BOOKS | REVIEW | FEMINISM

How Does Bina Shah Reflect Feminism in Before She Sleep Sleeps?

A story of women struggle, resistance, injustices, and inequality.

Introduction:

Before She Sleeps is a hallmark of Bina Shah. She has beautifully portrayed a picture of a city where women suffer from injustice and inequality. The struggle of women for their rights is described through a movement named; Panah Movement, which runs by the anti-women group. The writer has raised his voice for females through this piece of writing.

Bina Shah wrote in a smart and gripping way that terrifies others. This novel deals with the 21st-century answer to Margate Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. She has used many futuristic things like artificial intelligence and technology. The treatment of women is highly terrifying, and the purpose behind this is to imagine a world of post-religious authoritarianism in the coming world. The overall texture of the novel is rich and appealing.

Themes and storyline:

Before She Sleeps is based on female issues like gender inequality, male gaze, misogyny, etc. It is a dystopian novel; set in the modern world named Green City. Green city is the capital of South West Asia. It falls under the prey of war and disease, which has reduced the ratio of men and women to an extreme rate. Gender selection also works best in reducing their reproduction rates. It has alarmed society.

Along with this, the government has played a crucial role. They have used power and technology to take control of society. The layer of terror has been spread all over society. The government has restricted women from taking multiple husbands. It is only to retain human breeding, but this technique is against women’s rights.

After that, a group of women has shown resistance against this. Mostly in underground areas, women have shown resistance and refused to accept this system. Secretly, within a night, this group raises to provide the rich and elite of Green City a commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. Later, the elite and influential people have to wipe the floor with dull faces.

Who is Bina Shah

Bina Shah is the most talented and contemporary Pakistani writer, columnist, blogger, and author of many other writings like short stories and novels. Her humorous writing, political satire, and clear-eyed view of social issues have earned her critical praise and a devoted following of worldwide Pakistanis. She considers a modern-day writer who has raised his voice against the repressive Muslim women’s lives through this novel.

Before She Sleeps is considered a modern parable. She becomes a source of bicultural upbringing. She has interpreted social, cultural, and religious forces through a deep understanding and eagled eye. In this way, she acts as a bridge between Pakistan and America. No one can ignore her contribution to literature writing.

Before She Sleeps has gained worldwide coverage and become part of the growing trend of feminist dystopian fiction. It also acts as a channel for anger and anxiety of the #MeToo era.

Aims:

• To highlight the injustice on women.
• To depict women as a piece of object.
• Highlight the role of technology in the modern world.
• Pinpoint the struggle of women in the name of the Panah movement.

Bina Shah and Before She Sleeps:

Before She Sleeps deals with many issues and contains many themes, but this article deals with feminism, the struggle, and the voice for rights. The protagonist, Sabine, has participated in a movement known as the Panah movement. Lin acts as a leading role in this movement. It develops underneath Green City as a secret group. It is to raise voices against stretch government laws and provide a structure that allows them to evade their fate as wives, mothers, etc.

All the characters have attempted rebellion in a dystopian society that replenishes its female population with forced polygamy and childbearing — the novel deals with the virus that results in a decreased generation rate. Here, women are used as “domestic scientists” and ordered to marry multiple men and undergo fertility so that a new generation can be built. Now, the women of Panah have done their work and started showing resistance against this.

Women have deliberately taken a step toward nocturnal companionship. She holds her clients while sleeping with them. Lin believes that they have carefully taken their steps, forward-although it seems risky. This injustice has imprinted deep remarks on Sabine. She has lost her consciousness and is found nearly dead. She has also lost her memory of conceiving all secrets about Green City. Emotional freedom and independence have lost their way in such areas.

Booklist reviews about this novel as Before She Sleep stand on its own as a novel that will have readers contemplating rebellion and revolt, sex and power, and the many ways women’s bodies are sacrificed for the good of society.

Bina Shah wants to portray the grim picture of reality by mixing the spy genre and soap opera with speculative fiction.

Objectification of women:

In this novel, women are treated as piece objects. She has been given no rights. She is just like a piece that is used for breeding. Her privacy, rights, morality, and psychology matter nothing. Characters suffer from many kinds of torture and treat as an object.

Objectification is the act of treating someone brutally or thinking of someone as an animal or thing or an object. It is like dehumanized things. Sexual objectification is treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire. Women used for reproduction, “life-giving.” According to Martha Nussbaum’s concept of Denial of autonomy, a person is treated without self-determination.

The women in this novel have no right to speak and have no self-determination, so they are under objectification. There is no moral implication of sexualization in Before She Sleeps. Nussbaum has argued that objectification is not only important for sexuality but also contribute to slavery and capitalism. The irony in the novel is that “it [is] a capital crime to hit or abuse a woman.” In another way, women are more vulnerable to violability because of a lack of self-determination. Women are treated so as they internalize that behavior and laws.

Women are a part of society and are equally important for social construction, so they should not overshadow.

Perhaps the most profound and pervasive of these experiences is the disruption in the flow of consciousness that results as many girls and women internalize the culture’s practices of objectification and habitually monitor their bodies’ appearance — Fredrickson and Robert

In this novel, Reuben races across town to retrieve his illicit mistress’s illegal girl passed out unconscious. Here many questions are raised in mind regarding Green City and the people. More likely, that train of thought would go something like this, “oh shit on shit oh shit… I am too old to this shit I need a vacation”.

Shah’s novel Before She Sleeps does evaluate from an objectification perspective. Ill-treatment has become their daily routine. Shah has created a shocking scene depicting women’s values and standards. She states that

When I got to the Panah, I was unused to the sight of women’s bodies not swollen and distorted by pregnancy. It seemed wrong, at first, as if something was missing. It took me months to realize that a woman’s stomach wasn’t always convex; that its default state was not always filled with another being.

Women are facing strict behavior and practicing nothing. They cannot decide about their fate and future or are not allowed to use any contraception or related such pills. She is like a piece of the object, who has been examined various times, undergoes rigorous and routine physical exams, including fertility monitoring, and accepts as many husbands and pregnancies as the Bureau deems fit.

Women learn their sole purpose in society is “to bear as many children as possible.” She does force to bear as many children as she can. Sabine falls mentally sick because of conceiving many pregnancies.

Women’s emotions are of no value. When Sabine was in the hospital, she realized I fell in love with her a little bit then or understood how a Client might desire her in a way very different from how he sees me.

Here, female desire for another woman can only be understood or considered through a male gaze proxy, thus collapsing the momentary potential for more radical. Rupa, another character in the novel, raises herself against society and its norms with the help of Panah.

Before She Sleeps has a feminist bent, chapters provide a different perspective of women. All are nothing except devastating disappointment.

Role of technology in objectification:

As we know, Green City is a modern city in South West Asia. It is a lush green, beautiful and prosperous city with a high technology system. The government uses such technological devices to spread fear and terror among women.

Here are occasional references to the city’s control of the local environment, as we have defeated the desert and replaced it with this tribute to human achievement. There are citizenship classes and robotic door attendants. It has DNA security scanners that assign the marriages.

All beef, eggs, in fact, anything natural, is created in a lab with synthetic polymers, proteins, DNA, as news trickles in of meat being manufactured in labs — Bina Shah

As the mothers of the new nation, they are responsible for repopulating society and constantly remain pregnant. And if they break the rules in the “Handbook for Female Citizens,” there are harsh punishments — including “elimination.” Another development is the “Gender Emergency,” which repeats many times.

Women are now an endangered species…the remaining women in Green City found themselves put on an eerie pedestal to bring an entire nation back to life — Bina Shah

The HPV mutated and caused the decline of women. The “Perpetuation scheme” was supposed to address the disparity. Even the handbook only refers to “females.” The history of feminism, the third wave, is described in the nuclear winter context with the name “Final War.” Women are just like digital or online businesses.

Girls and women in Green City were required to have public profiles that men could peruse before applying for a Wife — Bina Shah

According to Claudia Kramatschek, in Before She Sleeps,

Shah inscribes the iniquities of our era on her version where Atwood’s regime was a purely phallic theocracy, Shah gives us a wider view of the sinister alliance between technological omnipotence and the mania for security.

Individualist feminism:

A feminist group deals with individualism, known as individualist feminism. This group aims to change some rules and laws to ensure equal distribution of rights. Women are also encouraged to take and fulfill their responsibilities. It also deals with women’s will and freedom regarding sexual choices. Shah states that,

People in the West reading this book might not find the characters empowered enough, or independent enough, but this is what the world looks like to many women. When it’s forbidden to choose your marriage partner, even falling in love with a person of your choice is feminist.

In Before She Sleeps, a group known as the Panah movement does analyze with this perspective. A group of women originated at night and stood for their rights. “Where rebellious women existed outside the system, traitors to Green City and the largesse of its Leaders.” They are against the rules of the government. Women are treated like “second-class citizens.”

The Green City women have no sexual freedom. It’s a “trigger warning” thing. The independence of women is ignored. Sabine is running this movement. She is in a deep web of her father’s plan of marriage. Sabine doesn’t want to involve in any sexual contact. Panah women provide intimacy — not sex to clients. The women of the Panah are the escorts of sleep, providing the highly sought female company that their powerful male clientele crave.

Men’s physical appetites are huge, but their emotional appetites are without end…So instead of selling our bodies, we spend the night with certain men, special men, the most powerful of them— Bina Shah

Women in this novel are treated just as a piece of an experiment. They ordered to sleep with as many people as they wanted “as a sleepless sentinel.” Her only duty is “And so, she sleeps. And so, she wakes”.

Contemporary feminist dystopias interrogate how reproductive rights are weaponized for ideological purposes, demonstrating how the reduction of women to raw material maintains and (re)enforces what queer theorist Lee Edelman has termed “reproductive futurism.”

Reproductive futurism demands that all sociopolitical decisions must make concerning the future Child, an abstraction that “remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention” (No Future: Queer Theory of the Death Drive, 2004, p. 14). Shah explicitly tackles the prevalence of sex-selective abortions and girl infanticide seen throughout South Asia and China, mourning the missing generation of women “aborted out of existence.”

Conclusion:

Bina Shah has created the dystopian world in the novel. She has maintained balance in everything. Shah’s writing is solid, and she is adept at switching between the voices of her characters.

She has intended Before She Sleeps as a tribute to women’s resourcefulness, the importance of male allies and friends, and faith that we can redress the imbalances of our societies. She sketches out the bleak and post-apocalyptic scenario of a world where women are again reduced solely to their fertility.

A disjointed style maintains the overall volatility and imbalance. Before She Sleeps is an engaging novel and provides nuance regarding the feminist genre. Everything from the technology to the sociopolitical rules to the literal landscape is vividly drawn.

The women’s perspective and their struggles do explain in a hidden way. Shah is a risk-facing outspoken woman, and through this, she wants to show “terrible feelings” regarding the murder of Sabeen Mahmud.

Critics call that Before She Sleeps is about “Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite.”

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