Redefining Pakistani Muslim wifehood in Hamid’s and Shamsie’s fiction

Abstract

Mobile Muslim women in Pakistan transcend the dualistic reductive discourses of the secular and the religio-cultural to carve out a distinctive modern subjectivity which is neither Western secular nor local religio-cultural; instead, it is interstitial. Pakistani fiction in English explores how mobile Muslim women in Pakistan choose their battles to renegotiate and redefine their gendered role of wifehood. However, it is still under-researched in this regard. In this paper, we aim to examine the effectiveness of empowerment enabled by the mobility of Muslim women to redefine their wifehood subjectivity as depicted in the fiction by Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie. Drawing on the concepts of performativity by Judith Butler and third-space by Homi K Bhabha, we interpret female characters from Moth Smoke and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Hamid and Broken Verses by Shamsie as reflective of the women’s struggles to renegotiate the role of wifehood. Beyond the dualistic discourses, we examine and discuss the variously situated Muslim women’s exercise of mobility-shaped third-space and its agentiveness. We argue that though mobility variously empowers them, the common factor among them all is that it enables them to negotiate without exclusive adherence to the local religio-cultural and the universalist Western secular discourses. We also foreground mobility as a source of agency in general to challenge the reductive discourses that view Muslim women as a monolithic passive entity.

Keywords

• mobility
• wifehood
• muslim women
• third-space
• mohsin hamid
• kamila shamsie