The Emergence of Female Agency against the Diverse Oppressive Encounters in Soniah Kamal’s Postcolonial novel Unmarriageable

Abstract

Kamal’s explicit critique of Pakistani society, overwhelmed with marriage-industrial-complex, finds its perfect place in world of fiction. Keeping in consideration, the postcolonial and patriarchal existence of Pakistani society, this paper attempts to locate in Kamal’s novel Unmarriageable, an atmosphere permeated with hypocrisy and misogyny. Being in Pakistan, women are subjected to exclusionary politics if they happened to assert their own subjectivity in the face of patriarchy. Besides this, the diversity in the contextual reality of the third world women is undermined by the Western feminist scholarship. Hence, by recognizing various forms of oppression, it will also seek to legitimize the existence of diverse oppressive experiences in regards to class and gender dynamics in Pakistan. This recognition will eventually serve to render an authentic agency to women. Ultimately, this paper will justify the emergence of authentic female voice as the novel concludes. Relying on qualitative modes of inquiry and interpretation, this paper endeavors to conceptualize the intersection of oppression and agency through the theoretical frameworks articulated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), wherein she interrogates the possibility of authentic subaltern voice within hegemonic discourses. Additionally, it engages with Chandra Talpade Mohanty's incisive critique presented in “Under Western Eyes” (1984), wherein she challenges the essentialist and homogenizing tendencies of Western feminist epistemologies that construct “Third World women” as a monolithic and victimized category. Through the lens of these critical interventions, the paper seeks to reexamine the modalities of representation, agency, and resistance available to postcolonial women within neo-imperial and patriarchal paradigms, as represented by Soniah Kamal in her novel “Unmarriageable, 2019”.