AI, Power and Female Body: Exploring Female Agency in Manjula Padmanabhan’s The Island of Lost Girls

Tanu Aastha^1* & Arpana Jha²
¹Research Scholar & ²Assistant Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Central University of South Bihar, Gaya. *Corresponding author.

^{Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 18, Issue 2, 2026. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v18n2.14
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Abstract

The futuristic setting of the dystopian novel The Island of Lost Girls (2015) explores the techno-patriarchal society and how they shape female agency when these characters lack access to truth and knowledge.  Manjula Padmanabhan’s Meiji is a teenager, the only girl in a country where there has been a systematic eradication of the female gender. The novel presents her journey from this “Wasteland” to “Vane Island”, a place away from her family, where knowledge is restricted and monitored, which further raises the question of autonomy and fragmented identity. This research paper uses Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledge” to explore the complexities of power dynamics that underlie knowledge production and female subjectivity. Haraway’s idea of “cyborg” has been used to discuss the blurred boundaries of identity, which facilitates fluidity, liberation and empowerment of the female. Judy Wjcman’s “AI feminism” takes this idea forward and reveals the scope of transformation in the role of AI from a tool of control to that of liberation and survival. By using these theoretical frameworks, the paper aims to examine the dual role of AI as a mechanism of oppression as well as a site of resistance. This opens ways for facilitating agency and empowerment among female characters.

Keywords: Female Agency, AI Feminism, Cyborgization, Situated Knowledge, Power Dynamics