Coming of (r)age in Pakistan: The event and everyday life

Abstract

Women's rage is well documented and debated in feminist theory, the mainstream media and social movements in the Global North. This article asks: what does rage look like in the fragmented political landscapes of the Global South? What is the affective threshold of women's rage in these contexts? Building on the literature on feminist rage, this article offers ‘raging’ as a framework that encompasses a range of women's everyday, affective practices of producing knowledge of themselves and making life liveable in patriarchal, illiberal and fragmented landscapes. Utilizing 12 months of ethnographic research among women's rights activists in urban Pakistan, I explore women's practices of raging that are not always visible or documented yet that allow them to create alternative possibilities for themselves. Focusing on Pakistani women's everyday struggles, this discussion emphasizes raging as a practice through which urban women cultivate knowledge of themselves – a knowledge which is woven into the very fabric of their lives. While women's agency has been explored extensively in the context of Islamic piety within recent literature of the Muslim world, this article explores women's agentive practices beyond the realm of religious subjecthood. By focusing on raging as a capacious category, this article expands the boundaries of what counts as feminist rage and who is able to participate in it. It also emphasizes raging as a practice that is ongoing and unstable as women constantly negotiate their everyday circumstances and the hierarchies imposed upon them.