CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Shumail, Zainab |
|---|---|
| Title | Tana Bana: A Study Of Past And Present Feminist Currents In Urban Women's Rights Activism In Pakistan |
| Summary | This thesis studies the work of the Lahore chapters of two urban feminist collectives in Pakistan: The Women’s Action Forum (WAF) and Girls@Dhabas (G@D). Contributing to literature that compares activist approaches of Second and Third Wave feminists and documenting both the rifts and commonalities between the two, I draw on feminist conceptions of the public/private divide along with Jo Reger’s conceptual framework that employs concepts of “political generation”, “collective identity”, and the “community context” in order to analyse the narratives I collected during oral history and semi-structured interviews with WAF and G@D members. In doing so, my findings demonstrate the specific social, historical, and political contexts which shape the two groups’ feminist activist practices. The thesis also highlights issues of invisibility and accessibility to information (and sometimes lack of awareness altogether) to resources documenting the work of different elements of the feminist movement in Pakistan, the impacts of which are reinforced by a lack of direct, personal communication in between the new and older generations of activists. I argue that the mutual acknowledgement of these differing contexts could lead to a more nuanced, appreciative view between the two generations of feminists about one another’s work. I conclude by briefly discussing the events surrounding the Aurat March of 2019 in order to further illustrate the power of solidarity available when valuable, heartening allowances are formed— the prospects of which are otherwise lost in the rhetoric of differences which the two generations perceive to stand in conflict with one another. |
| Supervisor | Helms, Elissa; Jones-Gailani, Nadia |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/shumail_zainab.pdf |
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