The Body as a Weapon and Resisting the Politics of Patriarchy: Rewriting Female Agency in “Draupadi” and Beloved

In contemporary feminist discourse, the politics of subjugation remains one of the significant concerns in relation to the tribal and slave women who have endure trauma, violence and systematic oppression. This study explore how the female body functions both as a position of subjugation and as a medium of resistance, particularly in Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Moving from victim centered analysis; the paper relocates these narratives within intersectional, postcolonial and feminist perspective to examine how the ideological institutions such as nation, racial slavery, and patriarch domination groups are attempt to systematically exploits marginalized female bodies. Drawing upon the theories of Judith Butler concept of ‘gender performativity’ and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s terms of ‘subaltern’, the study argues that the function of trauma not only as an evidence of oppression but also a shape of political expression. In Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi”, Dopdi Mehjen’s rape and her refusal to cloth herself transforming her vulnerable body into a form of resistance against the authority. Similarly in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe’s act of infanticide challenging the traditional norms of motherhood and it also reflects the trauma of slavery. Through the comparison of tribal uprising in Indian context with the experience of an enslaved African American mother, this study demonstrates how body is reshaped into a form weapon it personified through which female subjects challenges to patriarchal structure and reconstitutes the structure of oppressive regime of slavery and violence through their bodily act of defiance.