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@article{196241,
        author = {Yashita Sharma},
        title = {Stitching the Self: Domesticity, Agency, and the Intersectional Geography of Monica Ali’s Fiction},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {11},
        pages = {3546-3552},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=196241},
        abstract = {The study presented in this research paper includes the complex formation of female identity and social integration in the novels of Monica Ali, with the main emphasis on her masterpiece Brick Lane (2003) and her most recent masterpiece Love Marriage (2022). Far beyond the reductive dichotomy of immigrant versus citizen, this paper explores Ali in the framework of intersectional feminist theory and qualitative literary analysis as dual locations of structural repression and subversive action, domestic spaces: kitchens, sewing areas, and family homes. It uses close-reading approach guided by the theory of Social-Spatial and the idea of habitus by Bourdieu, which enables one to interrogate rigorously the role of physical surroundings to impose an interiority of the migrant subject. Through considering the "micro-politics" of the household, the paper reveals how Ali protagonists, including Nazneen and Yasmin Ghorami, are able to attain a hybrid identity not due to a wholesale cultural assimilation but rather due to the strategic re-appropriation of their local environment and the care labor. It claims that Ali redeconstructs the classical narrative of the immigrant, making it a micro-struggle with the state instead of a macro-struggle with the state. Finally, this study assumes that to the characters in Ali, the home threshold is not a zone of exclusion, but rather a transitional zone in which the immigrant woman shifts her passive role as a historical object of patriarchy to an active role as the producer of her own social position.},
        keywords = {Monica Ali, Intersectional Feminism, Brick Lane, Love Marriage, Diasporic Identity, Domesticity, Postcolonial Agency.},
        month = {April},
        }