Valuefacturing Life: Capital Encounters and Trans/Feminist Becomings in Pakistan and Beyond
[Thesis]
Shroff, Sara
Ling, L. H. M.
The New School
2019
129 p.
Ph.D.
The New School
2019
My work is situated in conversation with critical policy studies, postcolonial feminist economics, and transnational feminist, queer and trans studies. In my scholarship, I take up recent configurations of citizenship in contemporary Pakistan as a way to put policy studies in conversation with studies of sexuality, empire, postcoloniality, and decoloniality. My work intervenes in current debates about racial capital, sexuality, gender, and citizenship in and from the global south. I look closely at the postcolonial condition as a gendered, sexual, political, and economic assemblage through which value is produced and circulated in complicated transnational circuits. My work looks at what policy means in former colonies, and what such studies may tell us about citizenship, statehood, nationalism, neoliberalism and, in one specific paper, the very category of the human. I am interested, therefore, in what happens to this colonial invention of the citizen in the context of Pakistan, and how these frames have remained central to postcolonial notions of good governance and global positionalities. I ask: How are government logics entangled with colonial, and modern logics of economic value? How is Pakistan constructing the "good" woman and "good" trans citizens, and in turn, "good" neoliberal government? How are these logics playing out in Pakistani posh malls, designer stores, philanthropy circles and policy corridors? Who do these discursive productions ultimately serve and liberate or who do they subjugate and persecute? I take up three Pakistani figures in today's policy, philanthropic, and cultural terrain: the modestly modern working woman; the Anglicized heterosexy feminist, and the rights-bearing transgender citizen. These three figures mark key issues of women's work, gender and racial capital, and international LGBT (lesbian, gay bisexual and trans) politics. While each of these issues have been written about individually and within the field of postcolonial, feminist, queer and trans studies, I am interested in tying these figures together vis-à-vis what I call valuefacturing.