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ABSTRACT
This paper is an exploration of Hold Me in Contempt: A Memoir by Shirani A. Bandaranayake, the first and only woman so far to have held the position of Chief justice in Sri Lanka, who was impeached from her position. It argues that while the memoir acts as testimony and enables female political activism and agency, revealing the liberatory possibilities of female memoir, it simultaneously reanimates gender stereotypes which it attempts to resist through a discourse of respectable femininity. Yet, the paper contends that while Hold Me in Contempt unravels the relationship between memoir, gender, and power, it offers spaces for investigating the nexus between respectable femininity and subversive feminism.
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Kanchanakesi Warnapala
Kanchanakesi Warnapala graduated with honours from the Department of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and subsequently obtained her Master’s Degree in English and Doctorate in English from Michigan State University, USA. She is at present a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka and has published her academic research in journals such as Interventions, Early Popular Visual Culture, Postcolonial Text, and the European Journal of Life Writing.