Advanced International Journal for Research

E-ISSN: 3048-7641   •   Impact Factor: 9.11

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Call for Paper Volume 7, Issue 2 (March-April 2026) Submit your research before last 3 days of April to publish your research paper in the issue of March-April.
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Volume 7 Issue 2
March-April 2026

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Feminist Fragility and the Politics of Breakdown: Mental Instability as Structural Response in Indian Women’s Writing

Author(s) Dr. Devashish Kumar
Country India
Abstract In this article, mental fragility in Indian women writers is explored as a structural response, rather than individual pathology. In this way, it challenges conventional notions of trauma and recovery by exploring how mental breakdown, withdrawal, and emotional instability operate as epistemic critique in patriarchal, caste, and post-colonial societies. By drawing on feminist theories of affect, feminist theories of psychiatry, and narrative ethics, this article will analyse how Fire on the Mountain, Tomb of Sand, The Lowland, and Clear Light of Day represent the mental fragility of women as revealing the impossibility of gendered expectations of care, respectability, belonging, and relational endurance. Rather than pathologising female instability, these works of literature reveal structural exhaustion that is produced by unpaid emotional labour, nationalist memory, and transnational displacement. By engaging with theories of affective circulation by Ahmed (2004), cruel optimism by Berlant (2011), and depression as public feeling by Cvetkovich (2012), this article will show how fragility is used as a diagnostic tool that makes visible hidden violence. Feminist fragility is not weakness; it is an embodiment that resists moral and relational over-extraction. By placing breakdown as critique, women’s fiction from India undermines the neoliberal ideologies of resilience and recovery, instead highlighting the political value of breakdown.
Keywords Feminist fragility, affect theory, breakdown, structural exhaustion, emotional labour, psychological resistance.
Field Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In Volume 7, Issue 2, March-April 2026
Published On 2026-03-21
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E-ISSN 3048-7641
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