Emergent Sexualities and Intimacies in Contemporary Pakistani Women’s Fiction: A Postfeminist Reading

Abstract

This paper presents a reading of contemporary Pakistani women’s fiction with a focus on their treatment of the subjects of sex and intimacy. The textual nuances have been thematically presented to situate the argument that Pakistani women writers celebrate the intimate aspects of their lives. Without being disloyal to religious and regional sensibilities, these women are creating and nurturing breathing spaces for them. The data for the study comprises the works of two contemporary Pakistani women writers Maha Khan Phillips’ Beautiful from this Angle (2010), and Saba Imtiaz’s Karachi you’re Killing Me (2014). For the sake of conducting narrative analysis, this study relies on postfeminism as a conceptual framework and thematic categories representative of the chick literature genre as a method. The objective of the paper is to bring forth alternative voices depicting the lived realities of Pakistani women, as opposed to the essentialist understanding of Pakistani women.