Spatial Mobility, Pakistani Muslim Female Subjectivity, and Third-Space Between the Secular and the Religious in Kamila Shamsie's Broken Verses

Abstract

This chapter examines the agency of third-space gender subjectivity in Kamila Shamsie's novel Broken Verses (2005). To achieve this goal, two objectives are pursued in this chapter: First, it aims to interrogate and contest the reductive binary perception of women's gender identity in Pakistan as the secular and the religious. Second, it seeks to examine how the female characters, situated in their local power constellations in the novel, are empowered from their spatial mobility to redefine their gender subjectivity and expand their social spaces through performativity. It is argued that women's subjectivity transcends the set meanings associated with traditional religious or universalist secular womanhood. The chapter concludes that women's subjectivity, as shaped by their diverse sets of mobility, is variously inclusive, dynamic, fluid, and complex rather than monolithic, linear, or dualistic. The findings of the study contribute to the growing discourse that views gender and identity as constituent of and constituted by space and place at the same time.