and structural forms makes the stories works of art, the actions of his characters make them didactic and pushes the readers towards questioning some of their fundamental assumptions.