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From Reproductive Control to Ecological Refusal: An Ecofeminist Study of Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps | Contemporary Journal of Social Science Review
Abstract
Abstract
Before She Sleeps (2018) by Bina Shah has been interpreted as a feminist dystopia, pandemic story, and critique of surveillance. The reproductive regime and the environmental imaginary it uses, with their common extractive logic, have received less attention. This study contends that Green City makes female fertility and desert ecology useful tools for technocratic nation-building. The study applies theory-guided reflexive thematization together with close reading, taking inspiration from Griffin's (1978) ecofeminist critique of patriarchal dualism, and extending Julieta Chaparro-Buitrago's idea of reproductive extractivism to literary analysis. Selected passages were chosen for the analysis of the novel's representations of the Markaz, reproductive conditioning, surveillance, conquest of the desert, and Panah. The analysis focuses on four interconnected operations: the transformation of reproduction into demographic labour, the representation of desert transformation as conquest, the subjection of bodies, mobility, memory, and desire, and the emergence of refusal through secrecy, care, and body autonomy. Panah takes women out of the state's need for reproductive productivity, but the enclosure and unequal emotional work of Panah is an ambivalent haven and not a fully realized ecofeminist alternative. Shah connects gendered and environmental domination in a political rationality that prioritizes the utility of life, and resistance in relational practices that disrupt, yet do not fully resist, the extractive order.
Before She Sleeps (2018) by Bina Shah has been interpreted as a feminist dystopia, pandemic story, and critique of surveillance. The reproductive regime and the environmental imaginary it uses, with their common extractive logic, have received less attention. This study contends that Green City makes female fertility and desert ecology useful tools for technocratic nation-building. The study applies theory-guided reflexive thematization together with close reading, taking inspiration from Griffin's (1978) ecofeminist critique of patriarchal dualism, and extending Julieta Chaparro-Buitrago's idea of reproductive extractivism to literary analysis. Selected passages were chosen for the analysis of the novel's representations of the Markaz, reproductive conditioning, surveillance, conquest of the desert, and Panah. The analysis focuses on four interconnected operations: the transformation of reproduction into demographic labour, the representation of desert transformation as conquest, the subjection of bodies, mobility, memory, and desire, and the emergence of refusal through secrecy, care, and body autonomy. Panah takes women out of the state's need for reproductive productivity, but the enclosure and unequal emotional work of Panah is an ambivalent haven and not a fully realized ecofeminist alternative. Shah connects gendered and environmental domination in a political rationality that prioritizes the utility of life, and resistance in relational practices that disrupt, yet do not fully resist, the extractive order.