Women’s performance as resistance to oppressive norms in Malachi Edwin Vethamani’s coitus interruptus and other stories

Malachi Edwin Vethamani published his first collection of short stories, Coitus Interruptusand Other Stories in 2018. Interestingly, nine out of twelve of his short stories dwell on themes related to homosexual men and women’s sexuality, and this not only attests to Vethamani’s skill as a storyteller, but also adds to the body of works by Malaysian writers which delve into queer experiences and women’s sexuality such as Dina Zaman’s I AmMuslim (2007) and Jerome Kugan’s Body 2 Body: A Malaysian Queer Anthology (2009). Vethamani has never identified himself as a feminist, yet in an interview with Mumbai Guide in September 2018, he admitted that he is particularly concerned with how institutions of Malaysian-Indian families deal with issues of gender, women and heterosexuality. In this study, we examine women’s resistance to accepted sexual roles and practices in three selected short stories in Coitus Interruptus and Other Stories: “Coitus Interruptusâ€, “In Close Proximity†and “The Good Daughterâ€. These three short stories are selected because the protagonists are women and they share a central preoccupation with resisting sociallyconstructed gender roles and sexuality. Borrowing from Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis, we argue that women characters in the three selected stories are “performing†as a way to resist oppressive norms.

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