Defeminization as Identity and Survival: Reconfiguring Womanhood in Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar and The First House

Abstract

Avni Doshi, in her Burnt Sugar (2020) and The First House (2026), presents her female protagonists as strong women who resist the culturally prescribed models of femininity. This article proposes defeminisation as a critical approach to analysing Doshi’s representation of women who survive patriarchal structures by refusing, disrupting, or psychologically withdrawing from established feminine roles. In her novels, defeminisation does not signify the rejection of femininity itself; rather, it is a strategic dismantling of the identities imposed upon women as daughters, wives, mothers, caregivers, and objects of male and female expectation. In Burnt Sugar, Antara and Tara share an adverse mother-daughter relationship in which both women struggle against the demand that femininity must be synonymous with sacrifice, affection, obedience, and maternal self-sacrifice. Antara’s anxiety about becoming “Un-Tara” paradoxically reveals how deeply patriarchal definitions of femininity have entrenched themselves in female consciousness. In The First House, the unnamed protagonist’s husband's demand for divorce and physical separation leaves her in an existential crisis because marriage has become inseparable from her sense of self. Her subsequent fragmentation, withdrawal from domestic routines, immersion in astrology and mythology, and eventual movement towards an autonomous identity constitute a second form of defeminisation. Through these protagonists, Doshi demonstrates that the feminine self is neither natural nor stable but constructed through family, marriage, motherhood, memory, and societal subjugation. Yet defeminization is not represented as uncomplicated liberation. It is also a survival mechanism: adopted by women as they must sometimes become less recognisably “feminine” to resist the emotional labour demanded of them by patriarchal society. Doshi’s fiction therefore complicates conventional feminist narratives of empowerment by showing that survival may require estrangement from the very roles through which womanhood has been culturally defined.