Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame: from Androgyny to the Cyborg

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of the body and its affects by bringing feminist perspectives to bear on Salman Rushdie’s magic realist novels Midnight’s Children and Shame. The eccentric tropes of androgyny and the cyborg are thus singled out for critical scrutiny, with a view to appraising their potential to disrupt rigid gender dichotomies. While androgyny invokes Judith Butler’s theory of the constitutive outside as well as Carolyn Heilbrun’s ideal vision of harmony between the sexes, the cyborg owes its prominence to Donna Haraway’s post-humanist research which resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s figure of the assemblage. Although it is assumed that Rushdie’s transgression of multiple boundaries tends to defamiliarize/deterritorialize traditional gender stereotypes in such a way as to engage the reader in deep self-reflection, his abiding ambivalence together with the life-denying affects aroused by his protagonists hint at a pressing need for imagining a more progressive gender politics.