Women’s Sensibility an Individual’s Unique Creativity or a Literary Construct?

Abstract

This paper critically examines the concept of “women’s sensibility” in Kannada literary discourse to question whether it represents an individual’s creative uniqueness or a patriarchal literary construct. It argues that terms such as “women’s creativity,” “female sensibility,” and “woman-specific experience” emerged not as neutral recognitions of women’s authorship but as ideological markers shaped by male-dominated literary institutions. Tracing their historical formation from the Navodaya period through feminist criticism, the study demonstrates how women’s creativity was defined within restrictive frameworks such as domesticity, biological essentialism, collective morality, and emotionality, while intellectual autonomy and individuality were denied.

The paper interrogates linguistic patriarchy, proxy authorship, pseudonymous writing, and biological determinism to show how literary criticism foregrounds womanhood over authorship when evaluating women’s writing. It further argues that labeling women’s writing through sensibility-based categories collapses individual creative identities into collective gendered representations, thereby negating women’s intellectual agency. Drawing on the theoretical insights of H.S. Raghavendra Rao and Helene Cixous, the paper proposes a shift from “female sensibility” to “gender sensibility,” emphasizing plurality, fluidity, and the dissolution of fixed gender binaries. It concludes that a genuinely emancipatory literary framework must move beyond biologically grounded notions of femininity and instead cultivate gender-sensitive creativity that recognizes writers as complex, plural individuals rather than representatives of a gendered category.