SEXUALITY, SCANDAL AND THE GOVERNMENT OF BODIES: A FOUCAULDIAN READING OF SARMAD SEHBAI’S THE BLESSED CURSE

Abstract

This article offers a sustained Foucauldian reading of Sarmad Sehbai’s The Blessed Curse and argues that the novel presents sexuality not as a private instinct outside politics, but as a discursive field through which bodies are regulated, moral authority is staged, and political legitimacy is manufactured. Sehbai’s novel is saturated with scenes of concealment, voyeurism, masculine performance, pious mediation, and public scandal. These scenes reveal that desire in the novel does not simply oppose power. It is produced, named, circulated, and exploited by power. Drawing primarily on Michel Foucault’s concepts of discourse, power/knowledge, surveillance, confession, subject formation, and governmentality, this article demonstrates how the novel links the body to feudal residue, military authority, religious symbolism, media spectacle, and commodity culture. The analysis proceeds through six interconnected sites: the haveli as a disciplinary domestic order; mirrors and militarized speech as technologies of masculine subject formation; religion and bureaucracy as joint producers of moral truth; scandal as a mode of productive visibility; women’s bodies as politically managed surfaces; and halal branding as a sign of transnational governmentality. The article argues that The Blessed Curse is a major satirical intervention in contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction because it reveals that the modern political subject is governed not merely by law or coercion, but by visibility, shame, erotic fantasy, piety and discursive circulation. Through obscenity, irony, and grotesque exaggeration, Sehbai exposes the body as one of the central archives of political power.