Bold Women,Bad Assets: Honour,Property and Techno-Promiscuities

Abstract

In June 2016, Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani social media star, was murdered. Her death sparked both public outrage and a policy debate around ‘honour killing’, digital rights and sex-positive sexuality across Pakistan and its diasporas. Qandeel challenged what constitutes a proper Pakistani woman, an authentic Baloch and a respectable digital citizen. As a national sex symbol, she failed at the gendered workings of respectable heterosexuality, and during her short lifetime she optimised this failure and public fetish as a technologically mediated social currency (clicks, hashtags, comments, likes, reposts) to build a transnational celebrity brand. I centre Qandeel Baloch’s life and afterlives to think through the economic entanglements of honour, racialised ethnicity, coloniality, sexual violence and social media at the intersections of globalised anti-Blackness and honourable brownness as a matter of global capital. Within these complex registers of coloniality, Qandeel’s life and brutal murder necessitate a rethinking of categories of racialised ethnicity (Baloch), sexual labour (racial capital) and social media (digitality) as vectors of value for capitalism and nationalism. By centring Qandeel, I define honour as a form of racialised property relations. This rereading of honour, as an economic metric of heteropatriarchy, shifts my lens of honour killing from a crime of culture to a crime of property. Women’s honour functions as a necrocapitalist technology that constructs female and feminine bodies as the debris of heterosexual empire through racialised, gendered and sexualised property relations. These relations and registers of honour get further complicated by social media currency and discussions around digital rights, privacy and freedom of expression. Honour is, therefore, the economic management of sexual morality produced through race, religion and imperialism.

introduction

I first encountered the sensational Qandeel Baloch in 2014 in New York, when my Pakistani friend snickered as he showed me a video of Qandeel that had taken Pakistani social media by storm (with hundreds of thousands of followers) just a few days before. In this twenty-second clip, Qandeel is standing in a crowded public place, and asks in her broken English, ‘How I’m luking? Tell me how I’m luking?’. The question is directed at her camera phone and her gaze never leaves the lens. That afternoon, my friend used the words tacky and cheapster, and called her an attention-whore while being thoroughly entertained and amused. Her sexy and spectacular digital presence earned her the high-profile title of ‘the national slut of Pakistan’ (Chun, 2016; Maher, 2018). I, however, read Qandeel’s invitation to gaze as a broader desire to be seen—to be seen on her own (mediated) terms—perhaps the boldness women come to inhabit in both online and offline spaces under the conditions of a bulldozing heteropatriarchy, middle-class respectability and feminine modesty.

Qandeel’s life and death provide a sober reading of the biopolitical and necropolitical management of femininity that first propelled her to stardom and then punished her by death. Qandeel’s broken English, her allegedly ‘fake’ American accent and her insistent invitation to ‘luk’ made her a national laughing stock. For some, her sexual assertiveness and feminist agency were seen as too deranged and sinful, in need of respectable feminism, medicalised therapy or masculinised Islamic salvation. Qandeel was branded a ‘prostitute, a filthy dirty woman, a fornicator, and a non-Muslim’ (Aziz, 2016). For many, including myself, she was and is the rebel, gutsy feminist provocateur, and Third World feminist we are looking for (No Country for Bold Women, 2016). In a world where English is a postcolonial barometer of civilisational modernity, censorship a patriarchal pastime and sexual morality a sham of honour, Qandeel was breaking many rules. With marriage, monogamy and morality being central features of women’s honour, feminist respectability and postcolonial nationhood, Qandeel was marked as a figure of feminine failure and a public threat.

In the aftermath of Qandeel’s death, several federal policies that had been in the works were ratified due to decades of feminist activism and renewed public pressure. These included the Criminal Law (Amendment) (Offenses in the Name or on Pretext of Honour) Act 2016 (2016) and Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 (PECA) (2016). A public petition, titled ‘No Country for Bold Women’, by Action for a Progressive Pakistan was also circulated, which stated:

Qandeel was not killed for ‘honour.’ She was killed because an inordinately fragile, male ego couldn’t handle her flame. She was killed because a pervasive misogynistic culture cultivates and protects a toxic masculinity. She was killed because patriarchal structures sustain unequal gender relations with both men and women believing that violence against women is unremarkable, ordinary, and even deserved. (Action for a Progressive Pakistan, 2016)

As part of this feminist organising, a Tumblr account, No Country for Bold Women, ¹ was created as a digital archive. This archive maps the public discourse about violence against women in Pakistan through three key categories: ethics of journalism (#invasionofprivacy), commodification of women’s deaths (#necrocapitalism) and rape culture (#victimblaming).

In September 2019, Qandeel’s brother, Muhammed Waseem, was charged with her murder and sentenced to life imprisonment by Pakistani courts. Six co-defendants, including a state-endorsed Islamic cleric, Mufti Abdul Qavi, and Qandeel’s two other brothers, were acquitted. This legal ruling put one of the perpetrators behind bars, signalling the partial implementation of these newly ratified policies. However, as the statements above make clear, this form of individualised punitive justice and policymaking does not account for the misogynistic, patriarchal structures and hegemonic masculinity that caused Qandeel’s death in the first place.

Qandeel’s life and death set in motion necessary, urgent debates within Pakistani feminisms around respectability, class politics and sexual morality. Afiya Zia (2017) asks, ‘How do you shame a woman who is proud of her body and offers to publicise her sexuality as a national duty?’. I ask: what does calling Qandeel’s murder an ‘honour killing’ omit, erase, foreclose, offer? How is the notion of honour co-constituted through hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity? How is honour used as a metric of sexual morality and then monetised? How is honour imbricated in the legacy of racial capital and the cultural politics of Islam, which are together used to govern and regulate sex, gender and sexuality? When did Qandeel’s sexual, provocative social media presence become ungovernable and dangerous?

I argue that Qandeel’s life and brutal murder necessitate a rethinking of categories of racialised ethnicity (Baloch), sexual labour (racial capital) and social media (digitality) as vectors of value for capitalism, neoliberalism and nationalism (Bacchetta, Maira and Winan, 2018). Centring Qandeel, I define honour as a form of racialised property relations. This rereading of honour, as an economic metric of heteropatriarchy, shifts my lens of honour killing from a crime of culture to a crime of property (Grewal, 2013; Shah, 2017; Nichols, 2020). Women’s honour functions as a necrocapitalist technology (Foucault, 1990 [1976]; Mbembe, 2003; Banerjee, 2008) that constructs female and feminine bodies as the debris of heterosexual empire through racialised, gendered and sexualised property relations (Stoler, 2013). Honour is, therefore, about the economic management of sexual morality, produced through race, religion and imperialism.

This article proceeds in three sections. First, I locate Qandeel within the racialised lexicons of class, Islam, South Asia, the African diaspora, Baloch and womanhood. Second, I analyse honour specifically as property relations emerging out of colonial frames of racialisation and intimately tied to coloniality of capital, that is, racial capital (Robinson, 1983; Charusheela and Zein-Elabdin, 2004; Hong and Ferguson, 2011; Kongar, Olmsted and Shehabuddin, 2014; Melamed, 2015; Murphy, 2017). Third, I take up digital sexuality as speculative currency through a concept I develop called techno-promiscuities (Chun, 2016). I show how Qandeel’s life offers us an intimate look into how young women in the Global South are navigating techno-capitalist, heteropatriarchal regimes both online and offline. Their navigations and negotiations highlight, call out and resist the phallicisms on which honour is built: nation, religion, masculinity and empire.

colonial afterlives of race and ethnicity

Born Fouzia Azeem, Qandeel belonged to a working-class, Punjabi-Baloch family from Southern Punjab (Shah Sadar Din / Rajanpur). Qandeel was one of nine children, a divorced mother who had to give up custody of her son. She also worked as a bus-hostess, a model, a performer, a singer and an actress (Maher, 2018). She has been transnationally fetishised as Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian (Boone, 2017), despite having none of the class, citizenship and racial privileges of the Kardashians. Qandeel rose to fame as a media personality in 2013 when her dramatic audition on Pakistan Idol went viral. ² Qandeel offered to perform a striptease for the Pakistani cricket team if they won against India, and proposed marriage to Imran Khan, Pakistan’s current Prime Minister. She also posted suggestive selfies in a hotel room with Mufti Abdul Qavi—Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf’s (PTI) advisor for religious affairs and a member of Pakistan’s official committee for sighting the Eid moon. Qandeel’s public sexual propositions, sexy attire and lack of deference made her a rebel in the eyes of many, a sex symbol for some and akin to a terrorist to a few. Her Facebook page was regularly subjected to calls for a ban by members of Pakistan’s digital public in the name of Islam, public decency, female modesty and national honour (Maher, 2018).

In 2016, Qandeel’s claim of being Baloch was challenged on the grounds of morality, authenticity and shame. She was sued by Shahbaz Ali Khan Gurmani for PKR 5 crore (roughly US$300,000) and served a separate legal notice by Fayyaz Khan Leghari for her alleged misuse of the family and community name Baloch. She was asked to stop using the Baloch name (Express Tribune, 2016; Maher, 2018) by both petitioners, who stated that Qandeel’s ‘objectionable’ videos had brought shame to the Baloch name, identity, race and clan (Express Tribune, 2016; Pakistan Today, 2016). These petitioners saw her as an inauthentic Baloch precisely because she was seen as beghairat (shameless/honourless).

Balochistan is one of Pakistan’s four provinces and translates as ‘land of the Baloch’. It has been part of several separatist movements that have charged the Pakistani government with settler colonialism, resource extraction, economic exploitation and environmental degradation. Mahvish Ahmad (2013) points to the histories of betrayal and treason between Baloch communities and the Pakistani state. Baloch also contains and marks histories of migrations across provincial borders. These identity categories are complex and have been deployed in different ways by multiple communities throughout Pakistan’s history. Furthermore, it is important to understand that the term ‘ethnicity’ does not neatly map onto racialised identities in Pakistan without specificities of land and ocean, languages and intergenerational migrations. Categories of difference as separable are rooted in colonial epistemologies of biological and cultural essentialisms, or what Stuart Hall calls ‘floating signifiers’ (Stuart Hall: Race, the Floating Signifier, 1997).

While Baloch is defined as an ethnicity, a race and as a tribe, this category functions as a category of racialised difference in a continuation of colonial discourses. Baloch is not a singular ethnic identity but rather a set of transnational ethnic-linguistic identities across Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, and is part of the African diaspora in the region (Catalin-Jairazbhoy and Alpers, 2004; Ahmed, 2018). As a term for community affiliation as well as a family name, Baloch is also a charged colonial term that can encompass lineage, kinship, geography and language, and is often improperly coded as unmodern, anti-feminist, uncultured, primitive and savage (Imran, 2018). Moreover, in popular Pakistani nationalist discourses, Baloch boys and men from Balochistan specifically are marked as treasonous and disloyal, while Baloch communities settled in Sindh and Punjab are produced as more honourable and stately (Boedeker, 2013; Shafique, 2015; Boyajian, 2016). When Qandeel invokes Baloch as a surname and a brand, she is invoking a dense constellation of meanings that mix and match belonging, protection, migration, community, rebellion, honour, courage and freedom. Thus, these lawsuits gesture to the colonial entanglements of racialisation, ethnicity, migration and geography.

In reaction to this accusation of being beghairat and an inauthentic Baloch, in a 2016 BBC interview, Qandeel stated:

Nobody can say that I am not Baloch, that I am not from a Baloch family. It is Baloch who are brave and are able to take these brave steps [bahadur kadam]. I am changing the image of Baloch; I am showing that Baloch people can also be like this. Baloch have been negatively stereotyped as those who kill in the name of ghairat [pride], who do not let women go outside of the house, and this does happen in our families. I am the one and only who has received this freedom, who has received permission to be free. I have misused the freedoms my parents gave me; I agree with this. But now I am not controllable, now there is nothing to be done. (BBC Urdu, 2016, my translation)

In her claiming of Baloch as a form of belonging and honour rooted in fearlessness, Qandeel is challenging and changing what Baloch means in the first place, and who has the authority to claim it authentically. Her deployment of Baloch, as a Punjabi-Baloch woman, gestures to the tension in claims of authenticity and authority. Qandeel gives herself authority to claim her histories of authenticity boldly and in many ways names the internal tensions of Baloch as part of her self-identity. This making of selfhood is not disconnected from the realities and perceptions of Baloch communities across Pakistan. For Qandeel, Baloch means brave and fearless and is not a stagnant identity but that which can change, and is changing—and she is the one of the people who is creating and activating this change.

Qandeel states that she is ‘the one and only who has received this freedom’ to be a ‘free’ brave Baloch woman in public. She reflects that she has misused her freedom, given as permission by her parents—but it is too late now to control or contain her. Qandeel’s branding is part of the process of making herself legible and monetisable through the very terms that would render her powerless and invisible, or visible only as a victim of Baloch ghairat. While ghairat translates to pride, imbricated in the word are these multiple entendre of male sexual jealousy, prudency, being respectable and having a good reputation. Qandeel does not reject the Baloch community and identity but rather engages its complicated frames to rework its current discursive meanings and popular referents. Qandeel’s engagement with Baloch identity complicates our reading of race, ethnicity, class and gender in Pakistan.

For Qandeel, it is precisely because she is Baloch (read: fearless) that she is able to take these bahadur kadam (brave steps/decisions). This individualised boldness is very much part of her social media performance as a provocateur. I read her provocation in two ways. First, it is about challenging the condemnation of Baloch as a matter of racialised difference within the complicated politics of gendered value, calculated through ethnicity, in Pakistan. Second, it is a negotiation between both the tensions of and within a community she claims as her own, and the wider frames of ethnicised propriety of womanhood used to calculate the value and worthiness of different communities. Thus, Qandeel does not trade condemnation of her community for individualised attention and freedom within neoliberal frames of identity as transactional. She is not the insider within nor is she the native informant. Rather, she embodies the consequences of colonial and postcolonial categories of gender, sexuality and sex at the centre of the constitution of racialised ethnicity as a register of honour, womanhood, nation. Thus, by choosing the pseudonym ‘Qandeel Baloch’, she highlights and challenges the binary hegemonic construction of Baloch-ness as either honourable and loyal, or as traitor and renegade, all of which are suffused through and through with gender and sexuality.

honour as property

Feminist scholars have critiqued the imperial and orientalist essentialisms of honour as gendered spectacular violence associated with Islam, the Global South, Middle East, South Asia and parts of Africa (Abu-Odeh, 1997, 2000; Baxi, Rai and Ali, 2006; Abu-Lughod, 2011; Grewal, 2013). Thus, labelling Qandeel’s murder an honour killing is inaccurate and reductive because it distorts the systems and structures that regulate women’s sexuality and sexual autonomy. In Qandeel’s case, these systems and structures are embedded in concurrent transnational politics of Islamisation and Islamophobia, both of which are trying to control women’s bodies through regulating their desires, labour, movement, agency, reproduction, online presence and sartorial practices.

Qandeel uses the word ghairat to talk about Baloch women’s honour. Ghairat provides an important entry point into how honour as a heteropatriarchal frame is about possessing, maintaining, guarding and protecting something with value. If male sexual jealousy is a core component of honour, then managing honour is about maintaining patriarchy that is always already about managing women as sexualised and socially reproductive property. Honour is about ownership and the desire to own, which often is guised as chivalry, love, familial entitlement and care within heteronormative regimes of feeling and affect (Povinelli, 2006). The triadic relationship between honour, ownership and masculinity mobilises and rationalises violence against women. Qandeel unapologetically refused this property relation. Her refusal is not one of rejection but rather the rewriting and reworking of the dominant frames of women as sexualised property. She was still navigating dominant heteronormative metrics of value, but the difference is that she was making herself and her desires into her own profitable property. Ironically, as her class status shifted, she used her mobility and privilege to support her family, sending money for rent and household expenses back to her parents and brothers.

As a feminist scholar, I define honour as a form of racialised property relations and wealth creation. I theorise honour as a tool and measure for the calculation of the racial value of different lives and different deaths (Foucault, 1990 [1976]; Harris, 1993; Mbembe, 2003; Banerjee, 2008). Honour controls how women become valuable and devalued, and this system of accreditation and discredit relies on gendered and sexualised metrics. The assumption is that women make and manage their own worth, their family’s worth and writ large their nation’s worth. Women are in charge of their own honour and ‘own’ this process of value as long as they adhere to the hegemonic frames of femininity, family, social reproduction, marriageability and chastity (Haeri, 2002; Jamal, 2006; Bond, 2012; Khan, 2018).

Honour functions as an economic tabulation of ‘cost and benefits’ based on heteropatriarchal parameters that frame the choices made by, through, for and about female and feminine bodies. The legibility of women relies on their relations to men, and the proper fulfillment of those roles: mother, sister, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law. The roles are then regulated through specific terms and conditions of racialised sexuality: chastity, marriageability, emasculation, family and respectability, which are central to what Michelle Murphy (2017) calls the economisation of life. Honour also reflects the circumstances under which decisions are made, how women and their decisions are valued or devalued and how the rules of how to accrue value are enforced, including through violence. Value is accrued through a particular sexual politics that creates social worlds in which different bodies circulate and become valuable at the intersections of digitality, surveillance, securitisation, Islamisation and hegemonic masculinity.

The terms through which honour becomes legible in Pakistan are: zameen (land), zar (money, wealth) and zan (woman) (Haeri, 2002). Without heteropatriarchy, frames of honour have no economic value. Honour is an economic equation in which women are commodified into investable assets (hegemonic femininity) and men are trained to be smart investors (hegemonic masculinity). Theorising honour as property relations allows us to excavate how masculinity and femininity are both sexualised categories of the economy of heterosexuality. These hegemonic frames of heterosexualised gender relations are also frames of land ownership, income and wealth creation, protection and procreation. These frames are used to simultaneously shame and incentivise women and men into registers of respectable postcolonial citizenship that increase their value accordingly.

The first-ever comprehensive national study on Pakistani masculinity is helpful to note here. ³ First, one of the focus groups, composed mostly of married men and women, identified five traits as ideals of proper manhood: 1) providing and protecting family; 2) ghairat and anna (honour and pride); 3) being hard-working; 4) having power and strength; and 5) being brave (Aurat Foundation, 2016c). Thus, family is biological and is both a measure and a site of how honour is produced as property through women, as good or bad assets through their roles as wives, mothers, daughters and daughters-in-law, and men, as investors through their roles as husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and sons-in-law. Protecting the family, therefore, is about protecting honour (read: protecting property relations and making good investments). Sexual violence becomes a mechanism used by patriarchy, hegemonic masculinity and the Pakistani state against feminine subjects to reclaim honour as value of property through the discourse of protection and pride. Dishonourable women, like Qandeel, are seen as inauthentic national subjects, because they are unable to be claimed and reclaimed as valuable property for heteropatriarchal futurity as national futurity and individual wealth as national wealth.

Second, the study collapses ethnicity into geography; for example, ‘women in KPK and Balochistan are restricted to their homes and expected to cover themselves when in public. In contrast, women in Punjab have the liberty to seek employment and work outside their homes’ (ibid., p. 26). Ethnicity, therefore, becomes a category of racialised sexual difference, and is geographically bound, even though not all women in Balochistan are Balochi and not all women in Punjab are Punjabi. The gendered binary constructed here of Baloch (restricted) versus Punjabi (liberated) reproduces the Orientalist binary between East and West as a civilisational divide, layered and mapped onto identity categories and relations in Pakistan. This double bind of East and West, Baloch and Punjabi is produced and maintained through global capital as racial capital (McClintock, 1995; Roberts, 1998). Thus, the transnational naming of Qandeel’s murder as an honour killing is not arbitrary, but rather an effective colonial and postcolonial tool that erases the sexual politics of necrocapitalism, that is, honour killing.

Therefore, honour is a form of ownership and property-making. The term ‘honour killing’ is not a crime of culture but a crime of property. Dishonourable women are bad assets, and their death is how value is reclaimed. These workings are embedded in colonial and postcolonial law, state-mandated Islamic jurisprudence and gendered governance (Aurat Foundation, 2016c; Shah, 2017) and the making of proper postcolonial and Muslim womanhood and manhood. Calling Qandeel’s murder an honour killing also distracts from the structures that make sexual violence ordinary and acceptable—reported cases of violence against women from 2013 to 2014 are as follows: 809 abductions, 687 rape cases, 449 murders, 296 suicides, 162 honour killings, 131 suicide attempts, 124 rape attempts, 88 cases of torture and 35 cases of harassment.

Honour is further complicated by the politics of language embedded in histories of racialisation and transnational migration. One of the terms commonly used for honour killings in Pakistan is ‘Karo-Kari’. Karo means black/blackened/darkened man whereas Kari means black/blackened/darkened woman. The term varies across regions, provinces and languages: Karo-Kari is used in Sindh, Kala Kali in Punjab, Tor Tora in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Siyahkari in Balochistan. Karo-Kari is a homicidal act carried out against individuals who have committed zina. Zina is part of a law that criminalises sexual relations such as adultery, prostitution, rape, sodomy, homosexuality, incest and bestiality.

Karo-Kari signals the regimes of racialisation and ethnicity through which sexual deviancy is articulated and managed in postcolonial South Asia (Stoler, 1995). It marks sexual deviancy as dirty, and sexual corruption as moral corruption that threatens the collective honour of family and community. Dishonourable acts can range from virtual and telephonic intimacies, social media posts, dating, premarital sex and elopement with someone of the opposite gender from a different class, clan and/or ethno-linguistic community. Therefore, dishonourable means to be darkened and to defile the name of family, community, nation and the institutions of marriage and kinship. Dishonourable men and women are thus intolerable subjects and subjected to honour as a form of sexual control. These are, of course, matters of racialisation through the deployment of ethnic differences. This racialised ethnic difference plays out through multi-scalar intimacies. Marking karo-kari as a sinful act imbues this violence with the affective force of religion as a category of necropolitical power. Honour killing is thus a form of restoring collective religious and national pride and is only possible through death and the cleansing of dirty bodies that are marked as sinners and criminals.

Learning from and thinking beside Black feminist scholars on how regimes of racialisation and sexuality produce value (Wynter, 1994; Hartman, 1997; Sharpe, 2016), I think through how honour as a form of property relations operates through ethnicity and sexuality as technologies of valuation through death in contemporary South Asia. To be clear, I am not equating blackened brown bodies to Black enslaved bodies. The histories, frames and modes of value extraction are different here. Rather, I want to think through how globalised anti-Blackness is embedded in honourable brownness as a matter of global capital. The metaphor of darkness in colonial modernity and postcolonial statehood is embedded within global capital and is based in anti-Blackness. In the context of Pakistan, dishonour is named through this metaphor of blackening as a process of valuation and functions precisely as a measure of value imbricated within global capital as racial capital. Here, the brown woman’s body has value through the transfer of value through her death to her family, community and nation. When a brown woman’s body becomes darkened through dishonour, her body is recuperated for use and value through her literal death. Thus, racial capital uses different gendered and sexualised bodies through multi-scalar regimes of value in life and death. Honour names a set of property relations, including transfer, located within these regimes where honour becomes central to the economisation of each body.

This is how certain brown bodies can own other bodies as property, and how different brown bodies are valued or devalued. This racialised reputational hazard reiterates the racist and colonialist formulations that calculate and evaluate brown women’s bodies as simultaneous sites of sexual boldness and eroticised surplus life and labour. Pakistani women who function outside the social, legal and economic codes of heterosexual respectability and honour are thus part of global systems of raciality and sexual violence. Raciality functions with and through the categories of ethnicity, sex, gender and sexuality. Once Qandeel was marked as dishonourable, her value depreciated within the metrics that govern proper womanhood. She was damaged goods, a bad asset that could only be recovered in value through death. Qandeel’s valuation as a bad/immoral woman is intimately connected with the politics of ethnic difference in Pakistan: she is a bad/immoral Punjabi-Baloch woman where her sexual immorality is a matter of Punjabi-Baloch as gendered difference.

Honour captures the various racial processes at play in making a woman’s body a property for which she is responsible. Honour becomes a site of self-control and self-governance. Honour becomes a metric of valuation that determines who gets to live and how they live, and who dies, who we let die and how much their lives and deaths are worth. Women labelled dishonourable and sexually deviant have value. Their dishonour and deviancy have value, but it is through their death that social life is produced. The point here is that they are only valuable in death, and their death is a reclamation of property as a restoration of honour. Their dead bodies are valuable for preserving the value of hegemonic masculinity and femininity, and thus the institutions of heterosexual family and nation. When a woman becomes a bad asset (which Qandeel became), her value is only possible by labelling her as darkened and condemning her to death. As a necropolitical tool, dishonour then is akin to an unprofitable asset. Thus, the darkened brown woman is a bad asset. Since she is no longer a viable investment in life, death is the only way to cut the losses caused by her dishonourable acts.

Honour is the moral and material underbelly of racial capital. These conditions signal as to why certain women’s bodies are sites of good capital and good investments and others’ as bad assets and bad investments. Honour requires both good women and bad women for the creation and accrual of value. This frame of good versus bad woman and honourable versus dishonourable woman differs as it travels transnationally across racial and religious regimes. Ultimately, it is sexuality that signifies the power relations that produces honour as an economic tool for the valuation of life.

techno-promiscuities: speculative currency and digital sexuality

According to the 2016 Google search metrics for Pakistan, Qandeel was the most searched person online while ‘cricket score’ was the most popular search term. Like cricket, Qandeel was a national obsession. Like cricket, Pakistanis have perfected the British schemes of respectability, authenticity and racial capital. While cricket is evaluated through a predetermined scoreboard, Qandeel’s valuation as entertainment was based on the number of hits, posts, clicks and likes on social media. As a selfie queen, digital revolution and one-woman sexual revolution, Qandeel was disturbing cultural, religious and national norms and the gendered rules of digital mediation of sex (Chun, 2016; Talat, 2016; Maher, 2018).

Wendy Chun (2016, p. 141) asks ‘What does it mean to condemn certain users as “whores” and attention seekers in a medium, a network, that is by definition promiscuous?’. I argue that by making sexy workable and becoming a national sex symbol without ever physically stripping or participating in hardcore digital pornography, Qandeel deployed what I am calling techno-promiscuities. I define this as the speculative currency that Qandeel accumulated and deployed to sell digitised sexiness and sexual fantasy on social media.

I read Qandeel’s digital labour as feminist, sexual, social and affective labour, which was the only viable way for her to activate and accumulate capital as someone without middle-class credentials and media contacts. As a working-class woman who was often labelled as low class or simply cheap, Qandeel cleverly used social media to script, screen and sell sex. Working-class and racialised bodies have long been sites of both erotic allure and economic value (McClintock, 1995; Stoler, 1995). Qandeel economised this erotic fascination through a very carefully crafted feminist labour on social media. She wholesaled a fantastical and fictional character that was fearless, and Pakistani audiences fetishistically consumed her in her entirety.

A month before her murder, a provocative music video featuring Qandeel was released. The music video, Ban by Aryan Khan, ⁴ is a funny, satirical, awkward, low-budget music video where Qandeel does thumkas to the lyrics ‘Tere thumkay tey lag jana ban’ (your hip-heavy dance moves are going to be banned). Thumkas are dance steps that involve moving the hips and pelvis (that is, sashaying the hips and pelvic thrusts simulating sex). This particular dance step—the thumka—is seen as both erotic and fun as well as indecent and trashy, further layered by ideas of working-classness and sexual availability. The head of Beyond Studios, Jibran Khan, stated that only Qandeel’s thumkas were going to go viral and therefore be subject to calls for a ban—a statement verified by the fact that Qandeel’s Facebook page was regularly subjected to calls for a ban. Indeed this was why she was asked to be in Khan’s music video in the first place. At the time the music video was released, Qandeel was still literally and figuratively dancing that fine line between sexy and entertaining and ‘cheap’ and ‘attention-seeking whore’.

Thinking with feminist scholars such as Jillian Hernandez (2014) and Quindera McClain (2018) opens space to think about gendered disrespectability in the postcolonial context as a matter of class, race and ethnicity. Both Hernandez’s and McClain’s work focuses on women and feminisms labelled as uncouth, crass and cheap: those who are disrespected and devalued in the context of US popular cultures. Qandeel’s feminism indeed was invested in these labels of nasty, dirty, uncouth, crass and cheap. Indeed, this is where Qandeel pushed at the contours of the otherwise widely circulating respectable feminism in Pakistan and elsewhere—feminism that has not contended with women who are seen as dishonourable, slutty, fast, loose and disobedient. Journalist Sanam Maher states:

We didn’t have the “perfect victim” in a woman like her—she was trashy, fame-hungry, a drama queen, a woman who had left her husband and abandoned her child so she could become “the national slut of Pakistan.” (Padte and Maher, 2019)

After her murder, there was a struggle to think about Qandeel as a blameless victim precisely because gendered victimhood relies on the binary between good (with honour) and bad (without honour) women (ibid.). Good women are those who can be mourned without qualifiers because they are legible to the mandates of respectable womanhood. Chun (2016, p. 145) argues that within the digital world, slut-shaming signifies ‘the logic of the example lodged within it. This exemplary logic involves condemning and/or sympathizing with the slut/victim and also spawns endless debates over personal responsibility’. She shouldn’t have behaved like that, but she didn’t deserve to die was a popular reaction in Pakistani public conversations after Qandeel’s murder.

Zainab Alam (2019) calls Qandeel’s digital work ‘do-it-yourself activism’. Qandeel exercised her digital agency as a form of activism that was as much about upward economic mobility as it was about protesting the prevailing norms of gender, sexuality, patriarchy and religion. This digital agency was nakedly feminist, sexual, relatable and raunchy, thus one that Pakistani audiences were quick to question, mock and judge even as they agreed that Qandeel was unravelling the sham of male honour and proper womanhood. It is worth then asking: who do our feminisms and activisms include, both in life and death, and on whose terms? Qandeel claimed that she was an honourable Baloch woman; it was through her fearlessness that she created and activated her sexy/sexualised transnational brand. This brand moved from sexy as entertainment to being sexually powerful. This very movement of producing the femme/feminine/feminist embodiment and subject as powerful—her very body as a brand—was what was being prohibited, mocked, banned and eventually subjected to death.

Qandeel’s Facebook post a few days prior to her murder speaks to a rebranding of herself within and through the discourse of feminism while challenging the politics of respectability that underpin this discourse:

I believe I am a modern day feminist. I believe in equality. I need not to choose what type of women should be. I don’t think there is any need to label ourselves just for sake of society. I am just a women with free thoughts free mindset and I LOVE THE WAY I AM. (Qandeel Baloch quoted in Jeltsen, 2016)

This post gestures to why Qandeel is central to debates about what is and is not feminism in the Global South and South Asia. Her post marks Qandeel’s arrival to her own brand of feminism, her learning of what kind of brand she wants to be and what is branded as feminist in Pakistan (Guirgis, 2016). Qandeel’s sex-positive and self-loving was located in insidious discourses of modernity, equality, freedom and individuality. She challenged the terms of legibility of respectable womanhood required in Pakistan. I argue that the misspelling of the word ‘woman’ as ‘women’ in her post poses an inadvertent challenge to the singularity of visions of feminism and womanhood in Pakistan. The misspelling gestures to the plural, the promiscuous and the plentiful towards what constitutes intersectional working-class Global South, South Asian and South Afro-Asian feminisms.

Qandeel paid with her life to imagine and embody a different feminist agency. Thus, while her life demonstrates what women can do, her death signifies the price women have to pay for pursuing life on their own terms. This is further solidified by social media commentary about her. For instance, a social media comment by a Pakistani man states that, ‘it is because of women like you that males get tempted and rape women’, and a Pakistani British woman commented on a post of Qandeel dancing that, ‘someone really needs to shoot her. So many Muslims die. I wish someone decides to blast you … you are a shame to Muslims and Islam’ (Mehmood, 2016). Comments such as these situate why it is important to contextualise Qandeel’s murder in the global context of sexual violence both as a private affair and public spectacle, in Pakistan and its diasporas. Not valued as a mother, working woman, daughter or wife, Qandeel was labelled as a slut and whore (of the nation) who needed to be controlled, silenced and discredited. In this way, honour is the arithmetic of value that is transformed and translated into digital frames of personal responsibility as public respectability. Qandeel was afforded conditional sympathy because she could not be tabulated as a perfect victim of sexual violence.

Social media is an important tool for economic mobility, yet this often requires the self to be transformed into a brand, including how sex, desire and sexual fantasy are sold on social media, underpinned by sexual harassment and violence. Qandeel’s participation in attention economies allowed her to sell the fantasy of sex through a particular currency mediated by social media. She used hashtags to garner more attention for her photographs and videos, including: #unique, #kiss, #loudandproud, #boobs, #hotpicture, #shameless, #lesbian, #bigbooty and #assup. In June 2016, one month before Qandeel’s murder, she met with Mufti Qavi and posted selfies of them. She accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour in the hotel room. She started receiving death threats for publicly humiliating and challenging the hypocrisy of the religious cleric for which she later apologised or perhaps was made to apologise. When asked about her murder, Qavi states that: ‘In the future, before you humiliate the clergy, you should remind yourself of this woman’s fate’ (Maher, 2019).

As long as Qandeel’s speculative currency remained in the realm of commercial consumability (mainstream television series, morning and evening talk shows, fashion modelling gigs, comedy, parody), she was a tolerable temptress, attention whore and a young lost soul. Her consumability relied on public mockery: she was mocked and consumed as ‘tacky’ and ‘cheapster’, a badly behaved woman with bad English. She was seen as bad user as stupid user (Chun, 2016, pp. 145–146) but she was not yet produced as bad user as dangerous user. Once she seized the latter currency (i.e. the means of her production) to expose and shame state-endorsed clergy and curators of the contemporary Pakistani state, Qandeel became a threat to the sexual and religious mores that hold hegemony over our region.

Qandeel was condemned to death through biopolitical and necrocapitalist technology when she mocked the wrong kind of man in a manner that was unforgivable—she produced illicit video/photos of herself in a hotel room with the Pakistani Muslim clergyman Mufti Qavi. She was no longer containable as an attention whore or cheapster. In that moment, Qandeel was a working-class woman who had challenged the honour and manhood of Mufti Qavi by mocking their interactions as public and sexual spectacle, damaging his reputation and position as a respectable and religious leader of the country. By mocking him, she mocked his reputation, which is how he accrues value and is valued and respected as a man and leader. The only way to reclaim this value—to reclaim his masculine reputation as the national reputation—was through the murder of Qandeel.

conclusion

On No Country for Bold Women (2016), Pakistani feminists state: ‘women can be killed for economic gain, for ego or for any number of reasons, and all of it is justified because, in the final calculation, the female body count does not seem to matter’. This statement buttresses my argument that sexual violence is ultimately about a calculation of value predicated on how we think about personhood and property. Female and feminine bodies do count in this calculation, but in some cases their death is more valuable than their life. Qandeel’s public performance requires that we look closely at honour as a matter of collective reputation, economics and management of heterosexuality, undergirded by the rule of sexual violence.

Qandeel’s life and death necessitate a rethinking of the entanglements of coloniality, economic value, racialised ethnicity and how sexuality and sexual violence are at the centre of colonial legacies and postcolonial nation-making. Postcolonial frames of managing life and death are based on inheritances of the economisation of life in the colonies, for which race and sexuality are key technologies. Qandeel challenged the terms through which women become valuable assets by changing the metrics of value. She changed the game and was a game changer for feminist organising. She was commodified as a bad woman, seen as a silly and stupid social media user, and enjoyed as a public spectacle and national fetish. She became ungovernable when she exposed the failure of hegemonic masculinity and religious authority. If we must use the word ‘honour’ for the death of Qandeel, then I argue that she was murdered in honour of hegemonic masculinity, hegemonic femininity and hegemonic nationhood. Men’s dishonour can be repaired and recuperated often while women’s dishonour requires death. If honour is how female and feminine bodies become property and men are the managers of that property, then Qandeel was condemned to death when she became unmanageable as an investment gone wrong, investment gone wild. Qandeel Baloch exposes how sexual digital economies are imbricated with biopower and necropower as she seduced us precisely because her seductions worked to expose and mock men’s honour, hegemonic masculinity and neatly defined ethno-racial categories.