Infection rebellion in Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps

ABSTRACT

In her 2018 novel Before She Sleeps Bina Shah depicts an oppressive, dystopian society. This has emerged as one consequence of an uncontrollable virus outbreak which resulted in a disproportionate ratio of men to women. In such a gender-imbalanced world intimacy is commodified, allowing women some means of revolt in a misogynistic and fertility-obsessed world. Shah explores the horrifying aftermath of pandemics, identifying opportunities for the emancipation of citizens living under discriminatory policies. As the COVID-19 pandemic causes economic and human devastation across the globe, its repercussions, aside from fatalities, are clear. Entrenched in complexities surrounding employment, political liability, and stretched healthcare systems, the pandemic has challenged society to respond adequately and ethically. Although it predates coronavirus’s ravages, we argue that Shah’s novel imagines apt spaces for rebellion. Both in her imaginative universe and the wider society, transformative action and liberation are identifiable in the aftermath of infection outbreaks.

KEYWORDS:

• Virus
• pandemics
• dystopian fiction
• feminism
• misogyny
• Bina Shah

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, the capitalization of words such as “Virus”, “Wives”, “Husbands”, and “Clients” follows the conventions of the novel. In Before She Sleeps, Shah draws attention to her dystopian storyworld’s unusual social relations by using capital letters. References to “Husbands” and “Wives” indicates the importance Green City accords to polyandry (just as the countercultural Panah gives “Clients” primacy), while the “Virus” indicates this contagion’s potency as well as its metaphorical aspect.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire Chambers

Claire Chamber is a professor of global literature at the University of York, UK, where she teaches literature from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. She is author of Britain Through Muslim Eyes (2015), Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays (2017), and Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (2019). Recently, she edited Dastarkhwan: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (2021), co-edited A Match Made in Heaven: British Muslim Women Write About Love and Desire (2020), and co-authored Storying Relationships (2021). Claire was editor-in-chief for over a decade of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Freya Lowden

Freya Lowden is a third-year PhD student at the University of York, writing on 21st-century dystopian fiction from the Middle East and Muslim South Asia. After completing an undergraduate degree in English and German literature at the University of Warwick, she spent a year in China, studying Mandarin on a British Council Chinese Language Scholarship and working at the British Embassy in Beijing. She continues to teach part-time and to coordinate an online Model United Nations course. She has received funding from bodies such as the Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust and the Sidney Perry Foundation Trust.