Subverting gendered vulnerability of sex trafficking through resilience in Ruchira Gupta's I Kick and I Fly

Women and girls are the most vulnerable to exploitation, constituting approximately sixty to eightypercent of identified trafficking victims (UNODC, 2020). Yet scholarship on trafficking fiction remains largely confined to a victimhood paradigm, leaving the transition from vulnerability to resilience under-theorized. This article addresses the gap through Ruchira Gupta's I Kick and I Fly (2023), which depicts the intergenerational prostitution and trafficking of Nat girls in a small village of Forbesganj, where such exploitation is normalized as women's inevitable destiny. Contesting generational norms, the narrative traces the transformation of girls from vulnerable subjects to resilient survivors through martial arts training and collective female solidarity. The study first reads Judith Butler's concept of precarity alongside Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality to show how colonial criminalization of the Nat community and its postcolonial neglect produce a caste and gender specific susceptibility of women to trafficking. It then develops a framework of embodied resilience, joining Martha McCaughey's theory of physical feminism with bell hooks' feminist sisterhood to theorize self-defense training and female solidarity as practices that subvert exploitation. Read together, these frameworks trace a single arc from structural vulnerability to embodied and collective resilience, moving beyond the conventional trafficking narratives that dwell on suffering to account for the conditions under which vulnerable girls reclaim agency.