The Affective Construction of Female Other in Javeri’s Nobody Killed Her: A Study of the Performativity of Disgust
Abstract
This article discusses the affective production of otherness in Sabyn Javeri's debut novel Nobody Killed Her (2017) using the theoretical framework of Sara Ahmed's performativity of disgust as developed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), specifically in Chapter Four. According to the article, disgust in Javeri's novel is not a spontaneous psychological response to its bodies and objects' “repellence” but rather a “socially performed” and “repeatedly circulated” affect that is “institutionally consolidated” throughout the novel and thus actively constructs the marginal status of the novel's protagonist, Nazneen Khan, or Nazo, a lower-class Pakistani refugee woman whose body becomes a sticky surface onto which layers of class, gender, sexual, and political disgust accumulate throughout the novel. The main analytical lenses used in the article, such as Ahmed's affective economies, stickiness, contact zone, and performative speech act of disgust, and briefly by Judith Butler's performative speech act theory and Simone de Beauvoir's Other, focus on the ways Nazo's otherness is produced and sustained in three overlapping areas: class and embodied abjection, the gendered body as a site of accumulated disgust, and institutional disgust as a mechanism of silencing and erasure. Repeated social disgusts are enacted in key scenes, such as Nazo's self-positioning on the floor, her confrontation with Balgodi, the rape and the ensuing politics and finally the trial in the court room, where Nazo's accumulated disgusts render her ineligible to be her own body. The article ends by concluding that Javeri's novel is a powerful literary production of Ahmed's argument that no one is responsible for the killing of the female Other because the affective economy of disgust has already done the job, invisibly and completely.
Keywords: Performativity, Disgust, Female Othering, Affective Economies, Stickiness.
