Gender, Citizenship and the Nation-State in Pakistan
Article by Amina Jamal
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Excerpt from research article:
Discourses about Muslim women’s victimization, which have intensified during the U.S.-led “war on terror,” position Muslim women as objects in a debate of Islam versus the West, tradition versus modernity, and threaten to erase accounts of Muslim women’s agency and activism within their own societies. We need to examine Muslim women’s ambivalent positioning within religion, society and politics, and family and nation and recuperate the ways in which women appropriate contradictory discourses to assert their identities as daughters and citizens. This article seeks to trace the mutability of the gendered identity and status of citizen that is the locale of a persistent tension between Shariah laws and constitutional statutes in Pakistan. I focus on the social construction and control of women’s sexual autonomy in Pakistan that is due to the imbrication of law, religion, and politics at a particular historical moment. While I do not mean to suggest that a neat demarcation between legal, political, and social spheres is possible, I am interested in a peculiar collaboration between the imperatives of nation-state formation and the cultural- political project of Islamization in which the courtroom became the site of construction and contestation of ideas about “the nation,” “Muslim woman,” and “citizen.” An important part of my project is to explicate the challenges posed by the assertion of women’s sexual agency to the ideology of the heterosexual middle-class nuclear family and thus to the nation-state, even as the demand for autonomy is couched within the language of citizenship. This complicated positioning of women within family, community, nation, and state has shaped the feminist discourse in Pakistan, which is overwhelmingly couched in the language of women’s rights as universal human rights.
Download the “Gender, Citizenship and the Nation-State in Pakistan” article (pdf)