Echoes from the Black Mountains, Gendered Hegemony and Eco-justice in Gauhar’s An Abundance of Wild Roses: An Eco-narrative Perspective

Abstract

This paper investigates how language-enacted creation of environmental justice and gender discrimination in Gauhar’s An Abundance of Wild Roses (2024) through a comprehensive eco-narrative and feminist critical discourse analytical perspective. The analysis is based on the eco-narrative theory of Arran Stibbe (2023) and the Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) of Michelle Lazar. This paper examines the role of narrative language as a discourse to construct ecological injustice, activate non-human agency, and portray gendered oppression and resistance in a literature setting from the Global South. Using a qualitative interpretive research design and the help of thematic analysis, the research scrutinizes purposely chosen pieces of the text to discover eco-narrative stylistic choices, such as activation, eco-cultural identity, emplacement, enchantment, emotive reasoning, and metaphor, coupled with feminist discursive expressions of patriarchal power and female agency. It has been found that the ecological degradation is discursively constructed as something anthropogenic and ethically urgent issues, while non-human entities are discursively mobilised as moral agents that challenge anthropocentric ideologies. Simultaneously, gender discrimination is normalised with the help of patriarchal ideals of honour, silence, and obedience, yet resisted through multifaceted feminine plans of language and emotional uprising. The paper also illustrates how the ecological and feminist discourses come together to present an eco-feminist perspective of environmental justice based on relations of coexistence, care, and moral accountability. This study provides a contribution to decolonising the ecolinguistics and eco-feminist literature on South Asian areas through foregrounding the culturally situated ecological knowledge as well as gendered experiences.