“Circulating Emotions: Gendered Representation in Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp”

Abstract

This paper, titled “Circulating Emotions: Gendered Representation in Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp,” examines the role of affect in constructing gendered identities in Heart Lamp through Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Affect Theory. It explores how emotions such as fear, shame, pain, and care circulate within domestic and social spaces, shaping women’s lived experiences under intersecting structures of patriarchy, caste, religion, and class. Drawing on Ahmed’s concept of “affective economies,” the study argues that emotions are not private states but social forces that organize relations of power and belonging. In the selected stories, affective regimes regulate women’s bodies and choices, often producing silence, endurance, and emotional labour as normative conditions of existence. However, the narratives also reveal moments where affect becomes disruptive, enabling subtle forms of resistance and redefinition of selfhood. The paper contends that Heart Lamp foregrounds gender not only as a social identity but also as an emotional and embodied experience shaped by circulating affects.