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Title Naturalizing Women, Feminizing Nature: An Ecofeminist Analysis of Anglophone Sri Lankan Fiction

Author(s) Anum Ilyas

Abstract By invoking Greeta Gaard’s instructive concepts of Naturalization of women, Feminization of Nature, this dissertation discusses the subjugation of women and exploitation of nature in Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of Thousand Mirrors and Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge. Women are naturalized and nature is feminized by finding parallels between these two. In the selected fiction, women’s bodies are not only co-opted biosphere but also treated as landscapes in the form of rape and abduction in war. Similarly, nature is feminized because of its qualities like nurturing and caring. Moreover, it is presented as mother earth, barren land, and a sexual object. These shared attributes allow patriarchal ideologies to dominate nature and women through oppressive strategies. All oppressions are interlinked in one way or the other, especially when war figures prominently in both the novels and damages the landscapes therein. The female characters break the societal sanctions, and resurface in order to move vertically while deconstructing the binaries of male-female, Sinhala-Tamil, and human non-human. Moreover, the selected texts show that binaries are the root cause of most of the problems: women and men should work irrespective of class, race and gender for a healthy planet. We need to treat all living creature equally with kindness. I use Catherine Belsey’s method of textual analysis and Rachel Alsop’s ethnographic method in order to interpret the selected fiction. My research has broken the grounds for other researchers focusing on Anglophone Sri Lankan fiction from the perspective of ecofeminism. This research is likely to creatively contribute in the production of knowledge in the area of ecofeminism.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2021-03-17

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