Negotiating Mobility in Domestic Spaces: Gender and Social Stratification in Karachi, Pakistan

Author: Zahabiya Yahya

In her seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak questions whether subaltern subjects can be studied independently from the colonial agenda. She defines subaltern as individuals who belong to third world countries and are subjects of the curiosities developed within Western academia. By suggesting that their inability to speak up is a result of their divisions through gender, social class, and religion, she stresses that academics perceive these groups under an umbrella identity which benefits imperial agendas (Morris 2010). On a similar note, Lila Abu-Lughod (2015) asks the important question of whether Muslim women need to be saved by Western feminist organizations and activist projects that impose their missionary-style rescue initiatives into the region. She explains that Muslim women’s “[C]ontexts are shaped by global politics, international capital, and modern state institutions, with their changing impacts on family and community” (202). Consequently, pursuits in the West that aim to save Muslim women from Muslim men neglect the numerous factors within the category of “Muslim women” such as race, ethnicity, language, and social class that differentiate their experiences.

Historiography of literature produced from within the Muslim world explains why grouping all women as a ubiquitous category prevailed throughout most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Egypt, for example, Huda Sharawi pioneered the feminist movement and published monumental texts on her perceptions of the Islamic veil, freedom, and oppression. What is often neglected when studying her memoirs is her positionality as the daughter of an aristocratic family and a speaker of European languages that enabled her activity (Ahmed 2011). In contrast, women who consisted of the masses and lived in less privileged circumstances stories remained suppressed, primarily because they lacked both the ability and the leisure to express their thoughts to a global audience. While technological developments and telecommunication has created space for historically absent voices, many academic fields continue to categorize people within Eastern regions under a single classification of “the other.”