The Politics of Respectability and the Discipline of the Female Voice in Indian Literature: Speech, Desire, and the Moral Economy of “Good Womanhood”

This article explores the politics of respectability as a system of patriarchal control that disciplines women's speech, desire, and mobility in Indian literary discourse. It contends that "good woman" discourses constitute moral economies that control female subjectivity in ways that are not necessarily marked by violence but through ideals of female purity, self-control, domesticity, and emotional regulation. Contrary to mainstream perceptions of respectability as simply a value judgment or a neutral social preference, the article proposes that respectability constitutes a system of control that generates self-censorship and facilitates compromised agency in the context of the middle-class family in India. By engaging with feminist theory, feminist narrative ethics, and intersectional feminist critiques, the article interprets the ways in which women are schooled in self-surveillance to negotiate acceptable femininity through the control of women's speech and desire. The article also contends that women's speech in Indian literature is often disciplined through the mechanisms of stigma and exclusion entailed in moral censure that returns deviance to agency and renders silence virtuous. In hypothesizing respectability as a modality of discipline rather than a cultural value, this work ambitiously extends the Indian feminist literary tradition from the paradigm of empowerment and illustrates that feminist resistivity actually manifests itself through subtle moments of refusal and transitivity rather than moments of affirmative subject-formation.