Performance anxiety: women's sexed bodies in Pakistan

The nexus of Islam, gender, race and violence has been keenly revisited in some post-9/11 scholarship. The concern over the racialized Muslim male body is justifiable in cases of rendition, torture and the kind of battlefields that mark the War on Terror. However, the sympathetic analysis of the tor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International feminist journal of politics 2017-07, Vol.19 (3), p.296-310
Main Author: Zia, Afiya Shehrbano
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anxiety
Females
Feminism
Islam
Islamophobia
liberal/secular feminism
Males
Militancy
Muslim female bodies
Pakistan
Patriarchy
Race
religious militancy/war on terror
Scholarship
September 11 terrorist attacks-2001
Terrorism
Torture
violence
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Summary:The nexus of Islam, gender, race and violence has been keenly revisited in some post-9/11 scholarship. The concern over the racialized Muslim male body is justifiable in cases of rendition, torture and the kind of battlefields that mark the War on Terror. However, the sympathetic analysis of the tortured Muslim male body as a permanent and universally vulnerable imaginary has necessarily challenged the framing of sexual politics for Muslim contexts. This bid to shield the vulnerable Muslim male body from Islamophobia and imperialist violence forecloses the notion that Islamist patriarchy and politics can themselves be fundamentally violent in the post-9/11 moment and within the Muslim community. This obscures the range of routine, domestic and normative violent expressions observed by men in Muslim societies. This essay discusses two cases that illustrate the means and methods by which female bodies have been sexed by the narrative of the War on Terror in Pakistan. These cases highlight how the academic efforts that seek to rescue the racialized Muslim male body complicate the struggle of resisting (lay) female bodies.
ISSN:1461-6742
1468-4470
DOI:10.1080/14616742.2016.1207464