Gender and Generation: The Politics of Women's Rights Activism in Pakistan Restricted; Files & ToC
Malik Noon, Sana (Spring 2025)
Abstract
Women’s agency —or their capacity for action— has been at the center of interdisciplinary debates in anthropology, feminist theory, and broader scholarship of the Muslim world in the new millennium. Since the 2000s, urban Pakistani women have increasingly been engaged in political movements, becoming central actors in the public arena. Through 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore, I explored the strategies and tactics of urban Pakistani women who lobby for women’s access to public spaces, and legal and civic rights, and initiated the annual Women’s March —known as Aurat March in Pakistan—in 2018. This project situates the Aurat March in Pakistan as an ethnographic starting point to explore deep-rooted contestations among urban women belonging to different generations, social classes, and political backgrounds within the fragmented political landscape of Pakistan.
This dissertation makes three broad arguments. First, while social theory has posited leaderless movements as the future of social movements in the 21st century, I use leaderless as an analytic to investigate how non-leaders perform critical labor in the women’s movement and offer fractured hope to women and gender minorities in the punitive and illiberal landscape of Pakistan. Second, this project centers social generation as a framework for understanding the complementing and competing relationships cultivated among women engaged in activist spaces. The framework of social generation has not been applied widely to non-Western contexts and is emerging in studies of youth movements in the Muslim world, in the context of growing consciousness of social justice and human rights among younger generations. Last, this dissertation contemplates a “politics of the middle” as a transformative framework for studying social change, by paying closer attention to actors who lie in-between generations, political orientations, and organizations. Focusing on in-betweenness seeks to understand women’s agency beyond binary dualisms of secular/religious that have dominated ethnographic studies of the Muslim world in the new millennium. It offers a lens for reading and understanding contemporary social movements as they become more diverse, pluricentric, and connected to transnational actors and locations.
Table of Contents
This table of contents is under embargo until 22 May 2031
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2031 | 2025-04-17 16:46:11 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2031 |
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