In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India ...and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.
Sovereign Attachments rethinks sovereignty by moving it
out of the exclusive domain of geopolitics and legality and into
cultural, religious, and gender studies. Through a close reading of
a stunning ...array of cultural texts produced by the Pakistani state
and the Pakistan-based Taliban, Shenila Khoja-Moolji theorizes
sovereignty as an ongoing attachment that is negotiated in public
culture. Both the state and the Taliban recruit publics into
relationships of trust, protection, and fraternity by summoning
models of Islamic masculinity, mobilizing kinship metaphors, and
marshalling affect. In particular, masculinity and Muslimness
emerge as salient performances through which sovereign attachments
are harnessed. The book shifts the discussion of sovereignty away
from questions about absolute dominance to ones about shared
repertoires, entanglements, and co-constitution.
The bodies of non-White girls are hyper-visible in humanitarian discourses. This article engages in theoretical reflections around the articulation of Whiteness through the body of the third world ...girl. I curate and examine an archive of texts and visuals from menstrual hygiene and female genital mutilation (FGM) awareness campaigns to show how the figure of the third world girl is materialised simultaneously as deserving of care/protection and as a contaminant/imperfection. These apparently contradictory registers of legibility are possible due to the reiteration of the non-White female body as ontologically dirty, incomplete and an imperfect representation of full humanity. The third world girl then is the constitutive outside of Whiteness, and her production as such conjoins humanitarian protection codes with penalising political regimes. The latter is reflected by new border patrolling initiatives in the US and UK, launched specifically to identify victims of FGM. Such exercises of state power craft racialised bodies for constant interrogation, prodding and, ultimately, ejection. These bodies then become the loci of benevolent necropower and experience slow social death.
This article examines the making of humans and their others in and through transnational human rights advocacy. By exploring the discursive articulation of two global icons, Mukhtar Mai and Malala ...Yousafzai from Pakistan, I illustrate how the loud discourse of human rights constitutes particular bodies as human and others as subhuman, inhuman, and bestial through articulations of vulnerability and empowerment. Here, Muslim women and girls appear as vulnerable objects threatened by irrational and angry Muslim men. Visible violations of the corporeal body—delinked from geopolitics and economics—serve as a confirmation of suffering. And women’s empowerment is defined in narrow terms of subversion of local cultures, families, and communities through the practices of individualized voice and action. Such knowledge-making practices are problematic as they (re)install liberal norms and position the white, anglophone male as representing full humanity. Thus, there is a need to reevaluate the underlying terms that inform human rights advocacy. Excavating alternative—decolonial, posthumanist, subaltern, environmental, indigenous—conceptions of what it means to be human and to experience human empowerment is a difficult yet crucial project for human rights, feminist, and decolonial scholars and practitioners. To attempt such a move, I draw on my fieldwork with adolescent girls in Pakistan to center their understandings of being human that view bodies as relational and embedded in different systems of living, including nonhuman ones. This hints at possibilities for pluriversalizing the discourse of human rights in ways that acknowledge the multiplicity of what it means to be human across different knowledge systems, making way for varied experiences of empowerment and justice.
This article illustrates the complexities as well as the promises of enacting a decolonial praxis in the context of teacher professional development. Focusing on a specific case of teacher ...professional development workshops in Pakistan, and drawing on the methodology of narrative inquiry, I outline some of the pedagogical (re)encounters that I created to reclaim local knowledge ecologies. It entailed examining the current moment of coloniality, including acknowledging internalized “extraversion” or westward orientation; an active reengagement with local landscapes, intellectual productions, and teacher selves, including a critique of hegemonic relations of domination; and finally, becoming hunarmand (skillful) in taking up, twisting, and molding dominant pedagogical models toward anti- and decolonial ends.
Studies in education over the past decade highlight the hijacking of educational agendas by neoliberal rationalities and logics. I illustrate these processes in relation to transnational campaigns ...for girls' education, where the purpose of 'education' is reduced to producing wage-based labor and an accumulation of skills that enhance labor flexibility. 'Girls' are primarily articulated as economic actors: potential consumers, labor, and/or entrepreneurs. This reduction of individuals and social projects to economic logics calls for counter-discourses. I delineate one (among many possible) alternate framing of education by foregrounding muslim epistemologies. I present the views of the Shi'i muslim leader, His Highness the Aga Khan, about education, its purpose, and its entanglement with international development. Through a close reading and coding of over 30 public speeches and interviews of the Aga Khan between 1994 and 2015, I outline three salient themes pertaining to self, community, and meaningful life that cast doubt around the reduction of education to economic logics.
In this commentary, the authors argue that if they hone in on a different unit of analysis than the individual, they observe the emergence of a publics that engages in epistemic violence against ...women and girls of the global south by enacting a liberal feminist salvation narrative that has long been critiqued for being a handmaiden of imperial expansions and interventions in the global south.
This article considers cookbooks written by two displaced Shia Ismaili Muslim women--Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's The Settler's Cookbook and four editions of Noorbanu Nimji's A Spicy Touch-- to discover ...how food becomes a means of placemaking in the diaspora. The authors fled East Africa in the 1970s when Idi Amin expelled Asians from Uganda and anti-Asian sentiment reverberated in other East African countries as well. They made their way to Europe and North America. Cookbooks were often the earliest texts penned by Ismaili women in the diaspora, yet they remain an understudied archive. This article considers such cookbooks as they give a rare account of this minority Muslim community's settlement in the West. Through the cookbooks we uncover women's contribution to the biological and cultural reproduction of this religious community and discover that placemaking has a culinary dimension. Indeed, studies of refugee placemaking often focus on the built environment; this article extends the definition of placemaking to include sensory experiences through which displaced people remember and craft new attachments. Cooking and eating are some such experiences. An examination of Muslim women's culinary placemaking thus enhances our understanding of refugee life and its intersection with religion.
The Public Lives of Sovereignty Khoja-Moolji, Shenila
Political theology : the journal of Christian Socialism,
11/2023, Letnik:
ahead-of-print, Številka:
ahead-of-print
Journal Article
This article contributes to recent debates about nuancing the idea of 'patriarchy' by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of assemblage. It provides an account of patriarchy as a contingent yet ...persistent effect of human and material interactions wherein some molar forces aggregate and territorialise social relations around specific notions of womanhood, while molecular flows evade them. The particular set of interactions that this paper considers are configured through and around Qandeel Baloch, a social media celebrity from Pakistan, who was asphyxiated by her brother in 2016. In life, Baloch evaded several normative boundaries prescribed for middle-class Pakistani women. Riding the wave of social media expansion and an attentive youthful audience, she monetised male lust by transforming her body into a commodity, challenged self-appointed arbiters of religion, and mocked politicians. In death, she has been re-territorialised by mainstream media to conform to the social codes that bolster male domination. At the same time, she has been de-territorialised by feminist collectives that have produced their own normativity (or molarity) by erasing Baloch's ambiguities and pronouncing her a feminist icon. Examining patriarchy as an assemblage of forces directs our attention to such heterogenous, even contradictory, movements wherein some pathways-male domination-are more heavily trafficked than others.
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