CRITICAL ECOFEMINIST AND ECOLINGUISTIC READINGS OF CLIMATE CRISIS DISCOURSE IN PAKISTANI ANGLOPHONE FICTION

Abstract

Pakistan is consistently ranked among the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, with intensified monsoon floods, accelerated glacial melt and toxic urban water infrastructures disproportionately affecting women and low-income communities. Yet Anglophone Pakistani fiction has only recently begun to be read through a combined ecofeminist and ecolinguistic lens. This article examines Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner than Skin (2012), Sorayya Khan’s Noor (2003) and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) to argue that these texts figure climate change and environmental degradation as gendered, linguistic and infrastructural processes rather than atmospheric “background.” Drawing on ecofeminism (Shiva, 1989; Gaard, 2015), postcolonial ecofeminism (Rahman, 2019) and Stibbe’s ecolinguistic concept of “the stories we live by” (2015), the article shows how the novels dismantle dominant stories of development, security and entrepreneurial self-help that normalise the exploitation of both women and ecosystems. Methodologically, the study combines close, ecofeminist readings of bodies, labour and care with ecolinguistic analysis of metaphor, pronoun, tense, erasure and evaluative lexis. It traces how Thinner than Skin links glacial bodies and nomadic women’s labour in Pakistan’s northern highlands, how Noor stages haunted floodplains and disabled bodies as ecological memory of the 1971 war, and how How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia exposes toxic water infrastructures and neoliberal masculinities in an unnamed megacity. Across these novels, women’s bodies, speech and everyday labours are aligned with threatened ecologies in ways that resist sentimental “woman-as-nature” clichés and foreground dispossession, care and agency. The conclusion sketches an ecofeminist-ecolinguistic agenda for future work on Pakistani literature, advocating attention to climate justice, local languages and metaphors, and the global circulation of South Asian climate narratives.