L'écriture féminine is about writing the body, and it refers to the act of rewriting the prescribed definitions of gender and sexuality (Cooke, 2011). Her notion of the queer intimacy similarly involves the ability to capture a love that “allows for the transgressive play of sexual difference to rewrite intimacy outside the limits created by heteronormativity” (Kimmey 2003, p. For Cixous, the notion of the third sex or “the other” is excluded from the binary pairs of masculine/feminine and male/female. Cixous’s identification of female sexuality as everything that is outside of male principle creates a vast and limitless possibility, or an excess, that can exist on its own and be independent of masculinity (Hewson, 2001 Storr, 1999).

To achieve this goal, the study draws on the poststructuralist feminist Helene Cixous’s notions of the feminine, the other, queer intimacy, and l'écriture féminine or female writing. This study seeks to examine the Bright Lines to understand the subtle nuances and the complex negotiations of (female) identity and sexuality as portrayed through Ella Anwar’s sexual experiences. Furthermore, notwithstanding the reality of emerging concerns among Muslim women that make up the fabric of Bangladeshi society, less attention is granted to the study of subjective feminine experiences in the face of religion in contemporary culture. Indeed, within the enormous global attention that diasporic Bangladeshi fiction by woman writers has attracted in recent years (Anuar & Asl, 2021 Asl, 2018), Muslim women’s concerted attempts to reconstruct sexuality and redefine gender roles remain tremendously underresearched. The novel’s attempt to reconstruct the boundaries of gender and sexuality is important within the context of a heteronormative ideology that has traditionally dominated Bangladeshi culture and literature. And on the other, her same-sex attractions and behavior disrupt the fixed definitions of sex and gender-i.e., the pre-existing binaries of man-masculinity and woman-femininity (Butler, 1990). On one level, Ella’s unorthodox relationships with both her cousin Charu and her friend Maya demonstrate an apparent deviation from religious principles and cultural values. The contemporary American writer of Bangladeshi descent Tanwi Nandini Islam’s debut novel Bright Lines (2015) revolves around homosexual inclinations of Ella Anwar, who is an adopted daughter of a Muslim Bangladeshi family living in Brooklyn.

Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam