Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on a 30-year national discourse of rationality and progress despite challenges during a globalized era, a discourse that falters when encountering non-submissive female bodies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines late-20th- early-21st-century literary and news stories that narrate the "new woman" as a signifier that destabilizes established meanings within the nation. Middle-class females modify or subvert their assigned roles by freely embracing a particular lifestyle. Gulnari (Partap Sharma's Days of the Turban, pub. 1986) breaks codes of respectability when she joins the Akali movement as a revolutionary and interacts with men of different castes and faiths. Akhila (Anita Nair's Ladies Coupѐ, pub. 2001), a 45-year-old income-tax clerk, buys a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. She breaks conservative Tamilian Brahmanical norms governing her behavior when she decides to explore if a woman can live feasibly without marriage. In news stories of the Park Street rape case (2012), Suzette Jordan, a single working mother, challenged a number of norms when she was gang raped: her right to be out late, to accept drinks at a bar, and get a ride home without being raped. These women's choices serve as flashpoints within a nation, problematizing its self-definition as modern. This paper wishes to look at border as method. Borders demarcate spaces, people, and activities. These women trespass on disallowed terrain and experience violence. This paper reflects on a 30-year national discourse of modernity during neo-liberal challenges during a globalized era, a discourse that falters when encountering non-submissive female bodies. It scrutinizes the faultlines of these emerging contradictions to theorize other relations between gender and nationalism in an age of global capital.