Transgression: Afghan Refugee Women as gelumjum

Abstract

This paper argues that as part of a discursive strategy to securitize Afghan refugees in Pakistan, their womenfolk were labeled as gelumjum (a euphemism for prostitutes). Problematizing the othering of women refugees as transgressors, we discuss the structures and material conditions that forced Afghan women into prostitution as a livelihood strategy in the absence of societal cushion. It also discusses gelumjum as a problematized identity, a transgressor of the borders of the State, bodily borders, and borders of morality. As a refugee, gelumjum is an anomaly to the global political order defined by sovereignty, borders, and citizenship. They are also considered transgressors of the moral order, the law of home and marriage, and the customs of traditional society. Lastly, as transgressors of the bodily borders, gelumjum is also constructed as a pathological danger to public health. The study posits how this discursive strategy became a technology of control/power that created the norm/prohibition via the transgressive body, a normalized masculine public space. It demarcated the inside/outside boundaries of acceptable gendered behavior. This study is first of its nature as there is no prior research/scholarly endeavor in this domain. Gelumjum remained an overlooked phenomenon in the works on Afghan refugees, which reflects the differential representation on the basis of gender and deviance from the accepted norms. Hence, this study contributes to the scarce literature on Afghan women, particularly Afghan sex workers in host communities.

Introduction

The Afghan diaspora in Pakistan constitutes the second-largest refugee population in the world. As a result of the Soviet intervention in 1979, more than 3 million Afghan refugees entered Pakistan. Over the years, in order to problematize and hence control these refugees (Malik, 2021), Pakistan’s policy and discourses on the Afghan diaspora kept changing from generous hospitality to a discourse of “othering” which involved manifold relations, modes, and technologies, and open strategies. These exclusionary statist discourses constructed refugees as a “matter out of place” (Douglas, 2001), a threat to the social, political and economic structures and domestic security of Pakistan (Borthakur, 2017; Cheema, 2014; Ghufran, 2004; A. Z. Hilali, 2002; Jan, 2021; Malik, 2021; Malik & Jan, 2021) and as an impurity polluting the pure self (Alimia, 2013). The Afghan refugees have also been blamed for numerous social ills. For example, A. Z. Hilali (2002), in a broad sweep, blames all the ills in Pakistan, such as the “Kalashnikov culture,” drug (ab)use, sectarian violence, a decline in the tourism industry, ethnic unrest in the Balochistan province, and the rise in corruption, etc. on Afghan refugees.

Similarly, A. Z. Hilali (2002, A. Hilali 2005) refers to a popular term, gelumjum,* [explained in the following pages] used for Afghan refugee women, accusing them of being involved in a “psychological warfare” and having a corrupting influence on Pakistani society, particularly the youth.

Since the beginning, the discourse of war in Afghanistan has been abounding with the symbolism of women: victims, docile subjects of power, and passive recipients of aid. In media, Afghan women are depicted as always needing protection, representation, and a voice (Cloud, 2004; Hatef & Luqiu, 2021; Khalid, 2011; Mackie, 2012). The all-enveloping burqa that Afghan women generally wear suggests their marginality, docility, and subjugation by conservative religious and cultural structures. Though this representation has some traces of truth, it does not portray women’s complex, varied, and conflicting experiences and survival strategies. During the Afghan war, women played multiple active and conflicting yet invisible roles. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) became the political voice for the representation of women and for promoting their rights during the war. Kinsella (2019) has highlighted the mobilization of Afghan women in the U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan and the use of the female body as a necessary and desired resource for winning an asymmetrical war. The veil, or burqa, in the discourses on Afghanistan, became a “multilayered signifier,” symbolizing tension between closure and concealment as well as revealing the secrets of winning the war. Kinsella (2019) notes that as part of the US counter-insurgency strategy, Afghan women were persuaded to share information about and access to hidden spaces of the so-called mujahideen. Afghan women are involved in the economy, excluding insurgency, raising children, and managing reproduction, what Foucault (2008) calls a “biopolitical role.” Afghan women had actively resisted the jihadi as well as communist ideologies. As noted by Ghufran (1999) and Dupree (1989) in their separate studies, Afghan women have also been involved in collecting and distributing information to mujahideen and urban resistance groups, motivating the male members for jihad, taking part in the underground resistance, and even actively fighting against the Soviet forces, delivering health and education services.

Being part of a patriarchal society, the war left Afghan refugee women more vulnerable in the absence of male heads of the family. However, these women adopted complex and culturally controversial survival strategies to support their families in the face of religious-cultural and structural constraints and almost no choice of profession. Educated women would beg in the streets of Peshawar while others were forced into prostitution and labeled as gelumjum. Some even preferred being gelumjum to begging on the roads. As one of them explains,

When you are poor and desperate, you don’t think about stigma, and if you do at all, you choose to live with that shame. Shame is preferable to hunger to disease (which we face in the refugee situation), or you wouldn’t have beggars in the streets. In a way, I understand begging now. I used to think how people could open a palm to seek alms. It appeared unthinkable. At least, in my case, it is not begging. [Bakhtawar from Helmand]

Gelumjum has remained an overlooked phenomenon in the works on Afghan refugees, reflecting the differential representation based on gender and deviation from accepted norms. Hence, this study, the first of its kind as there is no prior research or scholarly endeavor in this domain, contributes to the scarce literature on Afghan women, particularly Afghan sex workers in host communities.

Objectives of the Study

The objective of this article is to examine the issue of gelumjum from the perspective of interpretivist phenomenology in order to understand how Afghan refugee women, particularly gelumjum, navigate various boundaries to ensure their survival and provide for their families. Additionally, it seeks to emphasize the contributions of Afghan women in their country’s liberation from foreign occupation, all while existing within a patriarchal framework society.

Gelumjum

The term gelumjum has an uncanny etymology and usage. A Persian word meaning “carpet rolling,” the word was used for the notorious warlord Rashid Dostum’s Uzbek forces that would attack towns and villages like hordes and pillage everything that they could lay their hands on in the wake of Soviet withdrawal. Said Hyder Akbar, an Afghan–American, in his autobiography Come Back To Afghanistan, writes about the Dostam forces: “[They] were Gilam-jam because they looted everything in sight, literally [rolling] the carpet” (2005, p. 53). The Afghans, especially women, who left Kabul during the internecine war and took refuge in Pakistan were derisively called gelumjum, which was soon synonymously used for Afghan women sex workers. As a discursive strategy, its polysemy was reduced by the fixation of meanings, and it was during the Afghan war that the word was made sensual; its original connotations from the vocabulary of war are almost forgotten in Pakistan.

Soon, the term gelumjum was popularized and problematized by researchers and academics and strategically associated with sinister moves of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan to “corrupt” Pakistani society. For example, A. Z. Hilali (2002) and A. Hilali (2005) implies imagery of Mongolian hordes when he claims that hundreds of prostitutes (mainly from Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Russia) were pushed into Peshawar and then fanned out across Pakistan. It was perceived that these women targeted high government officials from civil and military bureaucracy. A. Hilali (2005) imagines a situation of contagion and trades in the language of gelumjum as a “virus.” Besides a pathological threat to society, the construction of their identity in medical terminology suggests a demand for their elimination to cleanse the infested body politic of Pakistan. This construction of Afghan women as gelumjum, we argue, is premised upon a preconceived hypersexuality of Afghan women, which is an extension of colonial imageries and discourses.

It is important to mention here that destitute Afghan women worked as prostitutes in Pakistan in their refugee situation and that we are not here to give a pro- or anti-prostitution argument. Our aim is to investigate the problematization of Afghan women as sex workers as a discursive strategy that constructed them as transgressors, deviant, and a threat to the State’s sovereignty and socio-cultural and religious norms. Gelumjum as “transgressor” became a threat to the territorial borders in the nation-state system (being the refugee outsiders) and bodily borders (defined by the socio-cultural and religious structures) and hence necessitates/justifies the conditions for their elimination (through a demand of repatriation) to save the body politic of Pakistan from their corrupting influence.

Materials and Method

The methodological basis of this research is associated with the interpretivist, phenomenological approach, which made it possible for us to understand the participants’ (sex workers in this case) reality through their experience of that reality, that is, living the life of a gelumjum. This theoretical and methodological approach allowed us to identify and interpret the participants’“transgression” of existing norms and traditions dictated by the patriarchal milieu. Following the interpretive approach, we relied on questioning and observation in order to discover and generate a rich and deep understanding of the experience of Afghan women sex workers.

We conducted in-person interviews with Afghan women sex workers in the Peshawar city of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which is home to most Afghan refugees and borders Afghanistan, and one in Canada. The participants were selected through snowball sampling. After identifying the first participant, personal and professional relationships and contacts were used to approach her while taking care that their social and cultural norms were not violated. The first participant identified and contacted the other interviewees; two of them were based in the same city, while one was in Canada. The one in Canada was in close contact with friends in Pakistan, and we got in touch with her through her Peshawar-based friend through WhatsApp, an internet-based messaging app.

Since this is a sensitive topic to discuss (especially for sex workers due to the social, cultural, and religious stigmas associated with their profession and their vulnerability to harassment as refugees), not many of them were willing to be interviewed. Given that they have experienced similar conditions and come from almost the same socio-economic background, we can assume that those who spoke to us constitute a representative sample of their population. Their comparable cultural and socio-economic conditions have pushed them into the same profession. The participants’ verbal agreement was taken after reading to them a consent form. The participants were guided, informed, and briefed about voluntary participation and their right to withdraw from the interview at any time. Secondly, they were briefed about the process of the interview, that it would be tape-recorded (audio), transcribed in English, and referenced anonymously by using pseudonyms to avoid identification or any unintended consequences. They were unwilling to be audiotaped but agreed that one of us would take notes while another conducted an interview.

The interviews were conducted in the Pashto language (the native language of one researcher) at their homes and lasted for around 1 hr. Pashto was not the native language of the participants, but since they have lived in Peshawar most of their adult lives, they spoke (with an accent) and understood Pashto well enough to understand our questions and respond in Pashto. After conducting each interview, my co-author and I separately transcribed the text and then compared the two versions. When discrepancies arose on certain points, we reconciled them in the consolidated transcript in English. In cases of confusion, we contacted participants using the cell phone numbers they provided to us for clarification. Since this is a phenomenological study, we used an interpretivist, theory-driven technique, which helped us detach from the participants and make an objective analysis.

Before deconstructing the discourse of gelumjum, we discuss what the name gelumjum hides rather than reveals: the multiple and varied factors contributing to the gendered violence and indiscrimination that pushed Afghan women into prostitution. These factors provide a systematic analysis of the mechanisms of production of the “deviant.” They also unveil the effects of power relations in this discourse.

Afghan Refugee Women and the Socio-Political Conditions in the Host Country

In this section, we discuss the conditions in the host country that exposed Afghan women to sex work. Women make up a majority of the Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Despite the official statistical claims that women were less than 30% of the refugee population in the early years of the war, they continued to constitute the majority, as men would frequently cross borders to join the so-called jihad. According to the UNHCR, women constituted 46% of the refugee population in 2020.

For Afghan women, migration to Pakistan was a double trauma: their normal family and community support disintegrated, and their roles and status changed abruptly. Women from rural areas, where they would regularly move around their neighborhood to perform daily chores, found themselves confined to refugee camps where people from different ethnicities were crowded together. Consequently, to preserve the socio-cultural values of honor attached to women, their mobility was severely restricted; many were even denied visits to doctors’ clinics—the only respectable outing for refugee women. Already rendered helpless, inept, and ignorant non-entities through stereotyping (Dupree, 1989), socio-cultural taboos attached to women’s work made them invisible from public life. Their activities were mainly confined to private spaces.

Tasks performed by women, such as household chores, carpet weaving, sewing, and agricultural activities, were ignored, not registered, and remained unpaid and unsung. Men considered women’s work against their honor and male ego, as they were paternalized by being sole supporters of their families (Dupree, 1989). The restrictions on women’s mobility and literacy provided Afghan men a psychological assurance that their women would not interact with other men in person or in writing while they were away (Khattak, 2002). The conservatives saw education and public participation of women as causing sexual anarchy and the destruction of the Afghan culture (Dupree, 1989; Khattak, 2002). Thus, the socio-cultural norms in Afghan society caused their women folk to suffer social suffocation.

Most of the refugee population lived/lives in the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Besides being the bordering provinces of Afghanistan, these areas have a cultural connection with Afghanistan. In the tribal areas, the formal marginalization of women started with the enactment of special colonial laws, the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), under the British Raj in the 19th century. These notorious regulations excluded women from the economic and political spheres and legalized tribal violence against them. For example, under Article 30 of FCR, adultery committed by a woman is punishable by fine and imprisonment for 5 years or more upon her husband’s complaint (Naseer, 2018).

Scholars have equated these geographical spaces of tribal borderlands on the Af-Pak border as necro spaces. The “post-colonial” experience of women in these necro spaces was an extension of these colonial attempts to write the State as a “masculine truth.” As a transgressor, gelumjum violates the norms and the expected gendered behavior according to the law of the land and tribe and thus becomes a homo sacer (Agamben, 1998) who, being outside the law, is punishable/killable. In the discourse of gelumjum, the notion of honor in the tribal code is invoked to legalize the eradication of women through interpellating the subject of power.

Women also faced the brutalities of war and the rise of fundamentalist Islam in refugee camps. They were subjected to strict behavioral codes imposed by the regular circulation of fatwas (religious edicts) and ultra-conservative interpretations of cultural norms and traditions (Khattak, 2002). The rise of conservative ideologies and stereotypes regarding women in refugee camps must also be seen in the socio-political context of Pakistan during the 1970s and 1980s. During this period, the self–proclaimed mandate of the military regime of Zia ul Haq (1978–1988) was to Islamize the country. By reinforcing male-dominant societal norms, Zia’s Islamization project ensured diminished citizenship for women and minorities (S. Khan, 2009). Selling sex and extra-marital relations was criminalized under the Hudood Ordinance.

Under Zia’s rule, the lack of individual and social morals and the presence of social woes were attributed to un-Islamic ways of life (S. Khan, 2009). Women’s liberty and basic freedoms were curtailed under his despotic rule. In this context, when political Islam and tribal customs expect a docile, submissive woman as an ideal subject of patriarchal power structures, those violating the customs and norms are considered deviant and have to face dire consequences. The restrictions imposed on women by the military regime and the successor governments affected both Pakistani and Afghan women. Afghan women, being refugees and refugee women, were doubly affected. They were denied access to education, the right to mobility, and equality of rights in marriage and divorce matters.

Discussing the case of Nigerian migrant women in Italy, Serughetti (2018) makes a point that the receiving (host) States are responsible for producing migrant women’s vulnerability. In the case of Afghan women, Khattak (2003) identifies structural problems: differential access to the wage market, limitation on mobility, denied employment rights, and negative perceptions as intersecting vectors of discrimination against refugee women. Amidst the sexual violence and deepening poverty in refugee camps, as reported by the victims themselves (also see A. Khan, 2002), they also witnessed politicized aid programs that were detrimental to women’s interests. The donor agencies channeled aid in the camps through male community leaders in order to support the politics of jihad and to remain culturally sensitive (A. Khan, 2002).

Before the war, most Afghan women were “homemakers,” had no formal education, and knew only to work on farms. In Pakistan, the refugee camps were set up on barren land, and these women had no means to eke out even a meager living for themselves and their families. Before the mid-1990s, women were denied access to income opportunities by the government of Pakistan and aid agencies. The excuse for this was the so-called Afghan cultural code and “honor” attached to women. To add to their misery was the cessation of international aid in 1992. Khattak (2003) has noted that before 1992, prostitution was non-existent among Afghan women.

Due to the differential economic opportunities in the refugee situation, some Afghan women were forced to become beggars and others prostitutes in order to support their families. The collusion among Afghan patriarchs, the Pakistani State, and foreign agencies in denying women access to paid work reinforced the dominant patriarchal values. It reified women’s exclusion from the public space, a policy later adopted by the Taliban. Paradoxically, the policies of the Taliban and their human rights violations were criticized by international actors. Still, being partners in the U.S.-led “war on terror” in Afghanistan, international organizations kept silent on Pakistan’s role in gendered discrimination against Afghan women.

Findings of the Study

Loss of Societal Safety Cushions

Deprived of traditional family and community support and in the absence of male family members, Afghan women started selling their bodies as a survival strategy or what Scott (1985) calls—albeit in another context—a weapon of the weak, a mode of resistance in the face of a necro state of affairs which denies them their right to existence. As Gul Zareen, who migrated from Kabul in 1992, told us:

That was not something we chose but we were compelled to consider this given the condition our family was in. It was a terrible time for us and everywhere we went, people were demanding payment in Kaldaray—Pakistani rupee. All that the refugees wanted was to earn in local currency because, after the inflation in Afghanistan, the exchange rate of Pakistani money was high; it was much more stable than the Afghani [Afghanistan’s currency]. With no skills and no local education or command of local languages, there were no jobs for us. We were poor, with many mouths to feed and only my father to work. My aunt had to consider all options to help sustain the family. She met a refugee woman in the community who knew a Pakistani shopkeeper in the Board Bazaar. The man had offered her money for offering sex to locals. After some time, the Pakistani shopkeeper started pestering my aunt to enlist a young girl. When she refused, the shopkeeper threatened to talk about my aunt to the local police and, at the same time, started holding back my aunt’s hard-earned wages. My aunt was left with no option but to take me in. When she was taking me out for the first time, my aunt was crying badly and hugging me every few steps. This is how I was thrown into the abyss of shame and dishonor. Now, there was no going back—I became a gelumjum.

Another participant, Rukhsaney, told her story thus:

We migrated from Helmand in 2014. Our province was the hotbed of insurgency … There was nothing much for men to have by way of employment. We had to send our two sons to live in Zabul with their uncle who was working there on a road project. We left in a hurry because the war suddenly intensified. First, my husband worked in coal fields in Balochistan. Then we traveled to Peshawar, where I had relatives in Katcha Garhi camp. My husband had to go back to work, so he left me in Katcha Garhi camp to return to Balochistan. He was always coughing, and I was worried for him, but I had to let him go because we needed his wages to get by. Through my aunt, I took up the job of a housemaid in Hayatabad [an upscale community]. I did not want to be a burden to the family, and I desperately wanted my children to join us in Pakistan. Another maid in the house where I worked introduced me to a man who ran a mobile shop and who offered me a phone in installments, which I needed to talk to my husband and children. But, in exchange for having sex with him. It was then it started …. There are many girls and women, local and from Afghanistan. Rarely does anyone do it for fun; they do it to support their families and themselves.

Captive to Death-Worlds

Without access to sustenance and food for themselves and their children orphaned by the war, these women and their children were exposed to death. The death-worlds, created by the ideological conflict, consumed the bodies of their men; their own bodies were rendered expendable for being the “transgressors” of bodily borders. As Gul Makai narrates,

It is not an easy life… we carry multiple identities to move around in society. My children and I tread precariously to keep our heads high and our bodies nourished. But the fear keeps chasing us: the fear of being identified, labeled, and done to death. We are walking dead!

However, by using their agency, they resisted forcing them and their children to the death-world. Yet, their agency was not different from the agency of the sati in India, who “chooses” but chooses the funeral pyres as an agency to kill herself (Spivak, 1988). Paradoxically, these women cannot exercise their agency outside the dominant structures. Turning their bodies into commodities, these women finally become victims of oppressive patriarchal structures. Gul Zareen’s case, as narrated above, is a testimony as she fell prey to the blackmailing of the shopkeeper in Peshawar who exploited her refugee situation and her gender status.

Another refugee from the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood in Kabul who migrated to Pakistan in 1983 and settled with her family in Karachi Company, Islamabad, told:

… But there are hazards – once, a man made a video of my cousin to blackmail us, and it got passed around on the internet and social media. For years, we lived in fear that someone in the family, here or in Afghanistan, would see it. But it is a big wide world, and at the time, there was no TikTok or WhatsApp, or maybe it was just luck that no one saw the video.

Survival Strategy

Gelumjum’s decision to sell their bodies as a survival strategy is also deeply embedded in their subconscious, which they have acquired as part of implicit learning from their cultural conduct where women’s bodies are commodified. While poverty is one of the primary causes of child marriages in Afghanistan, Afghans also sell their daughters to settle disputes. During a famine-like situation, daughters are given into (rather sold) marriage at an early age to deliver the girls from hunger and to save the rest of the family from starvation (Bearak, 2006). According to Naghma Jan from Logar province of Afghanistan,

My parents married off my elder sister at the early age of 12 as the blood money; my cousin had a relationship with a girl in our village, and they were caught talking to each other. A local jirga [council of elders] decreed that the boy and the boy’s family should take the girl as their bride and give a girl of their own to the aggrieved family. This is how my 12-year-old sister was forced into a wedlock.

In Afghanistan and bordering areas of Pakistan, the tribal custom of walwar (bride price) allows men to purchase wives. Similarly, in the tribal custom of badd or baddi, women are used as commodities to settle disputes in the Baloch tribal areas of Pakistan. Our respondent from Wazir Akbar Khan told us:

I know of a family here who sold their daughter to a pimp. The father of the girl was disabled, and there was no one to support the family. There were prostitution rackets, and because there was a demand for Afghan girls because they were pretty and exotic by local standards, these rackets always welcomed them into their fold.

These structural and psychological factors explain the limited options left to Afghan refugee women in Pakistan.

Discussion

In the discourse of gelumjum, which articulates Afghan refugee women as a threat to the State and socio-cultural regimes, the sexuality of refugee women is problematized in regard to the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable gendered behavior. Their “deviant” sexual behavior constitutes them as transgressors and, hence, a danger/threat to society. This discourse is located at the intersection of local, regional, and international and contains elements from the domains of ethics, religion, and science. Its aim is to fix the meaning of Afghan refugees in such a way as to make ground for justifying the control of the “deviant” subjects of power.

Repression is an a priori condition for inter-human exchange (Bown, 2012), and the modern subject cannot act outside the internally referential system of modernity (Seppä, 2004). In his work “The Use of Pleasure,”Foucault (1984) argues that the normalizing society we live in is the “historical outcome of technologies of power that are centered on life.” While societies have always been overregulated, there is a tendency among people to transgress socially acceptable and orthodox behavior. Falk (1994), who critically assesses the debate around consumption culture, body, and formation of the self, explains that the more articulate the restrictions on the self, the more sophisticated forms of transgression will be. For example, when marginalized groups fight for their rights, they also transgress.

For Bataille (1987), transgression is an inherent part of our civilization. He argues that humans live by the social rules that define and constitute their humanity, such as the value of utility and the taboo of incest. To him, the taboos surrounding sex and death are “the refusal laid down by the individual to cooperate with nature regarded as a squandering of living energy and an orgy of annihilation” (Bataille, 1987, p. 61). Bataille considers transgression as a movement that always exceeds the bounds. It is a violent breaking of a taboo, often a sexual taboo, and leads to anguish (Noys, 2000, p. 10). Transgression has dominance over taboo because it makes the taboo possible. In its movement toward “infinite excess” (Bataille, 1957, p. 40), it solidifies the taboo and exposes the fragility of the taboo. Transgression “opens the door to what lies beyond the limits usually observed, but it maintains these limits just the same” (Bataille, 1987, p. 67). For him, transgression threatens and suspends the social order without breaking it. In transgression, we do not experience annihilation, but we experience a threat of annihilation. Transgression and prohibitions are co-dependent. [T]he very needs for systems of regulation and control is … predicated on the prior existence of something which needs “controlling” (Williams, 1998, p. 438).

The inevitability of transgression is partly derived from the belief that we cannot fully contain ourselves and that our bodies are inherently “leaky” (Falk, 1994), an “effusion of energies, fluids, and libidinal desires which are naturally resistant or ‘recalcitrant’ to containment” (Crawford, 1999, p. 357). The inherently leaky and excessive bodies always threaten to overspill, whether through blood, sweat, coughing, menstruation, or incontinence, the culturally constituted limits that seek to “contain” them (Williams, 1998).

For Williams, the body is an effusion of energies, fluids, and libidinal desires that are naturally resistant or “recalcitrant” to containment. Excessive bodies are always threatening to “overspill” the culturally constituted boundaries that currently seek to “contain/constrain” them.

[T]hat the recalcitrant, transgressive nature of bodies is primordial and that discipline and control, qualifications apart, are principally social and cultural. Bodies, in short, from their leaky fluids to their overflowing desires and voracious appetites, are, first and foremost, transgressive, demonstrating their continual resilience to rational control (Williams, 1998, p. 438).

Transgression is the inevitable outcome of our partial socialization, the flow of nature bursting the floodgates that hold it in check. Indeed, it is from these “unruly desires” that the need for corporeal “discipline” arises’ (Williams, 1998, p. 438). Despite its “unauthorized crossings of boundaries or refusals to acquiesce to norms and mandates” (Crawford, 1999, p. 356), transgression is inevitable for and is constitutive of the social order; it constitutes the prohibitions (of the order). In the following, we discuss how the gelumjum, as a transgressor of borders of State, society, and morality, threatens to bring disorder.

The use of the derogatory term gelumjum problematizes refugee women as transgressors of borders of the State, bodily borders, and borders of morality. Borders of States have become a “natural order of things” (Malkki, 1995, p. 5). They are not just edges of the State but are essential references to identities. Refugees are considered an exception and anomaly to the global political order defined by sovereignty, borders, and citizenship. In their very existence, gelumjum as refugees “threaten the national order of things and suggests the meltdown of the sovereign inside/outside geography which is central to the notion of the nation-state” (Diken & Laustsen, 2006). The territorial sovereignty of the modern State is premised upon the process of exclusion (Agamben, 1998; Malkki, 1995). Agamben’s decentering of landnahme, or land-based territorial sovereignty, suggests that territoriality is premised upon the delimitation of the meaning of human beings or the ontology of life, the life inside and outside of sovereign protection (Walker, 1993). However, as Anderson (1983) puts it, nations are imagined; the “inside” and “outside” are not fixed, clearly demarcated spaces. The inclusion relies upon an exclusion for cognition of its limits. The boundaries are thus blurred and vibrant spaces of inter-contamination (Rajaram & Grundy-Warr, 2004). Afghan women, being refugees, are outsiders inside through a paradoxical act of inclusion. They are outside the law of the sovereign, threaten the sovereign’s control over life in a particular territory, and, hence, are required to be cast outside of the norm. As they transgress and are excluded from the norm, they are placed in a state of exception (Agamben, 1998).

As biological reproducers, women are considered symbols of national and ethnic differences. At times of war, when rape and the sexuality of women are used as a weapon, their mobility and sexuality are strictly monitored to ensure the boundaries of nations/ethnicities are maintained (Enloe, 1990). A polluted woman is not desirable in her community and is either reclaimed by the mantle of religion or killed for honor. The encounter of the State with these “polluted” women is characterized as an interaction between the detritus and the interiorized humanity (Rajaram & Grundy-Warr, 2004). There are elements of horror and shame in this interaction between host communities and refugee sex workers. The horror comes through the abject characteristic of the profession and age-old anxieties about body fluids, dirt, and the unrestrained contact between the bodies. The abject, as argued by Kristeva (1982), is indistinct and without form. It represents a threat from the transgressor.

During the Afghan war, the refugee influx into Pakistan was negatively framed as a threat to the local communities in socio-economic and cultural domains. In these negative frames, women were constructed as threats to the communal body of the host State. These women (gelumjum) are considered transgressors of the moral order, the law of home and marriage, and the custom of traditional society, which expects them to stay home and observe pardah. By working outside, the gelumjum challenges the power structures defining socio-cultural norms and transgresses what has been assigned to their gendered bodies.

In Afghanistan and bordering areas of Pakistan, the status of women is defined by patriarchal and misogynist ethnocultural values meshed with varied interpretations of religious beliefs (Jalal & Silva, 2016). In the tribal belt on both sides of the border, the Pashtun cultural code, or Pakhtunwali, Ghosh (2003) explains, takes precedence over Islamic laws in deciding gender roles. This tribal custom reinforces the popular myth that men are biologically superior to women, a notion that they thought was natural, universal, and irreversible (Naseer, 2018). Women are denied their right to property, choice of a profession, and person to marry with. Under this code, women are considered receptacles of their family’s honor, which is attached to their bodies. Thus, rape or any other form of sexual violence is considered an assault on the victim as well as the whole family or tribe. Ironically, despite being a victim of violence, the victim is ostracized by her family and tribe, amenable to being killed with impunity. Her murder is justified in the name of ghairat/Pakhto, which is considered a legal act as per riwaj or tribal custom (Naseer, 2018).

Most of the refugee population lived/lives in the tribal areas where the formal marginalization of women started with the enactment of Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) under the British Raj. These regulations excluded women from the economic and political spheres and legalized tribal violence against them. For example, under Article 30 of FCR, adultery committed by a woman is punishable by fine and imprisonment for 5 years or more upon complaint of the husband (Naseer, 2018). The “post-colonial” experience of women in these necro spaces was an extension of these colonial attempts to write the State as a “masculine truth.” As a transgressor, gelumjum violates the norms and the expected gendered behavior and thus becomes a homo sacer who, being outside the law, is punishable/killable. In the discourse of gelumjum, the notion of honor in the tribal code is invoked to legalize the eradication of women through an act of naming the subject of power.

In the past, there have been efforts in Afghanistan to ameliorate the status of women and to grant them rights. As a result of these progressive efforts in the late 19th century and earlier 20th century, women were visible in the public sphere. However, these attempts to reform by progressive and liberal elements were challenged by the religious and cultural orthodox, which led to regime change and the killing of reformers (For details, see Jalal & Silva, 2016; Malik & Jan, 2021). The resurgence of conservative groups against these reforms partly became the driving factor for a mass exodus during the late 1970s and for Afghan women seeking refuge in Pakistan. It was this deeply embedded patriarchal structure that stopped women from going back home even after the war ended. The end of the Soviet-Afghan war witnessed a reversal of modernization policies and reforms to advance women’s rights by integrating them into the public sphere. Now, women’s rights are stigmatized as cultural imperialism. During the so-called mujahedeen government and under the Taliban rule, there was strict control over the women’s bodies. The Taliban, following a policy of a “gender apartheid,” took it as their responsibility to monitor and regulate women’s behavior to preserve the traditional gender norms. Women were prohibited from wearing makeup and high heels, attending school or visiting a male doctor, being photographed or filmed, and appearing on balconies or rooftops. They were punished for any breach of the Taliban’s edicts. Public appearance without a male relative was strictly disallowed. Adultery was punished with a public lashing or even stoning to death. In a society with such strict control over women’s bodies and conduct, gelumjum is a problematic figure who is blamed for defiance of the Shariah code and chaos in the ethnocultural order.

In this discourse, alongside the transgression and affront to the expected gender roles and socio-religious morality, gelumjum is also constructed as a pathological danger to public health. By pathologizing them, the discourse makes their presence a public health concern and a paradigm case for intervention by the bio-political State to ensure public well-being. Medicine thus had a hand in problematizing the transgressive figure of sex workers. Examining the relations of the new form of power that has taken charge of life and what he calls biopower, Foucault (1980) mentions the problematization of health and sickness through multiplicities of social instances. This problematization of health produced knowledge about the morbid phenomenon, a collective source of danger and a “bio-other” and led to the State’s intervention even into the very intimate crevices of the (social) body (Malik & Ali, 2020). In Pakistan, the public fear and anxiety of gelumjum as a morally corrupt and dangerous body was fueled by the medical discourse, which constructed them as a source of danger to public health, a pariah who may infect Pakistani men. Given the nexus of power/knowledge, different studies have noticed a high occurrence of viral infections such as HIV, HCBA, HBV, and others in Afghan refugees in Pakistan as compared to the local population. Risk factors associated with these diseases are transmigration, drug abuse, and unsafe sexual behavior (Khanani et al., 2010).

This medicalization of sexuality results in a system of classifications: “us” versus “them” identities are formed based on sexual behavior. In this process of othering, self-identities are also formed in reaction to the stigmatization of deviant groups. Sex workers are constructed not only as fallen women but as something less than women. By considering them as a “lost sheep of the flock,” there remains a chance for their reformation. The medical discourse rejects this chance of reformation and constructs sex workers as an antipode of ideal femininity, an immoral, unhealthy, and impure body (Baker, 2012). Thus, gelumjum has become a “state of being,” an identity category, not a career or profession.

Conclusion

In this paper, we examine the factors behind the production of gelumjum and their identity as transgressors. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when refugees became irrelevant to the donor agencies and the flow of aid ceased (Turton & Marsden, 2002), Afghan women, widowed by the war, were left with no male members to support their families. Afghan cultural norms expect women to stay indoors, which makes them dependent on male family members. In this scenario, many Afghan refugee women found themselves to have differential access to economic opportunities as compared to their male counterparts. Yet, some of them adopted or were forced into culturally controversial survival strategies to feed themselves and to support their families, being gelumjum, a derogatory title popularly used for Afghan sex workers in Pakistan. This figure of gelumjum became problematic as a transgressor of norms of the national order of things, norms attached to the female body in the conservative patriarchal structures and the cultural norms. In Pakistan, this discursive strategy became a technology of control/power that created the norm/prohibition via the transgressive body, a normalized masculine public space. It demarcated the inside/outside boundaries of acceptable gendered behavior. It aimed at the construction of the “purified” spaces of the State of Pakistan, achieved as a result of the Islamization project, to act as geographies of social segregation, alienating the impure, “matter out of place” bodies that do not fit in this purified land. This discourse calls for isolating Afghan women as “other” in the geographically located area of tolerance, the refugee camps.

The naming also produces an excuse for extensive surveillance by the State and punitive actions against these women. A grand narrative of Afghan women’s sexual impropriety is constructed. Police/State are able to recognize the prostitute by the common sight. Besides aiming at the control of the Afghan refugee body, this discourse results in “prescriptive ethics of the body.” Marital relations are normalized, which reinforces patriarchy in which women turn to men for protection and sustenance. Not only were Afghan women subject to control, but women in Pakistan were also being simultaneously controlled and disciplined. The deviant female body as a transgressor becomes the object of male control and is subject to intense social scrutiny and gaze.

Besides producing a horror of the morally corrupt and pathologically dangerous refugee women, these women are constituted as active agents in their own desubjectivation. As a result of this, the border-crossing acts a sense of moral inferiority, and shame is instilled in these women whose prototypical selves are the subjects of tribal discourse and power structures. As Diken and Laustsen (2006) argue, shame is a social emotion, and the shaming eyes reject or exclude the person who is doing the shameful act. They explain this by the example of acts of transgression of moral and bodily boundaries by the inmates of Abu Gharib and Guantanamo prisons. The torture there causes horror and instills shame among the victims through acts like forced contact with dirty objects such as human feces, urinating in pants, and victims touching each other’s genitals, etc. The structural factors that forced Afghan refugee women into prostitution produced shame as well as stigmatization, as morally inferior and dirty who need to be effaced for the sake of the purity of race. It is the irony of the history that the racist politics of Hitler though remained unpopular for transforming the blood myth into the greatest blood bath (Rabinow, 1984); still, the device of sexuality is the most significant weapon used by the biopolitical State to ward off refugees from contaminating their “pure lands.”

*One of the authors is a Pashtun living in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and hence has an insider’s view of the Afghan refugee situation in Pakistan. The other author has spent 3 years working in the Afghan refugee communities in Peshawar and nearby cities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Afghan refugees from all ethnicities reported the usage of this derogatory term by the Pakistanis.