Repositioning sexuality of spatially mobile Muslim women in Kamila Shamsie’s broken verses

Abstract

ABSTRACT By drawing on the concept of performatively created third space, we examine how spatially mobile Muslim women in Broken Verses negotiate and challenge heterosexual identity in Pakistan. We argue that the women expand the meanings of national identity through practical hybridity and alternating between feminist reinterpretations of the Quran, cultural norms and universalist individualist consciousness – constructing a third space subjectivity. We foreground third space epistemology to read the gender and sexual subjectivity of mobile Muslim women situated in the heteronationalist setting which is influenced by the emergence of conservative religiosity and increased social and spatial mobility.