Radha’s Revenge: Feminist Agency, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Desire in Anita Nair’s Mistress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between feminist agency, postcoloniality and the politics of desire in the novel Mistress . The paper begins with drawing from a range of classical as well as contemporary theological texts in order to read Radha of Mistress as and against the Radha of Hindu mythology. Arguing that the latter’s agency was co-opted by a series of androcentric cultural commissions and omissions, the paper reads Mistress as a feminist reclamation of Radha’s agency through a nuanced reworking of desire. Thereafter, the paper goes on to suggest that the notion of desire deployed in Mistress can usefully engage postcolonial feminist concerns. I argue that, by dislocating centre-periphery, global-local and universal-particular binaries in order to address past and present political hegemonies, and in locating female desire within a hybrid, ‘third space’ of agency, Mistress envisions a powerful postcolonial feminist politics of an alternative, open futurity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".