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Woman Becoming… Gender Possibilities In Selected Speculative Short Stories Of Intan Paramaditha And Isabel Yap, Grace V.S. Chin

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

The ontological question of woman’s nature forms the focus of this essay, which develops the theory of “woman-becoming…” to examine how the hegemonic patriarchal discourses and constructs of woman and femininity are subverted and reinterpreted in two speculative short stories by transnational Southeast Asian women writers, namely Intan Paramaditha’s “Beauty and the Seventh Dwarf” (2018) and Isabel Yap’s “Good Girls” (2021). Of interest here are the gender possibilities of the female characters, which uphold women’s freedom, agency, thinking, feeling, creation, narration and expression in the making of herstory—indeed, everywoman’s potential for change and transformation, and to become more than what …