‘The word with an aura’: hunger and women’s agency in Bushra Khalfan’s <i>Dilshad</i>

This study examines Bushra Khalfan’s duology, comprising Dilshad: The Biography of Hunger and Satiety (2021) and Dilshad: Chronicle of Blood and Gold (2024), to shed light on how hunger and austerity shaped gender relations and women’s struggles for agency in pre-modern Oman. The study argues that Khalfan’s portrayal of hunger primarily serves as a critique of imperial politics and gender construction, revealing how hunger was manipulated along racial and gender lines. Specifically, the visceral manipulation of marginalized individuals reinforces firmly rooted gendered spatial divisions. The study scrutinizes Khalfan’s texts in light of the famine and gender theories of established scholars. Drawing on these theories, the critical reading of Khalfan’s texts suggests that gastropolitical subalternity gave rise to hierarchical structures mirroring imperial construction of hunger and precarity as a way of ensuring political dominance. For Khalfan, racially marginalized women’s hunger is mitigated through established systems of privatized domestic labor, leaving the transgression of the public space as women’s only avenue for exercising agency.