Inside the dark world: Women's trade and prostitution in Patricia McCormick's Sold and Awais Khan's No Honour

Abstract

Trafficking, sexual exploitation, and violence are substantial issues for women living in the patriarchal societies of the Global South. McCormick foregrounds these issues in India and Nepal in her Sold (2006), as Khan does in Pakistan in his No Honour (2021). This article argues that South Asian patriarchal societies, including Nepal and Pakistan, are sexually saturated, rooted in gender inequality, and treat the female gender as the lesser and oppressed, a commodity and an object to be traded and sold for domiciliary purposes. Masculine privileges are threaded through South Asian patriarchal cultures in the form of male-designed doctrines. Contesting the patriarchal notion that prostituted women are objects, this article establishes them as subjects since both protagonists of the selected novels challenge patriarchal norms to become autonomous. Kathleen Barry's concepts on the close ties between trafficking and prostitution are used to capture the engagements of the two selected novels with the designated problems of women's trade and prostitution through textual analysis. This article concludes that sexism, masculinized privileges, and gendered misogyny are insidious forces at work that perpetuate the bleak social realities of women's trade and prostitution in patriarchal societies and can be overcome through women's empowerment.