Kabul Carnival. Julie Billaud
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mobilization of broader social imaginaries pertaining to the potentially threatening nature of women’s bodies. I push this idea to its limits by examining how the public visibility of women’s suicide, through self-immolation or poisoning, acts as a transgressive symbol of femininity excluded, rejected from existing fields of discourse, thus forcing an opening in representation. The nature of power relations in Afghanistan today is such that women cannot speak in many political contexts, which is precisely why women come to recognize that they must, as Veena Das puts it, “learn to communicate by non-verbal gestures, intonations of speech, and reading meta-messages in ordinary language” (1988, 198).
The study of Afghan women’s poetry and the cultural imaginaries that constitute their world helps us to better understand how an individual woman’s ability to access public life is dependent on her capacity to mobilize socially appropriate cultural expressions. I show how public women play with the polysemic nature of hegemonic political/religious repertoires (notions of jihad and martyrdom, for example) in order to assert their presence in male-dominated arenas. These covert reinterpretations, in spite of their inherent ambivalence, bring nuances to and marginally challenge traditional gender discourses. In the same way, women’s emotional performances, even under their most dramatic forms like suicide attempts, carry with them communicative potential in the same way as the grotesque and the exuberant in carnivalesque performances. These highly dramatic gestures that follow gendered forms of emotional expression strengthen realities of identity while bringing some legal validity to women’s demands. By creatively engaging with these well-known cultural repertoires, women do not only confirm their allegiance to the gender order but they also demonstrate its intrinsic fragility. These “polyphonic discursive formations within the tradition itself” (Raheja and Gold 1994, 25) do not function in my view as mere “rituals of rebellion” (Gluckman 1963), ensuring the continuity of the political and moral order of society. Their repetition, while reinforcing the “reality” of gender difference (Butler 1990), also allows for the shifting of meaning according to contexts and situations.
Fictional State Building
“Democratic transition” in Afghanistan has to be studied from the perspective of women because women represent a central catalyst of disputes and controversies. Indeed, as in other colonial encounters, women have become central subjects of public debates and political attention over the past ten years. The vitality with which the visibility of women in public life is discussed in contemporary Afghanistan by the international community, Afghan politicians and power holders, as well as ordinary people, underscores the centrality of women in symbolically shaping the future of the country. An analysis of reactions to and effects of their presence in public can help us unpack the political reconfiguration of public life in the “post-Taliban” period. Indeed, polemics that have emerged around women’s roles signal the broader moral anxieties around culture that have emerged as a result of the occupation. In a society torn by violence and war, women’s bodies have become the field through which statehood enacts its power (Aretxaga 1997; Das 1996).
With other academics who have attempted to theorize the state as a fantasy (Navaro-Yashin 2002), as a fetish (Taussig 1992a), as an idea (Mitchell 1991), or as a fiction (Aretxaga 2003), I want to underline the elusive, porous, and mobile boundaries of the state in a context where the “state” is considered as “failed.” In the context at stake a myriad of actors such as NGOs, UN agencies, the World Bank, private companies, and local militias and narco-traffickers assume a large part of the traditional Weberian functions of the state to the extent that the state mostly materializes itself through the use of violence, symbolic or real. In order to understand what “state building” may mean when the state is no more in charge or able to regulate many areas of social life, one needs to rethink the state beyond traditional categories of “structures” and “apparatus” (Navaro-Yashin 2002).
The reconstruction process has mostly focused on rebuilding state infrastructures: ministries, hospitals, schools, and courts, most of which have remained dysfunctional—and sometimes, even empty—for lack of security, personnel, and resources to pay civil servants’ salaries. Once the stage for the performance of statehood has been set, the state has largely remained a ghostly figure, a powerful fiction fueling popular anxieties and discourses of corruption, secrecy, and arbitrary violence. The “virtual reality” (Aretxaga 2003) of the state, its phantomatic presence, is nevertheless enacted in the relation of simultaneous attraction and repulsion that holds together its sovereign power. The state, therefore, is perhaps better captured in its margins (Das and Poole 2004) than in its supposedly transparent and rational bureaucratic forms. Veena Das and Deborah Poole argue that “the forms of illegibility, partial belonging, and disorder that seem to inhabit the margins of the state constitute its necessary condition as a theoretical and political object” (2004, 4).
But there is a more general point to be made. The uncertainty that surrounds the state is not specific to the Afghan context. Indeed, everywhere the state, as any institution endowed with the power to produce “the real in the world” (Boltanski 2008), is a semantic reality, a “being without a body” that can only speak through spokespersons. Ambivalence toward the state is inherent to social life since spokespersons who are supposed to translate the will of the state may in fact impose their own judgment. This tension between the need to have institutions in order to preserve a sense of stability and the impossibility to fully rely on them because of their fictional nature is what Luc Boltanski calls a “hermeneutical contradiction” (Boltanski 2008, 28).
In the case of Afghanistan, this fundamental state of suspicion is heightened by the fact that state representatives are less easily identifiable. They are to be found within a myriad of more or less formal organizations, with diverse and sometimes even contradictory political agendas, what Jane Cowan (2007) has identified as a “spectrum of sovereignties” in the context of the “supervised state.” Meanwhile, as much as the state is feared, nationalist discourses feed social imaginaries with expectations toward the state that often contradict the actual experience of disempowerment, violence, and marginalization (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). It is precisely in this tension that I want to think of the subjective and affective reality of the state as it unfolds in the everyday events of public life through desires, fantasies, rumors, and moral panics.
Following Yael Navaro-Yashin’s work on the psychic life of the state (2002), this book highlights the dialectic relationship between various social and political actors (Afghan civil servants and politicians, international forces, and citizens) that produces and refashions the political in the context of state-building efforts conducted under international supervision. My definition of the political is therefore informed by Michel Foucault’s definition of power as pervasive, relational, and productive and as a force that permeates bodies, shaping affects and subjectivities. Because political representation in contemporary Afghanistan remains highly contentious, an approach of the political that remains focused on formal institutions and political discourses is limited. A broader definition of the political is necessary to understand the psychic dimensions of state power and public life (Butler 1997b; Kafka 2012), especially in contexts where state institutions are emptied of their meaning. Because, as Navaro-Yashin (2002, 3) argues, “power is everywhere,” the political should not be “sited” solely in rationalized institutions but should rather be traced under its most “fleeting and intangible” forms. Metaphors of “no man’s land” (Navaro-Yashin 2003) and “ruins” (Navaro-Yashin 2009) powerfully illuminate the modern condition of confusion and estrangement embedded within transnational conceptions of the state, especially in contexts where, like in Afghanistan, international narratives of “liberation” and “justice” produce the actual experience of entrapment and immobility (Sanford 2003; Englund 2006; Mattei and Nader 2008; Castillejo-Cuéllar 2005).
The dominant narrative of the reconstruction is one of a “return to order” (“normalization”) that clashes with the actual state of emergency that continues to affect the everyday life of men and especially women, who have to bear the burden of a double occupation: one of international military troops and another of the state, enacted through military performances of masculinity attempting to assert themselves through the control of their bodies. Discourses of “freedom” and “liberation” reiterated by international actors have had the unintended effect of reinforcing a sense of urgency in maintaining