Gendered Nationhood and Female Agency: Mumtaz’s Subversion in Moth Smoke

Abstract

This article examines Mumtaz Kashmiri in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke (2000) as a literary case study to foreground how her subversive female agency evokes and erases the nation’s gendered scripts about sexuality and motherhood. The imagined political communities of nation bank on specific imagined gender roles to sustain themselves. Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) theorizes how gender relations affect and are affected by national projects and processes (and women are integrated into this project as biological and cultural reproducers, boundary markers and symbolic signifiers of the collectivity. At the heart of all these mechanisms is the institute of motherhood, which is co-opted by the nation and state under the guise of protection of the national honor to justify control of female bodies. This research article seeks to incorporate this theoretical framework in the analysis of the character of Mumtaz from Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke (2000) and inspect how she exercises her agency while facing the constraints of gendered nationhood. Her refusal to be a part of this sociological solidity and homogeneity comes at a hefty price. It ultimately exposes the hypocrisy of the system of gendered expectations which deny women their humanity.