Fluid Identities and Posthuman Feminist Consciousness in Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019)

Abstract

Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019) offers a poignant exploration of gender, identity and marginalization through the life of Tequila Leila, a sex worker in Istanbul. The paper studies the construction of fluid identities and posthuman feminist consciousness of the protagonist through Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subjectivity (2011) and Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity (1994) as its dual analytical lenses. While existing scholarship on Shafak's novels has largely focused on their socio-political critique of gender and marginalization in the Turkish context, the posthuman and nomadic dimensions of Leila's identity in 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019), as they manifest beyond the threshold of biological death, remain critically underexplored. The novel presents a fragmented narrative, unfolding Leila’s posthumous final moments of consciousness, her complex and fluid female identity. The study aims to explore how Shafak dismantles patriarchal definitions of the female body by moving the narrative beyond the threshold of biological death, thereby challenging the constraints of anthropocentrism and traditional humanism. The study employs a qualitative textual analysis method. The analysis draws on the protagonist Leila's agency, whose life, narrated posthumously, is disembodied and thereby revealed as Braidotti's nomadic hybrid subject — one that refuses rigid social categorizations of being. The study argues that Shafak envisions an affirmative posthuman ethics in which resilience is secured through the dispersal of the self, positing that identity persists as a circulating energy of memory and matter, transcending the threshold of biological death.