INTERSECTIONALITY AND RESISTANCE: APPLYING J. M. COETZEE’S FICTION TO THE INTERPLAY OF GENDER, RACE, ETHNICITY, CASTE, RELIGION, AND DISABILITY

Abstract

This paper applies an intersectional framework—foregrounding gender, race, ethnicity, caste, religion, and disability—to selected works of J. M. Coetzee, including Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Age of Iron (1990), Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Slow Man (2005). Building on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s account of intersectionality and Patricia Hill Collins’s “matrix of domination,” and placing these in conversation with postcolonial and disability studies, the article argues that Coetzee’s ethical fictions stage how institutions, moral vocabularies, and embodied difference co-produce vulnerability and resistance. While “caste” is not a South African social category, caste-analytic insights regarding purity, stigma, and endogamy illuminate caste-like hierarchies under apartheid and in post-apartheid inheritances; this comparative move is made explicit and critically bounded. Through close readings, the paper identifies recurring mechanisms: administrative violence that renders multiply marginalized subjects illegible; penitential discourses that mask domination as redemption; and carceral and care infrastructures that convert impairment into dispossession. The discussion shows how Coetzee’s narratives both expose and unsettle authoritarian grammars—of empire, race, respectability, and “normal” embodiment—while probing the limits of liberal witnessing. The conclusion proposes intersectionally sensitive avenues for pedagogy and research, reading Coetzee as a testing ground for ethics adequate to plural axes of power.