NEGOTIATING GENDER, SILENCE, AND SYMBOLISM IN JOKHA ALHARTHI’S CELESTIAL BODIES: A CULTURAL MATERIALIST AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study discuss gender and social post-slavery structures in Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi with regards to symbolic significance of domesticity in a stratified Omani society. It states that household practices, silence, naming, literacy, ornamentation and ritual, are culturally enshrined negotiations of authority that are not passive indexations of tradition. Based on the concept of cultural materialism and intersectional feminism, the paper illustrates the manner in which gender interacts with class, descent, and post-slavery status to generate varied versions of agency and constraint. It is explained that silence as compliance and as a strategy, naming as an act of emergent reorientation, material culture as a means of partial embodied self-assertion, and fragmentation of the story as a representation of incomplete divisions in history and affect. The redefinition of the domestic interior as a place of cultural production is used to bring out in the study how resistance in the novel is achieved by means of the mundane gestures instead of the open opposition.