Gendered Criminalization and the Feminization of Suspicion in Megha Majumdar's A Burning

Abstract: This article offers a socio-legal reading of A Burning by Megha Majumdar, arguing that the novel represents female characters as becoming criminally legible not primarily through evidence or demonstrated conduct but through gendered structures of suspicion. The article draws on feminist legal theory, particularly scholarship on gendered credibility and disciplinary power. Drawing on Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, the article introduces and operationalizes the concept of feminization of suspicion. The concept refers to the process through which female speech, visibility, and affect become pre-structured as incriminating within legal and public discourse. Three interrelated dimensions of this process are examined. First, Jivan’s conduct is rendered criminally readable before evidentiary assessment. Second, Lovely’s testimony is subordinated within credibility hierarchies structured by gender and social marginality. Third, suspicion becomes normalized as a governance technique operating across legal institutions and media. The novel, treated here as a site of socio-legal imagination, reveals how criminalization can come to appear natural and inevitable, not because evidence is overwhelming, but because the accused is already positioned as suspect. The article thus contributes a conceptual framework for analyzing how gendered suspicion structures criminal legibility in literary representations of law and in socio-legal discourse.