Politics/Dynamics of Gender in Afghanistan: A Study of Jenny Nordberg’s The Underground Girls of Kabul – The Hidden Lives of Afghan Girls Disguised as Boys (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Gender, Culture and Society, ICGCS 2021, 30-31 August 2021, Padang, Indonesia, 2022
Bacha Posh is a cultural phenomenon where a young girl is dressed and raised as a boy until she reaches a marriageable age or puberty by a family with no sons for the sake of a better future. This term considers being one of the cultural practices in Afghanistan, which is famously known as a Patriarchal country. The Pearl That Broke Its Shell is written by Nadia Hashimi and presents two female characters that follow this tradition to survive and get a proper life in the family. This research depicts how the practice of Bacha Posh is claimed to save a daughter in a family from the perspective of Patriarchy and its impact on the psychological side. The article then presents a brief overview of Patriarchy's restraint in Afghanistan, which later evoked this practice (Bacha Posh) to be well-known in society. This article focuses more on gender and identity, which relate to the psychological issue within the main female characters. The psychology of gender and women has been investiga...
Models and Realities of Afghan Womanhood: A Retrospective and Prospects
UNESCO, 2006
In order to conceptualise what human rights can signify for women in the dominantly rural society that is Afghanistan, it is necessary to understand the models and stereotypes available to them in recent history and how these have been reworked in every day life. Theirs is not an isolated situation occurring in a vacuum; it has to be understood in relation to the developments in the Indian sub-continent from the British Raj onwards as well as the spread of present-day Islamism. In the context of what may well be Asia's most tribal and patriarchal society, the resistance to Western modernization is unique in a country which could have been, alongside Turkey, at the avantgarde of progressive Muslim nations as early as in the 1920s. All efforts by reformist kings from the early 20th century onwards were doomed and when the communist government attempted to introduce an egalitarian society and implement women's rights after the April revolution of 1978, acute civil strife ensued. This generated full-scale war when their Soviet allies came to the rescue and the US, through their assistance to fundamentalist groups, turned this into the last conflagration of the Cold War.
At Home or in the Grave Afghan Women and the Reproduction of Patriarchy
Rubina Saigol, 'At Home or in the Grave: Afghan Women and the Reproduction of Patriarchy'. Working Paper Series # 70. Sustainable Development Policy Institute. , 2002
This paper focuses on the relationship of Afghan, mainly Pashtoon, women with the protracted war in Afghanistan. The paper is divided into four sections, namely 1) Absence of the State, Conflict and Identity Formation, 2) The Reproduction of Patriarchy, 3) Cultural Sensitivity, Aid Programs and the Reproduction of Patriarchy, and 4) Afghan Women’s Resistance to Violence and Patriarchy. Section 1 examines the effects of statelessness upon women in terms of the way in which the absence of a legitimate central authority, including judicial and administrative systems, affects the lives of women and the population in general. This section contextualizes the Afghan war and explores the complex relation between conflict and the formation of identity. Section 2 examines the ways in which the prolonged conflict has intensified patriarchal practices by means of increased restrictions, veiling, domestic violence, rape and murder of women. An attempt has been made to shed some light on the way in which conflicts tend to reinforce and strengthen patriarchies. Section 3 examines the discourse produced by aid agencies and international assistance in the 1980s and 1990s, with a view toward exploring how aid and assistance practices can themselves become the means of disempowering women and reproducing male systems of power. Section 4 is based on the recognition that Afghan women have not remained silent and passive observers of the conflict, but have actively offered resistance in various forms. Some of the forms discussed include cultural forms of resistance as expressed in poetry and song, individual resistance to violence against women, and collective resistance by organizations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. An attempt is made to demonstrate that Afghan women have been active interlocutors in the ethnic and sectarian struggles, especially by being the most vociferous champions of peace, democracy and justice. Published/Presented as: ‘At Home or in the Grave: Afghan Women and the Reproduction of Patriarchy'. Working Paper Series # 70. 2002. Sustainable Development Policy Institute.
The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence, and Power in Afghanistan
The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence, and Power in Afghanistan
Nations Development Fund for Women (merged into UNWOMEN in 2011) UNODC United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime USAID United States Agency for International Development WAW Women for Afghan Women ix Note on L anguage The official languages of Afghanistan-and those most widely spoken-are Dari (a dialect of Persian) and Pashto. Both contain a number of Arabic loanwords. For words that have become common in English, such as sharia, ulema, and mullah, I have used the established form. Words less common in English appear in italics throughout the text, with a brief explanation the first time they are used. xi Acknowled gments When carrying out this research, I benefitted from the support, insight, and inspiration of numerous people. I am deeply grateful to the Research Council of Norway for financially supporting this work through the grants Violence in the Post-Conflict State (project number 190119), Governance, Justice, and Gender in Afghanistan: Between Informal and Formal Dynamics (project number 199437) and Violence against Women and Criminal Justice in Afghanistan (project number 230315). Chr. Michelsen Institute, where I have been employed throughout this research, has been a great institutional home, and I wish to thank my colleagues there for their encouragement and help. My debt and sense of gratitude to Astri Suhrke for her advice, enthusiasm, mentoring, and great company are enormous. In more than one way, this project could never have been realized without her. Arne Strand first introduced me to Kabul and gave me the confidence to carry out fieldwork in Afghanistan again and again. Karin Ask provided invaluable suggestions at important junctures of this work. Deniz Kandiyoti has been an immensely generous, inspiring, and thorough supervisor, and I cannot thank her enough for agreeing to take on this role, for her many pieces of crucial advice, and for her close reading of my drafts. In Afghanistan, numerous people shared their time, knowledge and company. Above all, I want to thank Mohammad Jawad Shahabi. His research assistance during the first part of this work and our subsequent collaboration on what is now chapter 3 of this book have been invaluable. I remain immeasurably grateful for his insights, skills, and efforts over the years. In the early summer of 2012, another case of sexual abuse reached Afghan television screens and the international press. Lal Bibi, an eighteen-year-old nomad woman from the province of Kunduz, came forward in Afghan media recounting how, on May 17, 2012, she was seized by men linked to a local armed group. She was held captive for five days and sexually assaulted as revenge for her cousin's elopement with a woman from the family of one of the kidnappers. Lal Bibi's family declared to journalists that unless justice was done, they would have no option but to kill her. However, Afghanistan's women's right activists quickly mobilized in support, and pressure mounted on the government to arrest the perpetrators. But back in Kunduz, the man accused of the rape protested that no such thing had taken place. He argued that there had been an agreement of baad-a practice in which a woman or girl is given in marriage as a form of compensation for a crime or an affront. A mullah had married Lal Bibi to him just before intercourse, and "once the marriage contract is done, any sexual intercourse is not considered rape" (A. J. Rubin 2012). In present-day Afghanistan, this version of events did not necessarily exonerate him from having committed a crime. Women's rights activists pointed out that forced marriage was also an offense, according to Afghan law and particularly the new Elimination of Violence against Women law (EVAW law), which had become a cornerstone of gender activism in the country. Moreover, his attempt to justify his actions with reference to a framework of baad implicated others. A friend of mine, who happened to be in Kunduz on fieldwork at the time, told me upon his return that the elders who had sanctioned the kidnapping (as an appropriate redress for the affront to the honor of the eloped girl's father) VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AS ANALY TICAL ENTRY POINT S This book is filled with people who sought in various ways to have their ideas about gender violence accepted by others. For some it was a matter of immediacy. trafficking in sex workers, sexual harassment, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, forced sterilization, female foeticide and infanticide, early and forced marriage, honour killings and widowhood violations" (Merry 2009: 82). And as we will see later, the Afghan EVAW law decreed in 2009 listed many of these acts as violence and added a number of other acts more particular to Afghanistan, which many Afghan women considered a violation of their rights, entitlements, or persons, such as the cursing of a woman or even the denial of an existing familial or marital relationship that would absolve obligations toward a woman. 1 In other words, the Afghan EVAW law was developed at the intersection of transnational and national registers. As the global campaign against VAW moved to the center stage of international politics, it also, perhaps unsurprisingly, became entangled in existing global power structures. With the shift from national to global advocacy came a more professionalized, bureaucratic mode of operation, standardized programs and compliance mechanisms, and the arrival of international "VAW experts. " In an influential article, Kapur (2002) scrutinizes the political effects of this global VAW discourse, noting that it rose to international prominence through the obfuscation of the power relations positioning Westerners, white women, and feminists differently from ethnic minorities and women in the Global South. It constructed women of the Global South and nonwhite women who are subjected to violence or abuse as victims of their culture and in need of (outside) protection. Kapur argues that this effectively amounts to a kind of gender and cultural essentialism that cannot accommodate the different positions that nonwhite women and women in the Global South inhabit, or take into account the historically specific forms that violence against them assume. It is difficult to think of an example of this more glaring than Afghanistan since 2001. Western claims to "liberate Afghan women" while entangled in the geopolitical interests driving the war on terror, exhibited many of the traits that Kapur warns against. Afghan women were frequently represented as victims in need of outside saving, trapped in a backward state, and suffering what the West knew to be violence and abuse-violence that occurred as part of Islam or Afghan culture. Examining the employment and effects of such "victimisation rhetoric" (Kapur 2002) is integral to the analysis in this book, but a clarification nonetheless feels necessary. Stating that the book is about "violence against women" does not mean it places itself uncritically into the VAW discourse. I do not assume the existence of a fixed or absolute set of practices that await recognition as violence against women. This would suggest an endpoint of liberation and inevitably place countries along an axis of development or civilization, enabling the kind of global VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND BROADER FIELDS OF POWER As the discussion has already hinted at, definitions of and negotiations over violence against women are not just entry points to looking at gender relations. They also illuminate other fields of power. As Hajjar points out, struggles over women's rights are also contestations over jurisdiction and authority (2004). Attempts to make gender violence a public issue could signify an important shift in the demarcation between the private domain of family and kinship on one hand and public authorities on the other. For instance, if a rape case is adjudicated in a state court rather than settled between the families involved or by a local leader or kinship group that traditionally settles disputes, this expands (or attempts to expand) the Western powers played a fundamental role in structuring Afghan statehood-to the extent that international actors explicitly tasked themselves with the wholesale building of the Afghan state. With this in mind, it is far from certain that the power exercised in a government court-for instance, if an Afghan man is prosecuted for rape or wife beating-is that of the Afghan state. As I will discuss in some detail in the chapters that follow, the ways in which the Afghan state intervened in cases of gender violence was often underwritten, funded, and even designed by global, mostly Western actors, suggesting that the sovereign power exercised in Afghan courts was partly global. At the same time, the economic and political resources flowing from the international interventions often constituted opportunities for local actors to exercise and consolidate power in ways unintended by the international "state builders. " It makes sense, then, to understand sites of international peace-building interventions as "fields of power where sovereignty is constantly contested and negotiated among global, elite and local actors" (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008: 269). In this vein, challenges to and negations of the nation-state (the sovereign) in (post-)conflict settings are best conceived not as from below or above (that is, from local or global sources), but as parallel or alternative alignments that often are transnationally woven. In order to make sense of the ways the global, the national, and what might be termed the tribal are entangled in Afghanistan, I draw upon Saskia Sassen's concept of assemblages (Sassen 2008: 67; Heathershaw 2011). She argues that thinking in terms of assemblages allows us to appreciate that the global can be "dressed in the clothes of the national" (Sassen 2011). In other words, Sassen underlines how national institutional capabilities are reassembled to serve Yet despite the many ways...
Parvana's Trilogy: A Study of Violence toward Afghanistan Women and Girls
Jurnal Studi Gender Palastren, 2017
Afghan women and girls became the portray of the victim of violence since several years ago. The news about the tragedy spread through the newspaper, printed and online, and also in the literature world. The exposure of their sufferings as the impact of war and conflict among the etnics on Taliban rezim reflected in the Parvana's Trilogy named The Breadwinner (2000), Parvana's Journey (2002), and Mud City (2003). These trilogy were written by Deborah Ellis. This research is intended to show how the women and girls became the worst victim which received violence caused by all of the triggers. This paper uses theory of violence and framing analysis to analyze those violences. The result of discussion shows that many efforts done by women and girls to overcome their difficult lives, such as pretending being boys, human trafficking, and living as refugees are the ways to survive.
مجلة البحث العلمی فی الآداب
Western media had stereotyped Afghan women as creatures who face discrimination and marginalization from men and fundamentalist societies. In Zoya's Zoya's Story (2002) and Latifa's My Forbidden Face (2001), the two female authors speak about the terrible conditions of women in so-called democratic Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban. Ethnoautobiographies of Afghan women, in general, demonstrate a new understanding of life under oppression and how they strive to maintain their autonomy in the face of repression and subjugation. The texts understudy show that Afghan women are neither submissive nor passive figures but had tried to retain their autonomy under the rule of the Taliban. This research is framed by administering an approach that combines Michel Foucault's theory of Power/ Knowledge and Stuart Hall's theory of Representation / Stereotyping and directing a critical analysis of two ethnoautobiographies of two Afghan women activists who challenge their passive stereotyped images set by Western societies to justify the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This paper argues that Afghan women attempted to maintain their autonomy and fight for their rights before the rest of the world rushed to free them. Afghan women resisted suppression in several ways, but Zoya and Latifa participated in non-violent resistance against the Taliban regime.