In search of new imaginaries : (re)reading the portrayal of female resistance in Pakistani anglophone women’s writing /

Open in iSearch

Student Theses

2022

Nazar, Abroo

Thesis

This dissertation reads selected texts in Pakistani Anglophone women’s writing to explore the ways in which the spatial and bodily entanglements of the female protagonists reconfigure the concept of female resistance. The novels are Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Story of Noble Rot (2001) and Thinner Than Skin (2012), Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), and Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (2018). Female resistance in Pakistan reached its peak during Zia-ul Haq’s reign, following which researchers extensively studied the weaponization of religion and politics to impose oppressive policies on women’s spatial and bodily freedoms through the forced practices of veiling and domestic confinement. More than 30 years after the end of this era, the research on female resistance in Pakistan still often returns to the religion/secularism binary as the only available theoretical framework. In contrast to this simplistic understanding of female resistance, this dissertation focuses on women as individuals whose agency and resistance are shaped by a multitude of factors, including religion, culture, economic status, regional identity, and location. In Search of New Imaginaries attempts to make an original contribution to feminist studies in Pakistan by focusing on the ways in which the female characters of these novels negotiate space and use touch as forms of resistance. This dissertation uses a variety of theoretical frameworks, such as posthuman feminism, critical carnal hermeneutics, postcolonial ecofeminism, and postcolonial space theory. Part One of the dissertation includes two chapters that consider touch as a form of resistance. Chapter Two, “Posthumanism and Female Resistance; Reading the Disruptive Female Body in The Story of Noble Rot by Uzma Aslam Khan,” argues that the female characters’ atypical corporeal engagements with the non-human world provide an extended, relational view of female resistance that disrupts the humanistic boundaries between human and non-human. Chapter Three, “Touch and Embodied Agency; An Exploration of Female Resistance in Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah,” uses Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological theories to read touch as a form of female resistance. It claims that the study of female touch as resistance brings attention to the skin as a powerful medium through which identity is reconstructed through emotions. Part Two of this dissertation draws attention to natural and national spaces as sites for the exploration of female resistance. Chapter Four, “Nomadic Female Resistance and Natural Spaces: A Deleuzian and Guattarian Reading of Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin,” uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of holey spaces to evaluate the ways in which the novel’s female nomad protagonist inhabits heterogeneous and fluctuating natural spaces such as forests and caves, for resistance. Chapter Five, “Home, Nation, and the Chaotic Spatiality of Female Resistance in Home Fire,” employs Sara Upstone’s concept of post-space to claim that the novel’s immigrant British Pakistani Muslim protagonists’ resistance challenges the linearity of national spatial boundaries and introduces post-space as a multilayered concept to negotiate the space they occupy. In conclusion, this study of female characters’ resistance in the selected novels expands the horizon of feminist resistance studies in Pakistan

LG51.H43 Dr 2022eb Nazara

https://educoll.lib.eduhk.hk/records/W6VfTNfx