Voices Beneath: Exploring Female Identity and Marginalization in Asian Fiction

This paper explores the intersections of gender, subalternity, and literary resistance in two narratives, Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi and Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman. It argues that fiction provides a critical space through which the gendered subaltern emerges not simply as a victim of structural violence, but as an active agent of resistance. Drawing on feminist and subaltern theories, the study foregrounds how women’s bodies and voices disrupt dominant historiographies and expose the limits of official narratives. Through comparative literary analysis across South and East Asia, the paper highlights how caste, colonialism, patriarchy, militarism, and nationalism converge to render experiences by minority groups structurally inaudible. Yet it also demonstrates how such forces are contested through narrative, dialogue, and affect. By placing these literary works in dialogue, the paper interrogates the limitations of dominant epistemologies and Asian fiction as a mode of historiographical intervention. In doing so, it argues that subaltern women's narratives not only resist the erasures of history, but redefine what it means to witness and remember from the margins.