Mechanisms of Patriarchal Control in Sufia Humayun's A Text Divorce
Keywords:
Patriarchy, Sexual Politics, Kate Millett, A Text Divorce, Pakistani women's fiction, feminist literary criticismAbstract
This paper examines Sufia Humayun's short story A Text Divorce, published in the anthology Shattered Echoes, through the theoretical framework of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970). The study focuses on six thematic notions drawn from Millett's (1970) theory of patriarchy: patriarchy as a system of control disguised as love and protection, the internalization of male authority, surveillance and the loss of female autonomy, female obedience as a cultural expectation, psychological manipulation and emotional dependence, and divorce as a patriarchal instrument of power. The current study adopts a qualitative interpretative research design and uses Braun and Clarke (2006) thematic analysis to analyze the textual data. The story centers on Saira, a Pakistani woman who separates from her controlling husband, Nomi, only to receive a text message bearing a single word: "divorce." By reading the narrative against Millett's (1970) framework, this paper argues that the story dramatizes patriarchal domination not through physical force but through socialization, surveillance, emotional conditioning, and the legal privilege embedded in divorce. The analysis reveals how Humayun uses the ordinary texture of Pakistani domestic life to expose the extraordinary violence that patriarchy can commit through silence, surveillance, and a single text message.
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