ECOFEMINIST NARATIVE OF RESISTANCE:INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER, NATURE,AND POWER IN CONTEMPORARY PAKISTANI WOMEN WRITERS' NOVELS

Abstract

This study aims at examining the intersections of gender, nature, and power in contemporary Pakistani women’s fiction through the lens of ecofeminist literary criticism. Anchored in the works of Raaza Jamshed’s What Kept You? (2025) and Feryal Ali-Gauhar’s An Abundance of Wild Roses (2024), the research interrogates how narratives of grief, memory, myth, and ecology become vehicles of resistance against patriarchal domination and ecological degradation. While ecofeminist scholarship in South Asia has primarily addressed cultural productions and broader socio-political discourses, limited attention has been given to the literary contributions of Pakistani women novelists who engage these themes. Through a corpus-based close reading methodology, informed by ecofeminist and postcolonial theoretical frameworks, the study reveals that Jamshed’s novel develops an “interior ecology” of language and affect, while Gauhar’s narrative foregrounds a “mythic ecology” of land, spirituality, and community. Both texts, however, converge in demonstrating that women’s subjectivities are inseparable from ecological struggles and that literary imagination becomes a site of ecofeminist knowledge-making. The analysis highlights how Pakistani women writers expand global ecofeminist discourse by embedding local histories, cultural mythologies, and postcolonial legacies within their narratives, thereby reframing resistance beyond binary notions of nature and culture. By situating women’s voices at the heart of ecological and gender justice, the study contributes to the urgent task of understanding how literature reimagines possibilities of survival and resilience in the context of intersecting crises of patriarchy, environmental precarity, and postcolonial marginality.