FROM ECOLOGICAL MASCULINITIES TO POSTCOLONIAL ECOMASCULINITIES: A DIFFRACTIVE READING OF CONTEMPORARY ANGLOPHONE PAKISTANI FICTION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21379889Keywords:
Care, Diffractive Reading, Ecological Masculinities, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Slow ViolenceAbstract
This paper interrogates the possibilities of “ecological masculinities” (Hultman and Pulé's 02) as a counter-hegemonic alternative masculine practice among postcolonial Pakistani men in three Anglophone Pakistani literary texts that are Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Aamer Hussein’s Another Gulmohar Tree (2009), and Shandhana Minhas’ Tunnel Vision (2007). Drawing on Martin Hultman and Paul Pulé's (2018) foundational claim that “all masculinities have an infinite capacity to care towards Earth, human and themselves” (Ecological Masculinities 179), this study is an attempt to examine implication of ethics of care in postcolonial literary context. Grounded in Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of “agential realism” (Meeting the Universe 172) and Donna Haraway’s (1997) feminist epistemological knowledge, this article employs diffractive reading as a methodological framework to understand how realities are constituted through “intra-action” of human and more-than-human agencies (Barad). This study situates its literary analysis within the theoretical corpus of “slow violence” developed by Rob Nixon (2012) and engage critically with Martin Hultman and Paul Pulé's notion of “ecomasculinity” (2018) to see whether or not the notion of ecological masculinity, that is developed principally in the Global North, can be productively extended to the postcolonial Pakistani context. This study thus contributes to the existing scholarship on ecological masculinity and postcolonial criticism by collectively generating the provisional figuration that this study names as Postcolonial Ecomasculinity.
Downloads
References
Albrecht, Glenn. "'Solastalgia': A New Concept in Health and Identity." PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, vol. 3, 2005, pp. 41–55.
Albrecht, Glenn, et al. "Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change." Australasian Psychiatry, vol. 15, suppl. 1, 2007, pp. S95–S98.
Anshelm, Jonas, and Martin Hultman. "A Green Fatwā? Climate Change as a Threat to the Masculinity of Industrial Modernity." NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2014, pp. 84–96.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2013.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.
Barad, Karen. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, 2003, pp. 801–831.
Banerjee, Sikata. Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India. State U of New York P, 2005.
Buckingham, Susan. Gender and Environment. Routledge, 2020.
Bullard, Robert D. "Dismantling Environmental Racism in the USA." Local Environment, vol. 4, no. 1, 1999, pp. 5–19.
Connell, Raewyn. "Masculinities in Global Perspective: Hegemony, Contestation, and Changing Structures of Power." Theory and Society, vol. 45, no. 4, 2016, pp. 303–318.
Connell, Robert W. Masculinities. Routledge, 2020.
---. "A Whole New World: Remaking Masculinity in the Context of the Environmental Movement." Gender & Society, vol. 4, no. 4, 1990, pp. 452–478.
Connell, Robert W., and James W. Messerschmidt. "Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept." Gender & Society, vol. 19, no. 6, 2005, pp. 829–859.
Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Neville R. Ellis. "Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss." Nature Climate Change, vol. 8, no. 4, 2018, pp. 275–281.
de La Bellacasa, Maria Puig. "Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things." Social Studies of Science, vol. 41, no. 1, 2011, pp. 85–106.
---. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. U of Minnesota P, 2017.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley, editors. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford UP, 2011.
Dobson, Andrew, editor. Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice. Oxford UP, 1999.
Evernden, Lorne Leslie Neil. The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. U of Toronto P, 1993.
Everth, Thomas, Laura Gurney, and Chris Eames. "Assemblage Drawings as Talking Points:
Deleuze, Posthumans and Climate-Activist Teachers." Australian Journal of Environmental Education, vol. 39, no. 2, 2023, pp. 152–165.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.
Fenwick, Tara, and Richard Edwards, editors. Researching Education through Actor-Network Theory. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
Ferguson, Ann Arnett. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. U of Michigan P, 2020.
Gerhardt, Christina. "Back to the Future or Forward to the Past: Ocean Voyaging and Slow Travel." Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, vol. 44, no. 1, 2020.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Harvard UP, 1993.
Greenhalgh-Spencer, Heather, and Zofia Zaliwska. "Storying Ruptures as Educational Practice." Studies in Philosophy and Education, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–16.
Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. Riverhead Books, 2017.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.
Hedenqvist, Robin, et al. "When Gender Equality and Earth Care Meet: Cultural Contamination and Recontamination in the Work of Ecological Masculinities." Men, Masculinities and Earth:
Contaminating, Decontaminating and Recontaminating Toxic Masculinities, edited by Martin
Hultman and Paul M. Pulé, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 209–225.
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2015.
Hultman, Martin, Paul M. Pulé, and L. V. Ponarina, translator. "Ecological Masculinities: A Response to Societal Crises of Our Time." Population, vol. 23, no. 2, 2020, pp. 61–71.
Hussein, Aamer. Another Gulmohar Tree. Saqi, 2012.
Juelskjær, Malou. "Gendered Subjectivities of Spacetimematter." Gender and Education, vol. 25, no. 6, 2013, pp. 754–768.
Krishnaswamy, Revathi. Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire. U of Michigan P, 1999.
Lugones, María. "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia, vol. 22, no. 1, 2007, pp. 186–219.
Maufort, Jessica. "'Man-as-Environment': Spatialising Racial and Natural Otherness in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow." Ecozon@, vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 155–174.
McGill, Christopher. "Book Review: Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture, and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English." Ecozon@, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012.
Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Rev. ed., Indiana UP, 1987.
Minhas, Shandana. Tunnel Vision. Roli Books, 2007.
Mukherjee, Upamanyu. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Oxford UP, 1983.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.
Pulé, Paul M., and A. Sykes. "Transforming Destructive Masculinity Norms through the Work That
Reconnects." Deep Times Journal, 2023.
Qasim, Khamsa. "'It's Karachi, It's Where Life and Love Come to Die': Representing Gender, Space and Identity in Karachi You're Killing Me." Pakistan Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2022, pp. 69–88.
Quijano, Aníbal. "Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America." International Sociology, vol. 15, no. 2, 2000, pp. 215–232.
Requena-Pelegrí, Teresa. "Masculinities, Nature, and Vulnerability: Towards a Transcorporeal Poetics in Washington Irving and Walt Whitman." Men, Masculinities, and Earth: Contending with
the (M)Anthropocene. Springer International Publishing, 2021, pp. 135–149.
Rocheleau, Dianne, et al., editors. Gender and Environment: A Feminist Political Ecology Perspective. Routledge, 2013.
Rutt, Rebecca Leigh, and Lise Tjørring. "Killing with Care? The Potentials at the Sustainability/Masculinity Nexus in an 'Alternative' Danish Slaughterhouse." Agriculture and
Human Values, vol. 41, no. 4, 2024, pp. 1541–1556.
Shefer, Tamara. "Pathways to Gender Equitable Men: Reflections on Findings from the International Men and Gender Equality Survey in the Light of Twenty Years of Gender Change in South Africa." Men and Masculinities, vol. 17, no. 5, 2014, pp. 502–509.
Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The "Manly Englishman" and the "Effeminate Bengali" in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester UP, 1995.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Imperialism, Routledge, 2023, pp. 171–219.
Twine, Richard. "Masculinity, Nature, Ecofeminism." Ecofem.org Journal, 1997.
Varutti, Marzia. "Claiming Ecological Grief: Why Are We Not Mourning (More and More Publicly) for Ecological Destruction?" Ambio, vol. 53, no. 4, 2024, pp. 552–564.
Yetiş, Erman Örsan, and Yekta Bakırlıoğlu. "Fatalistic Normalisation, Daunted Managerialism and Afflictive Condemnation as Forms of Slow Violence." Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 10, no. 1, 2023.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Nosheen Rana (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
