Negotiating Patriarchy in Transit: Gendered Subjectivities in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Monica Ali's Brick Lane

Abstract

Gender, in recent migration narratives, is a key location where identity, belonging, and displacement are reconfigured. This paper attempts to explore Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2004) and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017) via the lens of transnational gender studies and postcolonial feminism. The study investigates how migration creates unequal and gendered subjectivities, drawing on the theoretical interventions of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avtar Brah, Inderpal Grewal, and Caren Kaplan. In contrast to Nadia's quest for independence and self-determination, Saeed's retreat into religio-cultural nostalgia reveals a crisis of masculinity in Exit West, which uses magical realism to conceptualize refugee mobility and borderlessness. By following Nazneen's steady negotiation of agency within the confines of patriarchy, community surveillance, and economic dependency, Brick Lane, on the other hand, offers a realist portrayal of diasporic domesticity. The study contends that migration reconfigures gendered power relations, resulting in broken masculinities and contingent female agency, rather than dismantling or reproducing patriarchy in uniform ways. This study highlights gender as a crucial element for comprehending diaspora, transnational identity, and the politics of belonging in modern migration literature by contrasting Hamid's metaphorical refugee tale with Ali's realistic depiction of immigrant life.