Volume I Special Issue I September 2021

Name of Author : Lal Surya S

Title of the paper : Mapping Queer-Motherhood as a Desiring Machine in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract: Deleuze and Guattari introduced the concept of ‘machine’ as a counter narrative to oppose the Oedipalization which operated as the foundation of human organization. Human conception of societal organization was based on the frozen structure of father-mother-me triad which restricted flows and fluctuations. Language, reality and subjectivity were all intertwined with the very notion of Oedipalization. It was in this context when Deleuze and Guattari come up with the new conceptualization of human organization, purely based on ‘connections’ which facilitated new possibilities in the natural world, called machine. Machines operated on the productive dimension of desire which was left unnoticed by philosophers from the age of Plato onwards. The very philosophy of deriving pleasure out of plugging into a new domain without being limited into the predefined identity as prescribed by the dominant power structures is what the concept of machine points at. This very act of temporary plugging in and out is political in nature as it destabilizes the rigid Oedipal structure which gives meaning to familial system, sexuality, subjectivity and reality. Arundhati Roy, introduces the idea of queer-motherhood in her novel ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ to transgress the patriarchal, oedipalized structure of family and thereby looking at the condition of possibility by transgressing the conventionality. My research paper will be an attempt to analyse the notion of queer-motherhood through the lens of Deleuzian concept of desiring-machine and how it posits a challenge to the patriarchal convention of motherhood.

Keywords : Motherhood, Desiring-Machine, Queer Identity, Oedipalization

DOI :

Page Number : 150-153