The Political Economy of Gender: A Marxist-Feminist Reading of Patriarchy and Resistance in A Thousand Splendid Suns

Abstract

This paper analyzes Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) in the context of Marxist feminism and the ways in which the novel exposes the politics of patriarchy as not only a cultural but also a political-economic institution. The institution that takes advantage of women bodies and labor to generate value. The paper suggests that women such as Mariam and Laila are oppressed as a twofold exploitation: they are exploited as gendered subjects subject to patriarchal control as well as economic entities whose domestic and reproductive labor are seized with no payment in the situation in Afghanistan. Through the implementation of essential Marxist feminist terminology such as social reproduction, the domestic labor debate, and the base-superstructure dynamic, this reading proves the way Hosseini constructs the emergence of opposition in women not as an act of rebellion but as a needed disruption to a system based on material and emotional exhaustion. The study contributes to the resistance, finally envisions liberation not by individual flight but by unity and community recovery of reproductive power. This provides a literary example of history of trying to understand gender oppression as an economic phenomenon.