Redefining Womanhood: A Post-feminist Interpretation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts

Abstract

This paper explores Jhumpa Lahiri's whereabouts in the light of a post-feminist perspective, which involves the re-definition of womanhood in the light of autonomy, loneliness, and personal choice in the context of an individualistic, consumer-oriented world. The tension between personal agency and structural inequalities has persisted over time, and using post-feminist theory, Empowerment Theory (Solomon, 1976), and feminist praxis offered by Sara Ahmed (2017), the paper analyses the debate of personal agency and structural inequalities. With the help of the qualitative analysis of texts, the study claims that although the unnamed protagonist represents the post-feminist standards of independence and self-emancipation, her autonomy is complemented with emotional aloofness, precarity, and unresolved attachment to patriarchal and familial systems. The novel, therefore, disrupts the post-feminist fantasy of absolute freedom that can be gained only by individual choice. Some contextualization: placing Whereabouts in the context of larger feminist literary discourses, the given study puts forth the notion of the necessity of global feminist awareness and personal empowerment, which is especially acute in the realm of world politics and South Asian literature, where structural imbalance is still a dominant issue.