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Abstract

This paper explores the experiences of principal characters in Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West, particularly the woman protagonist Nadia, as they battle with displacement and assimilation. The novel highlights the challenges faced by Nadia, a migrant woman, as she navigates through constant mobility and cultural adaptation. This continuous movement engenders a similar fluidity in her sexual orientation as she searches for a home. Nadia represents the “inessential woman” of Elizabeth Spelman’s book of the same name, a woman who is othered by White, middle-class feminists who may view Muslim women as shackled by heterosexuality and religious sanctions. Yet Nadia is more complex than those Western stereotypes. Despite many studies on Exit West, the novel’s discussion of sexuality and sexual freedom amongst migrant women is often overlooked. By employing Elizabeth Grosz’s concepts of body politics, desire, and sexual difference in the reading of this literary text, this study analyses the ontological gender and sexual identities of women in the Global South who are often ignored in hegemonic feminism. The textual exegesis also probes the limitations of bisexual epistemologies in the context of displaced women, who are otherwise regarded as non-epistemic objects. This paper reads Hamid’s text in the context of studies of Muslim migrant women’s intersecting experiences of transculturality, gender, and sexuality. Additionally, this study employs Ellie Anderson’s “hermeneutics of labor” to analyse the emotional labour of Nadia in her ambivalent relationship with Saeed, which complicates the platitudinous portrayal of migrant lives in literary readings.

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