An Ecofeminist Study of Gendered Bodies and Earth in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Abstract

This study presents the ecofeminist analysis of Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie using the approach proposed by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva to explore the relationships between gender, ecology, and power. Though the themes of political, diasporic, and securitisation have taken centre stage in the existing studies, this research prefigures the role played by patriarchal, religious, and state institutions in controlling women and their bodies, grief, and spatial mobility in terms of ecological imagery and ritual denial. Through a qualitative close textual analysis, the study examines the motifs of soil, water, heat, burial, and embodied mourning as arenas of gendered and ecological violence, where they intersect and conflict. It claims that the refusal of burial rights, the criminalisation of grieving, and the infringement of female bodies onto surveillance are mechanisms of ecological disruption that cut body, land, and memory. Simultaneously, the care practices, rites, and perseverances of women are interpreted as ecofeminist ways of resistance relying on relational morality as opposed to juridical power. Home Fire can be placed within the context of postcolonial ecofeminist criticism, and placing it within this context, the analysis also rewrites Home Fire as urban and diasporic ecofeminist writing, which links intimate trauma to existential injustice, gendered vulnerability, and state power in a globalised world. In a wider sense, the research demonstrates the way literary narratives can be put to light to reveal the ecological injustices that are yet to be identified in the policy-oriented or technocratic discourse. It shows that grief, ritual, and embodiment are significant epistemologies that the marginalised subject uses to express resistance. Through this, the study will assist in projecting the ecofeminist critique outside of the rural or pastoral setting to the context of securitised, transnational urban space.