Reclaiming Spaces: Female Body and Kitchen as Sites of Contestation in Ambai and Han Kang

Abstract

This paper offers a comparative study of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and C.S. Lakshmi’s (Ambai’s)A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, two seminal works that echo women’s bodies and autonomy in acts of resistance within patriarchal societies. Although they both emerge from different cultural contexts-the Korean and the Indian-the underlying core in terms of women’s questionings on everyday violence, expectations, and silencing would speak to each other. The Vegetarian depicts Yeong-hye’s radical refusal of meat as symbolic rebellion against bodily control, showing how women’s agency is pathologized and punished. While Ambai’s stories centre on domesticity, particularly kitchens, to reveal how the woman negotiates identity, creativity, and desire within crippling family structures. The present paper makes an attempt through feminist literary analyses as to how symbolism, narrative fragmentation, and embodied metaphors are used to represent the struggle for selfhood of women in both works The study concludes that both texts expand the discourse on feminist consciousness by portraying the kitchen and the body as contested terrains shaped by social control yet capable of profound transformation.