Doctoral Dissertation Research: Managing Cultural Change: Women Navigating Purdah and Security at the Borders of Disease, Deviance, and Transportation

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

This project analyzes how three groups of women security workers in Karachi, Pakistan, navigate the transition from gendered seclusion or purdah, to stigmatized work in the public sphere, how they balance the discordant requirements of work and home, and how their activities shape the public sphere. The project expands knowledge in two sociological fields: (1) It enhances feminist state theory by examining how women's labors complicate the equation between gender, nation, and state, in a context shaped by a medley of dissonant global forces: Islamization, neoliberalism and securitization. (2) By addressing how culture works in circumstances that create a mismatch between actors and their settings (i.e. in conditions of hysteresis) it contributes to general sociological knowledge of broad interest about how people adapt to and cope with their changing social contexts. Since these women security workers are involved in projects partially funded by US sources, this project will provide valuable new information for US policy makers, enabling them to craft more effective programs to bolster US initiatives promoting health, security, and gender-equity, globally. By bringing marginalized experiences to light, the project will also help enhance mutual understanding between the United States and Muslim cultures, especially in South Asia. The three cases include policewomen, Lady Health Workers (LHWs), and airline attendants, all three occupations employed by the state to patrol the borders of health, crime, and transportation in Pakistan. These women workers enable the state to extend its reach and its security agenda amongst veiled women citizens, but are stigmatized for breaching their own gendered seclusion to work alongside men. Enforcing and contending with various gender practices, they must manage the tangle of opposing state and global forces. For instance, LHWs must straddle global Islamic discourses surrounding gender as well as global health discourses surrounding risk in motivating women clients to pursue family planning, which is often done in breach of men's wishes. Three kinds of methods are used to analyze how women security workers manage these conflicting logics and contend with their own stigmatization: (1) primary data comprises 120 in-depth interviews with the women, (2) this data is contextualized via observations of the women?s workplaces, their homes, and their interactions with those they serve. (3) Secondary data encompasses textual analysis of training manuals, official websites and news coverage of the women's activities, providing insights into the broader social context within which the women are located. Two research questions will be addressed through this data: (1) How do Pakistani women working stigmatized jobs at the interstices of purdah, globalization, citizenship, and security, balance the tensions that ensue when dissonant logics vie with each other to discipline women's bodies? How do these women's activities shape the public sphere? and (2) How are notions of state, nation, home and family complicated or reworked through these women's activities in the crevices of the globalized clash between state, empire, religious nationalism and gender?