Keywords

1 Introduction: Contextualising Padmanabhan’s Dystopian Saga

Many women writers on science fiction and fantasy have been using the utopian genre for decades as a framework to write about gender identity and its constraints. As early as in 1905, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote “Sultana’s Dream”, which deals with a gender-reversed India where men are kept in purdah. Published in The Indian Ladies Magazine, the story is a science fiction approach to women’s social issues where the author reverses gender roles and is ironic about the different approaches towards social development and scientific advancement. We could argue that the purpose of feminist activism and utopian envisioning is to subvert the existing social dominance hierarchy, as it has been stated in numerous studies (Wagner-Lawlor 2013; Sargisson 1996, 2000, 2012; McKenna 2001).

A century after Hossain’s feminist utopia, South Asian acclaimed writer Manjula Padmanabhan published the dystopian novel Escape (2008) and its sequel The Island of Lost Girls (2015). Manjula Padmanabhan, a prolific author born in Delhi, currently divides her time between India and the USA. She is a journalist, an acclaimed playwright and comic strip artist (creator of the popular cartoon character Suki), the author of many children’s books, including Mouse Attack, and the illustrator of many others. Padmanabhan obtained international recognition as a playwright after receiving the Greek Onassis award for her fifth play, “Harvest”, the futurist story about the selling of body parts and exploitation between developed and developing countries, which was made into an award-winning film entitled Deham by Govind Nihalani. All her plays and performing pieces have been collected recently in 2020 in two volumes. The first, Blood and Laughter, entirely focuses on science fiction and social commitment issues, while the second, Laughter and Blood, brings together all her short performance pieces. Similarly, Padmanabhan’s collections of short stories—Hot Death, Cold Soup: Twelve Short Stories (1996), Kleptomania (2004) and Three Virgins and Other Stories (2013)—explore science fiction and extra-terrestrial unfolding as dystopian dramas, among other different social, political and cultural conflicts that unfortunately continue to be urgent. She has also published a semi-autobiographical novel as a young woman illustrator, where she observes alternate sexuality in urban Delhi.

There is no doubt that speculative and science fictions have recently taken the dystopian turn and are becoming popular all over the world. In Padmanabhan’s dystopian saga, the world’s nations do not exist anymore and there is only one global government, the Whole World Union (WWU), which splits the planet into four entirely separate enclaves, where no trade, communication or travel arrangements are allowed due to the collapse of the oil industry. The world is dominated by a central enclave called The Zone, “a giant arena for a continuous savage and immensely popular cycle of war games” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line182), which take place for the convenience of global economy. The Zone is where Africa used to be, and is now divided into countless subdivisions, colour-coded for the different teams that occupy the territory: “The teams live and die based on the illusion of the Three Freedoms: Entertainment, Warfare, Commerce - the holy trinity. What the teams earn for their owners, the owners pump back into the teams. The approval ratings from viewers, (…) even the quality of food supplements to Champions, have all become part of the Zone’s essential ecology” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 4947).

The novels are set mainly in two radically opposed areas and follow the journey from one side to the other, crossing the Zone: from the Forbidden Country (ruled by misogynist Generals who call their land Brotherland and politically isolated by the WWU as a result) to the Island (a secret land to the Forbidden Country, governed by cis women, the Mentors, with funds from the WWU to run it independently after the women who designed the Zone threw off the yoke of the WWU when the Suspended City in the Zone became an economic powerhouse). In the Forbidden Country, women have been exterminated and men can self-clone. In the Island, women lead a programme to rescue vulnerable women and “restore” them. The first novel, Escape, tells the story of Meiji, the only female survivor in the Forbidden Land. This young girl has been secretly raised on an Estate managed by her three uncles, called Eldest, Middle and Youngest. She comes to know that her own mother had publicly immolated herself (a sacrifice with clear sati resonances) in order that the Generals might think that there were no female survivors in their family, thus saving Meiji’s life. As Meiji grows into puberty, the three Uncles decide that she needs to be escorted outside the Forbidden Country so that she is not eventually discovered by the Estate General on one of his frequent visits. Youngest is appointed to accompany her and keep her safe during a long, extremely dangerous journey across a wasteland and the Zone, to finally reach the Island, a place of scientific experimentation and relative safety for the mutilated trans and cis women of the world.

Dystopia, as opposed to utopia, refers to an undesirable condition, a worst-case scenario to moralistic observers. This general idea has been examined in some depth by Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley and Gyan Prakash in their introduction to Utopia, Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, where they state that there is a “dialectic between the two imaginaries, the dream and the nightmare” (2010, 2), as for them, “every utopia always comes with its implied dystopia—whether the dystopia of the status quo, which the utopia is engineered to address, or a dystopia found in the way this specific utopia corrupts itself in practice” (2010, 2). Therefore, they argue that a dystopia is “a utopia that has gone wrong, or a utopia that functions only for a particular segment of society” (2010, 1). In addition, in our interview with South Asian writers Manjula Padmanabhan and Prayaag Akbar, Akbar claimed that “one person's dystopia can be another person’s utopia” (Navarro-Tejero and Diego-Sánchez 2020). Following this line of thought, one could state, with Gregory Claeys, that in the long run these two terms become structurally inseparable (2013, 20). This can be clearly perceived in Padmanabhan’s saga, in which the Generals’ utopian world order has become a nightmare for the vulnerable. At the same time, the Island (Padmanabhan’s own Laputa) works as a resistance ghetto to “save and restore” the vulnerable, but it has its own power hierarchies and codes trying to impose their own idea of what it means to be a woman.

In this chapter, I contend that Padmanabhan’s narrative explores the dystopian trope in two complementary ways. First of all, I argue that her fiction is shaped by the author’s specific cultural and national features, and so the first section of this essay deals with the way Padmanabhan’s fiction closely engages with current social and cultural debates in her country. Secondly, I turn to discuss the fundamental underlying question in this saga of where femicide stems from: would gendering and gender discrimination be primarily based on sexual organs, on appearance or on the perceived alignment with masculinity or femininity? Trans identities are visible in Indian society, and although recognised by law, they do not enjoy basic human rights. The same would seem to apply for women, as even though sex-selective abortion, dowry, sati and child marriage and exploitation are forbidden by law, statistics prove female infanticide is a fact. If we accept that dystopian narratives reflect the fears and anxieties of the cultural context from which they emerge, then Padmanabhan’s dystopian fiction appears to be channelling South Asian women’s anger about the (trans)misogyny of the present, and their concern about an inevitable dark future where reproduction is instrumentalised and technology has displaced nature and humanity.

For this analysis, I draw from Judith Butler (2004, 2009), for whom human life is conditioned by vulnerability by virtue of our embodiment, but as Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds argue, also by our condition as social and effective beings, since we are emotionally and psychologically vulnerable to neglect, abuse, ostracism or humiliation. Moreover, as sociopolitical beings, “we are vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation, oppression, political violence, and rights abuses. And we are vulnerable to the natural environment and to the impact on the environment of our own, individual and collective, actions and technologies” (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 1). On the basis of this complete definition of vulnerability, we can argue that Padmanabhan’s dystopian novels move beyond the basic concern of the oppression and exploitation of cis and trans women from a paternalistic and coercive perspective once identified as a vulnerable group, to a universal hypothesis of the interaction between the individual (the increased vulnerability experienced by some social groups: trans and cis women) and the nation-state as consequence of the era of technological perfection and corporate capitalist globalisation, as argued by Guy Standing’s thought on precarity (2011) and by Judith Butler in “Rethinking Vulnerability” (2016). Thus, this chapter explores how concepts of womanhood intersect with those of vulnerability and resistance in Manjula Padmanabhan’s dystopian novels. Furthermore, it addresses how Padmanabhan brings out the gendered resistance to the neo-colonial dimensions of techno culture in the context of female genocide in India, by examining sexual violence under the analytical lens of resilience, a condition that enables the victims’ healing and empowerment.

2 Women as the Endangered Sex and the Displacement of Nature by Technology

Padmanabham’s novels present a future that is a twisted, horrifying projection of contemporary politics and ecological disaster. Rupali Palodkar has perceptively summed up the ecofeminist concern in India, indicating that, the ownership of women’s body and sexuality and that of land and nature has rested with men since ancient times: “It is in India that sex-selective abortions are practiced on a wide-scale... There is a need to find an alternative to men’s exploitation of the earth... and to discover an ecologically sound way of life that would not threaten the existence either of the earth or of women” (2011, 60–61). For her, this is the reason why women writers like Manjula Padmanabhan are turning to ecofeminist thinking and writing about the consequences of the degradation of nature and women. In the saga, the world as the readers know it now is referred to as the “Time Before”, which was lost in a detonation. The ecosystem was ravaged by pollution, as the seas shores died, the ice melted and wildlife perished. In both novels, identity politics intertwine with how fundamentalists in the Forbidden Country conceive a world without women, as men have developed technology to self-clone, and how a predatory global capitalism uses women as commodities to be exploited and consumed. Life in the Zone is extremely arduous for women, as they are shamefully used “as booty, as trophies, as entertainment” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 4938). The widespread popularity of spectacle is to be understood as part of the mode of production and consumption in an age where human beings have to live under close surveillance by means of different mechanical devices, particularly drones. The dominant group in the Zone uses technology to subjugate lesser privileged classes, those powerless (like women) in their vulnerable and precarious condition as subalterns. For Sarah Bracke, subaltern resilience provides the infrastructure for global processes of economic production and consumption, and a resilient subject is one who can absorb the impact of austerity measures and continue to be productive (60). An example is the statement of a character who was born in a sex-circus family and is forced to perform sex for the teams: “[w]hen I is one year old, she [my mother] is give me to her Big Man to use and he is use me three ways, then he is pass me around to his friends. (…) My mother is feed me the drugs instead of milk (…) I is give suck to dogs. To pigs. On stage. To make laugh to Zone teams. Then we is get food for whole family” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 3924).

To better understand the novels, one needs to remember that India is a country with a declining sex ratio, mainly as a result of the strong social bias against the girl child and the misuse of the widely available (though forbidden by law) technology of sex determination for female foeticide. By raising uncomfortable questions about pervasive (trans)sexual violence, misogyny and the erosion of civil rights in her dystopian fiction, Padmanabhan warns the readers about the radical consequences of institutionalised sexism and fascism and challenges prevailing notions of male superiority and female genocide. In fact, according to Surya Monro, if “strategies focused on erasing gender are pursued, the minority gender groups, such as Hijras, Kothis, intersex people and androgynes are likely to be disadvantaged because the default dominance of men and non-transgender people will remain unchallenged. In addition, degendering, if pursued in a prescriptive manner, would deny people the choice to identify in a sexed and gendered way” (2010, 246).

The Estate General is represented in the novels as a sadist who views himself as a sculptor who has re-shaped reality and his attitude towards both the now-extinct cis women and trans women is symptomatic of the death of difference in the land he despotically rules. As one of several cloned Generals, he believes that difference and individuality are wrong, and sees only the virtue of entire conformity and sameness. Extracts from a series of interviews held by a foreign journalist are inserted at regular intervals in the first novel, part of a strategy to send his message outside the Forbidden Country. Among his many claims stands out one that “The existing deficit of females in our world enormously aided our task” (Padmanabhan 2015a, line 3582). It is important to note here the declining child sex ratio in India according to The National Institution for Transforming India (900 in 2013–2015 and 906 in 2009–2011), which evidences a real deficit of females in a country where the girl child is often not allowed to be born. Even after birth, so many girls suffer neglect and discrimination that brides sometimes have to be “imported” from poorer regions of the country, and women are harassed or murdered for dowry. Indeed, Rita Patel (1996) stated that the cause of female foeticide in India, which has dramatically increased since the 1970s due to the technology of prenatal sex determination methods, alongside an abnormally high infant girl mortality rate, is the illegal dowry system and the cultural basis of son preference. This genocide has generated a vast literature exploring its root causes (Bhatnagar et al. 2005; George 2006; Kishwar 1995; Menon 1995; Moazam 2004; Patel 2007; Purewal 2010; Sen 2003).

Women in the dystopian land depicted in the novels are called the Vermin Tribe. As stated in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the term “vermin” is used for wild mammals and birds which are harmful to crops, farm animals or game or which carry disease and parasitic worms or insects but also for very unpleasant or destructive people (2011, 1607). In one of the many manuals written by the Generals to guide the citizens of the Forbidden Zone, one can read that “the drones [servant clones performing the lowest tasks] are what the Vermin Tribe should have been: servile, dumb and deaf” (Padmanabhan 2015a, line 3131). And later, the General explains in one of the interviews with an appalled reporter from the outside world that “Females are driven by biological imperatives that lead them to compete for breeding rights”, and that “[i]n order to control breeding technology and to establish the collective ethic we had to eliminate females” (Padmanabhan 2015a, line 3582). Randal Rauser explains that the dehumanising descriptor “vermin” has a horrifying history in our modern age, as in the twentieth century “génocidaires have often referred to the out-groups they sought to annihilate as vermin, most infamously in the case of Nazi and anti-Semitic propaganda” (2015, 19). Rauser continues explaining that “this practice of dehumanising out-groups by labelling them as creatures, vermin, or some other form of pestilence has been a common feature of genocides throughout history” (2015, 19). It is, therefore, extremely significant that the author has adopted the vermin metaphor that the Nazis used in the treatment of the Jews as inhuman and parasitic to be feared, hated and annihilated.

As the General states, women have been totally exterminated and the species of women is supposedly now extinct in the Forbidden Country. Even words or pictures or symbols relating to women are banned by the laws. The propaganda spread by the Estate General praises the superiority of clone technology as opposed to female reproduction, since their bodies are allegedly polluted. In his manual The Generals: A Plural Life, the General states that “we took the Mother out of Nature” (Padmanabhan 2015a, line 4021) and citizens cannot even remember now when women existed: “It’s hard to believe what we are told about the Time Before” (Padmanabhan 2015a, line 3351). The concern with reproduction is a commonplace in dystopian science fiction, which leads, once cloning is possible, to a battle of the sexes and the extermination of one, assuming of course that there are only two sexes, even though there are millions of non-binary people in India. The General’s views on women are imposed on the masses leaving them with a distorted concept of a woman, which is evident in the remarks of Pigeon: “What’s the need for a specialised breed just to give birth to men, any more than there’s a need for specialised limbs for climbing trees or chopping woods?” (Padmanabhan 2015a, line 3368). Further, Blackson remarks: “I was told a different tale altogether. When I grew up, it was said that once upon a time there was a race distinct from Man and that race was known as ‘Wi-Men’. The sole purpose of the Wi-Men was to bear children. They were small and dim witted, incapable of caring for their needs outside their home and obliged to seek the constant protection and supervision of men” (Padmanabhan 2015a, line 3378).

We might initially interpret the novels as Meiji’s bildungsroman describing her growth into cis womanhood and Youngest’s valiant effort to save his young ward. But Padmanabhan problematises these characters, questioning the rigid gender binaries. On the one hand, Meiji is the only female survivor in the Forbidden Zone, but she has grown up as a man, dressed as a boy, and under the supervision of men only. Moreover, she has been kept in the dark about her own difference, and male hormones have arrested her development so that she was not killed if her female genitalia were discovered. On the other hand, the male protagonist, Youngest, who tries to save her, undergoes under coertion a vaginoplasty for the General’s pleasure. As a result, both protagonists need to negotiate their own gender identity as their bodies are transformed during their quests towards liberation from the Forbidden Country to the Island.

Manjula Padmanabhan seems to be committed through this saga to disrupting hetero-patriarchy and the biological prescriptions of womanhood. Readers are warned about the political implications of femicide allied with technology and the violence and marginalisation against transexuals, two of the most important issues concerning contemporary India, which indicate the performative condition and fluidity of gendered and sexual identities in the current global society. To this purpose, it is highly significant that the novels portray main characters within both trans feminine and trans masculine spectrums, as I will describe next.

3 Transmasculinity and Transfemininity: Stories of Resistance

There is enough evidence within the narrative to posit that Meiji could be read as a trans man. For example, the scene where Meiji is horrified by the growth of her breasts and attempts to self-administer a mastectomy is an event that draws on the dysphoric experiences of many transmasculine people and on the “wrong body” narrative (Bettcher 2014; Stryker and Sullivan 2009; Stone 1992). To hide her during her perilous travel, Meiji is given a synthetic penis, a devise which “perfectly matched her skin and the method of its attachment to her pelvic region was so expertly achieved that it looked entirely at home on her body” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 1960–1961), and it brings her comfort. Meiji feels comfortable in a boy’s body. This is how she grew up, always dressed as a boy, considered by the rest as an effeminate boy. At the age of sixteen, Meiji is told by her uncles that “you are not what you are supposed to be (…). We want to help you understand what you need to know in order to become what you must become” (Padmanabhan 2015a, line 1156), and now that she is escaping from the Forbidden Country, she is under the disguise of a young boy to be shielded from vigilant eyes.

The author is concerned about the weight outward appearance carries in society, suggesting that gender rests fundamentally on how one is perceived and recognised by others. When Meiji is eventually taken to the Island, the land run by cis women to protect and preserve other women, she is interpreted as a woman unaware of her “true” gender identity. In The Island, there is not the slightest possibility of her being identified as non-binary, even as she declares to the rest of the rescued women (known as the Candidates) that “I am not the same as you. All of you” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 2354). The people in the Island are anxious about her positioning as either a man or a woman and cannot think beyond the binary. Meiji complains to them: “You called me a … a … woman […] I’m not a woman” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 2387). But at the same time, Meiji claims that she is not a man when her peer Messina teases her: “Oh! It’s that funny little sausage dangling between her legs! She thinks she’s a man!” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 2387). Notably, Meiji continues to resist the authoritarian control of the island women by refusing to conform to either gender. According to Butler, in such practices of non-violent resistance, there is agency that mobilises “vulnerability for the purpose of asserting existence” (2016, 27). When Messina shrieks “If you’re not a man and you’re not a woman, (…) what are you?” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 2397), Meiji claims “I’m a … person!” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 2397). This way, Meiji attempts to resist all advances on her, contrary to the other candidates’ sense of gratitude towards the Mentors, who impose rules and regulations on them to restore the powerless and ironically assert their rights. The narrator says that Meiji understood, intellectually, that Rahm had been correct to refer to her as a woman, yet she did not consider herself one: “she had the breasts, the double-folded slit between her legs and the internal organs. Nevertheless, she did not consciously use that word to describe herself. The fact had to be dragged out into the open as a statement made by others” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 2628).

This quotation provides evidence of the reinforced and hegemonised woman/feminine/vulva vs man/masculine/penis dichotomy, sanctioned by the biomedical discourse that upholds an essentialist notion of gender affirmation. On the other hand, Butler states that “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (1990, 43–44). If gender is constituted performatively through repeated acts, we can understand Meiji’s trans-masculinity as a repetition of the constituent practices of masculine femininity, and not as the masculine mind in the female body found in sexual inversion.

The Mentors in the Island insist on making her a woman and on the erasure of any possible queerness in her: “she’s that rare jewel, a perfect, unblemished virginal girl (…) she is exactly as scarred as any of our more typical girls. At least they know what they are. She doesn’t. When she began to speak after her recovery, she didn’t even know how to use female pronouns. She kept using it instead of she” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 1983). As a consequence, the Mentors purport to teach Meiji how to become a woman: “She will go into training to be a Sacred Bearer. She will be schooled in the classical tradition of giving birth, including the full, nine-month gestation. And she will, with the blessings of our entire community of Islands, enjoy the experience of true, natural motherhood” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 2260). This resonates with what Sandy Stone has remarked regarding the practice of certain medical professionals in gender clinics who needed to provide “evidence” that a complete medical, surgical and social gender transition would end the gender dysphoria syndrome their patients (ideal candidates for treatment) had been diagnosed in order to fulfil their agendas, thus proving that social constructions of sex and gender are rooted in biological essentialism. According to Stone, the trans women: “who presented as wanting to be women didn’t always ‘behave like’ women”, so that the professionals in those clinics would prefer their selected candidates to charm school in order to fulfil gender roles and presentations that were expected of women at the time (1992, 290).

Meiji is forced to have her memories wiped, according to her peer candidate Alarie, for her “own good” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 2354). However, Meiji rebels against such treatment: “They took our memories without asking! Now I have nothing but my name. I don’t know where I am, don't know where I came from” (…) what is safe? when strangers can reach inside my brain and take away whatever they want?” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 2354). Even after that, Meiji associates safety and security with not to being in the Recovery room of the Island, but with the wearing of the synthetic penis. It is possible to suggest, then, that the recovery of these memories allows for the realignment of a selfhood that, within both novels, has so far been depicted as transmasculine or agendered. We could argue that this can be an example of transexual men interpreted by feminists as “traitors”, as according to some authors, in their transitioning they denounced their feminist politics for male privilege (Hines 2005, 2007; Monro and Warren 2004; Halberstam 1998). Surely, the gender/sex binaries are destabilised by gender/sex fluidity and having Meiji as a trans male protagonist is a significant step forward in terms of representation, a queer character who was never taught during her childhood that her body marked her out as a victim or endowed her with a clear biological destiny. Moreover, the saga also features characters who are transexual women, or “transies” in the terminology of this futuristic world: one is Youngest, who, as mentioned above, was forced by the Estate General to undergo a vaginoplasty, and therefore passes as a woman called Yasmine; the other is Alia, who voluntarily underwent a transexual transition towards womanhood, and became Yasmine’s companion in their way to and from the opposed lands. The difference is made clear when Alia says to Yasmine: “I am a transie. Maybe that’s why I have feelings. More than you, because you are really a man, not a transie” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 1065). Monro quotes Seabrook (1997) to explain that with the advent of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the established social position of transgender and intersex people was consistently undermined, for example by the British removing their land rights. This resulted in the fact that “most Hijras belong to the poorer castes and classes, and economic marginalisation structures their experiences very heavily” (Monro 2010, 250), and also that they illustrate intersectionality as “their operation is a product of caste, class, and colonialism related inequalities, as well as the gender and sexuality inequalities that permeate Indian society” (2010, 251). The novels are very descriptive about the sexual abuses Alia suffers in the hands of the Estate General, making clear all the suffering she has to endure up to the moment she may use her subaltern position to defeat the monster who has so sadistically abused her.

Alia tells Yasmine that her father used to rape her and hated her because “he knew that unlike other boys who became transies for money, I was a transie deep in my heart. In my blood, in my soul” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 1065). Alia seems to represent the Kothi communities in India. Though it is a heterogeneous group, the judgement implemented by the Supreme Court of India in 2014 uses this word to refer to biological males who show varying degrees of being effeminate, among other groups of transgender people encompassed in the category of “third gender” (National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India). Alia’s relationship with her father is that of subjugation, similar to hijras’ relation to their abusive gurus. He verbally abuses his daughter, uses her as a servant in every sense and brutally assaults her. There are also explicit descriptions of the way the General later uses Alia as a sexual slave, which makes her a perfect illustration of transmisogyny in India and of the precarious condition trans people are placed in, when a society refuses to give the third gender any space. Padmanabhan is committed to denouncing the treatment transexual people receive in her country, where although the third gender has been legally recognised, their lives remain fraught as there is sex trade and exploitation and a constantly humiliated cast out. We need to clarify that after the publication of the saga, some rights have been gained. A bill was passed after a lot of controversial debate to finally become an act of the Parliament of India, The Transgender Persons Protection of Rights Act of 2019, but it was much criticised by transgenders as it included regressive provisions of the Supreme Court judgement in 2014 for neglecting the recommendations made by the Standing Committee and the transgender community. For instance, hijras can self-identify as women, but are disqualified as such when they contest elections or quotas.

After becoming a transie, Yasmine was marked out with a dark blue hijab as “a transexual in the pleasure industry” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 41). Actually, life for transies in the saga is reduced to “ply[ing] their trade” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 1213), denouncing this way the fate of these communities in India. In the Forbidden Country, men have sex with other men and Generals can choose certain men to be transformed through vaginoplasty into transexuals for the pleasure of this ruling class. The Estate General revelled in this power to alter the human body, describing Youngest to Alia in the following terms: “He is, after all, irresistible, not a feem, such as you are, but a genuine reversi. It’s a term I coined myself: a man who, against his will, against his nature, is forced to change his body into that of a … well, I call them Vermin. Non-men. Those who are born in nature yet are unfit to belong to the ranks of men” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 1350). Likewise, Alia saw Yasmine as “more of a “he”—” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 434). Even Amir, Alia’s abusive father, agreed: “you’re no transie. You’re a man. Am I right?” to which Yasmine answers “I is have body of a women” and Amir replies “but not the mind (…) The way you move, the way you talk (…) the way you stand and hold yourself: it is with pride, with dignity. A man’s dignity” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 513). That is why the Island Mentors made every effort to also teach Youngest, using advanced technology, how to more fully “become” Yasmine, and this included leaving behind the masculine entitlement to sexual pleasure, which can be interpreted as another abusive mechanism of control.

The whole world in the saga rests on technological progress under the control of an elite who uses it to subjugate the rest. One of the main characteristics of life in every corner of this futuristic land is that all areas use mechanisms of surveillance and communication (a dystopian variation of Foucault’s panopticon). Different forms of surveillance, such as audio chips permanently embedded in the upper jaws, tiny robotic cameras above the crowd, wall monitors, etc. serve to control everyone, adopting a panoptic way of disciplining individuals as totalitarian regimes do (Foucault 1995; Friedman 2011). The dominating elite, the Generals in the Forbidden Country and the Mentors in the Island use these technical apparatuses to achieve two major objectives: subordination by constant monitoring, and thwarting the pull for resistance.

However, the trans protagonists endure adversities due to their vulnerability, that is transformed into resistance brought about through their resilient condition. Marianne Hirsch stated that as embodied species, “we share a common vulnerability emerging from the condition of living in bodies and in time. But, importantly, vulnerability is also socially, politically, and economically created and unequally imposed” (2014, 337), and that it is precisely an acknowledgement of vulnerability, both shared and produced, which can “open a space of interconnection as well as a platform for responsiveness and for resistance (2014, 337). In Hirsch’s direction, the trans characters Alia, Yasmine and Meiji show an elasticity that enables adaptation to the circumstances, which allows them to undergo changes that grant them power, as they grow stronger and more connected to others. Two of them are presented as vulnerable victims of sexual abuse, but they enact subversion though resilience. This way, the trans characters are portrayed as agents—risk-taking subjects, in Nivedita Menon’s terms (2004, 142–143). As Bracke (2016) stated, survival can be linked to collective transformation and to social revolt and that rebellion involves subversion. Therefore, resilience leads to a change, to the creation of a new social structure that undoes those structures of control and limitation. In the protagonists’ transit nature on the margins, they forge a solidarity stemming from their being similarly and violently abused by the General. This alienated group is determined to guarantee their own survival and so, after a dramatic denouement, the saga ends on a faint note of hope. As Peter Hall and Michèlle Lamont put it, this show of resilience can be interpreted as “the capacity of groups of people bound together in an organisation, class, racial group, community, or nation to sustain and advance their well-being in the face of challenges to it” (2013, 2). Therefore, from subaltern resilience (where the subaltern position is maintained), the protagonists go to the resilience of vulnerability (where the vulnerable group resists at the same time that is transformed).

Consequently, the author provides stories of resilience and resistance, which allow for the possibility of integrating changes to defy extant structures of sexual abuse and domination and to transform the situation of the vulnerable. Padmanabhan presents the Generals as the enemies, as they hate (kill and/or rape) trans and cis women. The Generals’ own utopian plans have created a place for resistance (the Island) that is also essentialist, as their idea of “restoration” does not welcome non-binary options. The Mentors function in such a way that the candidates are by and large unable to resist any “advances” on their bodies and their lives, as they have to express their gratitude for the sudden elevation of their lifestyle and for access to the improved facilities (thanks to advanced technology) provided for them. This sense of gratitude makes them slavishly accept the rules and regulations and ultimately turns them powerless to assert their rights. However, Meiji manages to resist all “advances” on her, thus representing a powerful non-binary character featuring a strong sense of resistance to all forms of domination. Similarly, Alia manages to reverse the control the Estate General has over her by killing him (though there are more clone Generals) and by unveiling his plans to take global his genocide of cis women and intersex people. We could, then, argue that the trans characters, as subaltern subjects, employ the strategies of resistance to become agents of their own stories.

4 Conclusions: Feminist Solidarity

In general terms, the author seems to criticise the multiple dimensions of social inequality that come into establishing a human condition in which the technological apparatus is at the disposal of the ruling classes (either men in the Forbidden Country or women in the Island). The novels analysed in this chapter suggest the implications of this situation by presenting the extent to which those affected by the changes suffer and how they surrender themselves in order to survive, even though eventually they learn to resist and to make use of their vulnerable condition to join forces and transform their precarious realities. Padmanabhan’s fiction appears to draw from her perception of the transformation in the world order due to globalising tendencies, where transnational movements are forbidden and international trade is controlled by a global governance, new modes of communication and cultural deterritorialisation. As a result, the premises for the creation of the WWU in the saga bring into being even more precarious conditions of the vulnerable groups than the Time Before.

The rulers’ essentialist belief in their sex supremacy (the opposed binary cis males and females, paramount in their own regions, as in a battle of the sexes well represented in the Zone) reminds the readers of the constraints regarding a terrible future where fluid genders are persecuted and women are not even allowed to exist. This situation, according to Tabish Khair (2016, 3–4) and Sara Ahmed (2004, 64–84), can create a sense of division and alignment that leaves some out and validates speeches and actions of hate and violence. Therefore, although the saga is presented as a segregation narrative—flipping from the Forbidden Country’s prejudice against women and femininity to the Island’s prejudice against men and anything associated with masculinity, and complicated by their own biological determinism—the presence of trans characters in the novels not only reconfirms the inevitable violence existing within the established binary, but also symbolises a strong desire to escape from governmental tyranny that promotes rigid categories.

While the General’s regime curbs any dissent by keeping the citizens in a state of ignorance—the General claimed that “ignorance is power” (Padmanabhan 2015a, line 3669)—with lies, misinformation and propaganda, Mentor Vane claims that “Knowledge is power” (Padmanabhan 2015b, line 5477). As a consequence, the Mentors change their tactics and try to join forces with Alia, Meiji and Yasmine in order to get all the knowledge they have about the Forbidden Land with a double purpose: to put an end to violence against all women by intervening in The Zone and by disrupting the General’s plan. This might lead to a complete turn in the way the Island works, a reversal of the use of technology and a democratic agreement that can grant the possibility of doing something good for the world in spite of the Generals’ utopia of a land without any women, the WWU neocapitalist trafficking of women and Youngest’s sacrifice of his own sex. However, these are left unfinished as a lead-in to the next novel in the saga, which Padmanabhan announced she is in the process of writing now (Navarro and Diego 2020). Chandra Mohanty (2003) made a firm critique of western feminism and globalisation as a step towards a feminism without any kind of borders. Having this in mind, we can conclude that, once the essentialism of two opposed worlds in the saga in a dystopian atmosphere has been exposed, the end of the second novel invites the readers to think that there may be hope in collective resistance. It seems to suggest that intervening together in solidarity with a common purpose makes the trans resilient protagonists, who stand for the fluid genders, showcase a queerness that needs to be included in a plural feminist agenda fully engaged with the realities of every community.