Touching to Transgress and Transgressing to Touch

Abstract

Dalit feminist poet and author Meena Kandasamy's poetry collections Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010) are daring explorations of how the flesh can inscribe its desires in all of its impulsive and unhindered spontaneity in the text – tender and violent at the same time, with the text treading across wired fences of gendered and segregated spaces only to return back to the flesh. This chapter acknowledges Sangari and Vaid's sociological insight into how women's sexuality has served as a pivotal gateway for the maintenance of caste-based and sex-based inequalities and attempts to critically explore the pathway Kandasamy cuts to overturn the Dalit female body's very trajectory of “utility” in a society obsessed with purity and patriarchal hegemony. Locating Kandasamy in the socio-political matrix to read her poetry, an inter-disciplinary approach is adopted in scrutinizing the need to study the language she uses in her poetry, taking into purview its apparently “sexually provocative” content and its maneuverings around the notion of “touch” in the text.