Access to public spaces for women is far from a settled debate. In places like the urban centers of Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, it still is a right in theory that women can have access to public spaces. But that, too, comes after degrees of negotiation with family, social circle and neighbourhood and it is meditated by class and cultural background. Of course the negotiation to access public spaces works under a set of rules and a framework defined by patriarchy. Other than patriarchy seeing women through a binary, patriarchal norms also define public spaces as a threat. A threat not only to the safety of women but behind the characterisation of public spaces as threatening, the patriarchs (or the matriarchs guarding the patriarchy) are given anxiety by women going outside – because the public spaces are populated by ‘undesirables’. Undesirable is defined according to the norms and standings of the economic, cultural and ethnic background that the family belongs to.
Patriarchy sees women through a binary: the good women who need to be protected and the bad women from whom the good women should be protected. Public spaces are not only populated by the undesirable segment of population i.e. men belonging to the ‘wrong’ economic or socio-cultural class but also by undesirable women: those who don’t abide by the expectations or the politics of respectability. A ‘good’ woman obviously is the one who not only serves the purpose of biological reproduction but also serves to reproduce culture and thus the nation. Hence, the body of a woman becomes a site to define a nation (also one can read an ethnic or cultural group) and her being becomes a signifier of culture. In this way patriarchy is closely embedded in our concept of an ethno-cultural or even a geographically defined nation. A nation imagines itself through the limitations on and the set ‘good’ behavior for women. The nations (the exterior, the public spaces) are exceedingly defined in masculine terms and the feminine (i.e. the private space) becomes the ‘honor’ and the boundaries for the nation to protect.
Associated with the anxiety about the tampering with cultural purity is the bias against the politically disposed and the marginalised communities. The need for women to strategise access to public space and the constraints put on their access to such spaces is perhaps the best manifestation of intersection of the patriarchal notion of honour and the political biases working in favor of dispossession. When women are barred access to public spaces by their ‘guardians’ on the presumption that the public spaces are populated by undesirable segments of the population, it presupposes demonisation of a section(s) of the population which are a threat to the respectability of women. Those sections may be religious minorities, ethnic minorities or lower income classes. Thus the manufacturing of respectability for women of some classes – middle- and upper-middle and such – is predicated on the presence of an undesirable political/social/cultural subject.
Patriarchy, when it monitors and restricts the movement of women, serves to outcast a large segment of the population. In big cities of India the middle-class Hindu women have to be at home lest they come into contact with the undesirables, men of untouchable class and Muslims. In Pakistan the women in cities have to be restricted to homes lest they come into contact with men from a variety of other social and cultural backgrounds. Through the constraints on free movement of women the anxieties regarding social and political stratification are reinforced. And as women are considered not only as instruments for biological reproduction but also their bodies and behavior are forced to act as carriers/identifiers of culture and class, any prospect through which that function is disrupted is discouraged – often violently, by patriarchy and political forces.
Not only is there a threat to perceived 'honour', but the possibility of the women being seen by people of the lower strata provokes a double anxiety
The barring of women from public spaces is an issue affecting the very basic quality of life. For instance in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa from where I come, other than Peshawar and a few urban pockets here and there, women have very limited access to public spaces – and that, too, not only to closely surveilled spaces but even access to those spaces is guaranteed under the condition that the women are accompanied by a boy or a man. The subspace of the available public spaces varies from going to the hospital to visiting relatives. Thus women in that society have to live indoors with their basic right to fresh air taken away. For many of the predominantly Pashtun areas it will be shocking to the sensitivities of the patriarchal structures in place there if women do excursions outside unaccompanied – let alone being seen ‘loitering’. Not only is there a threat to perceived ‘honour’, but the possibility of the women being seen by people of the lower strata provokes a double anxiety.
A jewellery bazaar - public spaces in Pakistan are widely seen as being male-dominated to the extreme
Thus the right of women to access public spaces without the need for manufacturing a need and violating the respectability code of moving in closely surveilled spaces is also a way for breaking the boundaries amongst social and economic classes. If a woman steps out of the home just for the sake of it, the anxiety of patriarchy and political structures to maintain a culture of exclusion towards unwanted ethnic/religious minorities is heightened. And so the right of women to step out of home becomes a project of breaking down the barriers of class. To challenge patriarchy is not only a gender equality issue; it also is a deeply political issue in that it enables us to reimagine ourselves. The social acceptance of women having access to public spaces disrupts the familiar trope of “men saving good women from bad society” and hence creating a new political understanding. Feminism is not an individualistic endeavour, it is a collective political project meant to emancipate us all from our own decadent thinking and conception of ourselves. In that way feminism (the right of women to access public spaces without the need to manufacture a purpose) and political emancipation of the masses (doing away with social stratification and compartmentalisation) become parallel complementary projects.
Hurmat Ali Shah is interested in the intersection of politics, society and culture
