Finding ‘Herland’: Utopian Windows in Sabyn Javeri’s Selected Fiction

Abstract

In recent reviews of Sabyn Javeri’s fiction, the author has been criticised for offering too little to feminist emancipatory discourses in Pakistan. Javeri has been accused of creating narratives where the resistance of female protagonists is circumscribed, and sexually divergent characters are realigned with patriarchal social norms. In line with feminist utopian scholarship, which claims that authors sometimes create bridges that lead to nowhere but intervene in, disrupt and perhaps even sporadically upend patriarchal structures, this study relocates Javeri’s fiction in the tradition of the feminist utopian narrative. In its reading of Javeri’s short fiction, specifically ‘A World without Men’ and ‘The Urge’, we claim that the author’s ‘deviant’ female characters seek out and create transient spaces for temporary self-actualisation beyond traditional patriarchal society. The alternative space created can be labelled feminist utopia or ‘Herland’—  a term from Charlotte Perkins Gilman seminal work — referring to a world inhabited only by women. Even if the protagonists retreat to the traditional heteronormative sphere of relations in Pakistani society, Javeri gives them a temporary window to create worlds in which they, like the women of Herland, do not need men as counterparts to complete them. In this way, Javeri’s images are charged with creative/ subversive potential.