Embodied Labour and Environmental Degradation: A Materialist Ecofeminist Study of Thinner than Skin by Uzma Aslam Khan

Abstract

This qualitative study performs a textual analysis (McKee 1) of Uzma Aslam Khan's Thinner than Skin (2012) through Ariel Salleh's materialist ecofeminist framework, as elaborated in Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (2017). The study addresses two research questions: how the novel represents embodied materialism through its female characters, and how embodied labour is materially connected to environmental degradation in Khan's fictional Kaghan Valley. The analysis is conducted exclusively through Salleh's central concept of embodied labour. This research finds that through the characters of Maryam and Kiran, the novel presents women's labour as materially embedded within the environmental landscape and essential to community and ecosystem survival. The study concludes that Thinner than Skin presents the exploitation of women's labour and the destruction of the environment as interconnected outcomes of capitalist-patriarchal structures. This is the first study to apply Salleh's materialist framework to the novel, bridging a research gap in scholarship on Pakistani fiction, which has previously been read through cultural, postcolonial, ecocritical, and ecolinguistic lenses rather than a material ecofeminist framework.