EMBODIED TRAUMA AND THE LIMITS OF STRUCTURAL NARRATOLOGY: RECONFIGURING NARRATIVE VOICE, TEMPORALITY, AND IDENTITY IN KALKI SUBRAMANIAM’S “A MUTILATED VAGINA CALLED EEZHAM”

Abstract

This article examines embodied trauma in Kalki Subramaniam’s poem “A Mutilated Vagina Called Eezham” through a critical reassessment of Gérard Genette’s structural narratology. It analyses order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice in relation to transgender subjectivity, corporeal violence, traumatic memory, and collective identity. Using qualitative textual analysis and close reading, the study places Genette’s categories in dialogue with trauma theory, transgender studies, and affect theory. The analysis considers how retrospective memory, textual recurrence, first-person articulation, and corporeal imagery shape the poem’s representation of suffering and political belonging. It argues that Genette’s framework remains useful for describing formal organization, while its interpretation is enriched by approaches attentive to embodiment, affect, and historical context. The article proposes “embodied narrativity” as a working concept for examining how bodily experience, memory, and identity participate in poetic meaning-making. The concept is offered as a text-specific analytical extension, not a universal model.

The study contributes to interdisciplinary readings of trauma-inflected transgender poetry while recognizing that one poem cannot represent the full diversity of transgender or Tamil experience.