Kabul Carnival. Julie Billaud
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the same time, I had recruited a translator/Dari teacher, Lutfia, who supported me in conducting interviews, translations, and in building contacts among women MPs, students, and activists. Lutfia was a twenty-two-year-old university student originally from Kapisa Province where her family still lived. She boarded at the National Women’s Dormitory on Kabul University campus. Thanks to her intercession with the dormitory’s director, I was offered a room among female students in return for English and French lessons. I lived there for four months, sharing girls’ daily activities, improving my Dari while gaining insight into what made up their everyday lives: worries, dreams, gossip, Indian soap operas, poetry, music, makeup, and, of course, studies. My relationship to Lutfia gradually moved toward friendship. I did not only benefit from her linguistic skills but also from her patience and kindness in explaining to me the complex rules of Afghan etiquette.
I also volunteered for a few months at the Afghan Women’s Network (AWN), a local network of women’s NGOs, assisting them with proposals, reports, and fund-raising. I taught English to the staff and in return for my services I was introduced to the women’s organizations working under the umbrella of AWN. Thanks to this new connection, I gained access to other women activists in Kabul and Herat where AWN had recently opened an office. I also followed for a few weeks two renowned women’s rights advocates who ran programs in Nangahar and Hazarajat.
Fieldwork in an environment where public figures in general and public women in particular were the targets of political assassinations necessitated a high degree of flexibility. My navigation in different circles was dependent upon the willingness of the women I met to open up and on the quality of the relationship I managed to develop with them. There was no guarantee that the doors that were opened one day would still be opened the next. I shadowed a woman activist in her activities for a few days here, conducted participant observation in a women’s organization for another few days there, eagerly jumping on each opportunity that presented itself. Planning was a useless exercise. I ended up following a metaphor, an idea, instead of the specific informants I had initially thought of. It is through my navigation among various circles of women enjoying different degrees of public visibility that I could start sensing the erratic nature of public life at a time of rapid and intense political change.
In spite of all my efforts to get some kind of insight into the spaces I was interested in, it is undeniable that my particular position within that space profoundly affected the nature of the work I could do. My informants had some valid reasons for showing suspicion toward my ultimate intentions: there were very few independent researchers in Kabul; I was not representing any particular institution and I was an unaccompanied French woman. As a result, it was not rare for me to be taken for either a spy or a journalist. The only solution I found to make my presence less awkward was to offer concrete services whenever possible, to follow women’s projects and support them the best I could.
In order to preserve the anonymity of my informants, I have sometimes changed their names and used pseudonyms. I have anonymized some of the women I interviewed at the National Assembly when they explicitly asked me to do so. When it is the case, I only mention whether they come from rural or urban areas since it is a significant distinction that involves a radically different position. I have coded their interviews and removed biographical elements that may make them too easily identifiable. I kept the original names of the women activists and politicians who were willing to gain some public visibility through my writing. All the women who have shared with me some intimate stories that I have used to support and inform my argument have been given pseudonyms.
Researching Women’s Political Expression
This book is structured around two main parts. The first part focuses on the state and the various manifestations of its power over women’s bodies. I locate the current project of “state building” in a continuum of modernization attempts conducted in the early 1930s, in the 1960s–1970s, and during the Soviet occupation of Afghani stan. In the course of a history marked by forced modernization and Islamic fundamentalism, I show how the state has remained a phantom figure that haunts Afghans’ collective imagination in powerful ways. In the second part, I show how Afghan women routinely respond, through embodiment and performance, to the various sources of pressure pertaining to their visibility in public life.
The first chapter is a historical overview of the fashioning of the Afghan nation and of its articulation along gender lines. I show how the modern history of Afghanistan is marked by a constant focus on women’s bodies as either sites upon which the state strove to apply the stamp of modernization or, on the contrary, the stamp of an imagined tradition. I place the contemporary moment in the continuity of these numerous attempts at remaking women.
Chapter 2 uses the example of a “gender empowerment” training program carried out by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs as part of its broader “gender mainstreaming” mandate to illustrate how ideas associated with modern state building and citizenship are being infused into Afghan society. I show how “reconstruction” does not simply consist in the formation of a bureaucratic apparatus based on Western models of liberal democracies but primarily involves cultural and symbolic production.
Chapter 3 focuses on the justice sector as a major site of attention of current state-building efforts. Through interviews and observations conducted in Family Response Units (FRUs), Kabul Family Court, women’s shelters, and defense attorneys associations, I unpack some of the contradictions, ambivalences, and ironies of justice sector support programs conducted under a fuzzy “rule of law” agenda. The inaccessibility and impotency of formal justice institutions has led women to take justice into their own hands and turn to community-based forms of mediation. Using observations conducted during Koran classes taught by an Afghan women’s rights activist, I underline the centrality of Islam and kinship in legitimizing claims for rights, especially in the highly sensitive arena of family law.
Chapter 4 is an ethnographic account of young women’s responses to moral panics that have emerged in the national and local press as a result of the appearance of some commodities and cultural products such as cosmetics, fashion, and Indian soap operas on the local market. These panics flagged the threat of moral dilution and cultural pollution and urged policy makers to react in order to reestablish social order. While unpacking the multiple meanings of these moral anxieties, I explore how female students boarding at the National Women’s Dormitory in Kabul struggled to position themselves in a new life environment away from their families. I argue that these young women’s bodily practices revealed a constant tension between the necessary fulfilment of different roles as dutiful and modest daughters and as young urban educated women aspiring to present themselves as “modern” and Muslim. The fact that Islam remained a central element of their self-justification should not be understood as a reflection of the conservative nature of Afghan society but rather as a form of resistance to foreign domination.
Chapter 5 aims to characterize new meanings attached to women’s veiling in the new Islamic republic. While the chadari (burka) has become the ultimate symbol of women’s oppression for Western audiences, it is necessary to take a closer look at its multiple and often contradictory uses and to contextualize the reasons for its maintenance, despite the downfall of the Taliban regime. The ethnographic data I collected among women’s rights activists and women MPs demonstrate that women who are attempting to access public spaces have developed creative strategies of dissimulation to get public recognition. They have become visible under the veil and have sometimes been able to challenge gender hierarchies behind the appearance of compliance and conformity. These findings challenge liberal ideas according to which women’s visibility in public spaces is a necessary guarantee for their emancipation and their agency.
Chapter 6 investigates women’s emotional performances and discourses of suffering, jihad, and martyrdom. I show how these ambiguous communicative tools serve to make commentaries on social relations and gender hierarchies without totally disrupting the honor code and the ideal of female