https://www.ucpress.edu/books/sovereign-attachments/paper

Drew Kerr: I’m so excited you’ve taken this time to discuss Sovereign Attachments! It sits as one among, now, a number of urgent book-length projects you’ve produced not just about Muslimness (in South Asia), but incisively about political subjectivity, global Islam, and gender. Can you place this book for us within your range of projects — where did this project start for you and where has it led you?

Shenila Khoja-Moolji:  My work has generally been attentive to the interplay of gender and power in the lives of Muslims in Pakistan as well as in the North American diaspora. This interest has in turn led me to study discourses of education, national security, and human rights, to illuminate how these multiple discourses are constitutive of gendered and racialized subjectivities. The idea for Sovereign Attachments emerged as I was wrapping up my first book, on women’s education, which had raised questions about state power and gender that I realized I wanted to examine further.

My first book, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, responded to what I noticed as a convergence on the figure of the girl in International Development policy and practice. We can find numerous campaigns that portray girls in the Global South as threatened by poverty, disease, and terrorism—and as containing the potential to resolve these problems. These campaigns often present education as the primary social practice that can enable girls to reshape and reinvent themselves, often into productive workers. The argument is that if girls go to school, they will delay marriage, delay childbearing, enter the labor force, contribute to the national GDP, and by doing all of the above they will pull themselves and their families out of poverty. In previous work, I had written  that the burden of development and ending poverty was being shifted onto black and brown girls, without due consideration of the reality that poverty is political and is an effect—not only a cause—of historical relations.  Girls were being called on to reshape themselves into flexible labor for the neoliberal economy, but without significant accompanying critique of the capitalist and racist exploitation and extraction that had originally produced the dispossession of these girls and their families. 

Since I was then concerned about Muslim girls in South Asia, I also investigated the kind of girlhood being portrayed as desirable. I noticed that models of “successful girlhood” were often premised on white, middle-class sensibilities; girls who were prevented by structural disadvantages from enacting this form of girlhood risked incurring the label of “failed” girlhood. In the American context, girls threatened by failed girlhood are often called “at-risk”; when NGO staff see them in a Pakistani context, they identify them as “traditional/backward/oppressed” girls. Though Western NGOs and aid agencies have played a significant role in creating this figure of the oppressed or backward girl, she is not constrained to the world of international development. She travels to national security discourses and there is made to tell a particular story about Islam and Pakistani society: in this story, Muslims are presented as uniquely oppressive, out-of-time, and in turn justify imperialist interventions. I wrote extensively about these practices of racialization (rereading/coding as failure any departure from white middle-class educational norms) and the related phenomenon of casting Muslims as impure or uncivilized. But as I did this research into contemporary framings of Muslim girls’ education, I was reminded that this yearning after the figure of the educated girl is not a new phenomenon. We find similar writings about Musalman women’s education in colonial India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. British administrators, Christian missionaries, and also Muslim social reformers—albeit for different reasons—claimed that education would save, civilize, or reform native women. In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, I had thus decided to track these myriad articulations of the educated Muslim girl from the turn of the twentieth century, considering this figure as a discursive space within which multiple actors—from religious and national elites to international development organizations—advance constructions of ideal girlhood, and at the same time constructions of class relations and national and religious subjectivities.

Over the course of that earlier book project, I had become increasingly concerned with the narrow figurations of women—not only of girls, and not only in respect to education—that were circulating in Pakistani public culture. In writing Sovereign Attachments, I wanted to understand how and why—whether or not educational change happens—women’s roles in Pakistan remain so persistently circumscribed. Since the state is such a powerful institution, I decided to pay attention to the state’s role in sustaining in public culture certain ideations of gender. While previous studies on the interrelationship of gender and state had focused on the laws that affected Pakistani women’s lives, in Sovereign Attachments I was more interested in the cultural and affective modes that revealed and shaped gender hierarchies. I had noticed how the state often mobilized kinship feelings and gendered figurations to legitimize its violence and cultivate consent for its actions, and I wanted to examine this practice more closely. But I also saw gendered imagery mobilized by those who were contesting statist authority. These are some dynamics that I wanted to explore.

Drew Kerr: Sovereign Attachments deftly situates us amid the discursive battles between the state and the Taliban in Pakistan. Attending to recent decades, you consider autobiographies by heads of state, a range of images, videos, songs, didactic magazine and newspaper articles, poems, anonymous women’s letters (maybe written by women), and op-eds in English and Urdu from both the government and the Taliban to rethink sovereignty. It becomes abundantly clear in the book that these particular technologies of mediation and text-artifacts comprise a contentious mediascape of identity and nationhood. To get us into the book, can you walk us through what opens up about the political and moral worlds of sovereignty and masculinity in Pakistan, and generally, by looking at the types of materials you do? 

Shenila Khoja-Moolji: My entry into the book is the 2014 Taliban attack on an Army Public School in Peshawar, in which 132 children, and nine teachers and staff, were killed. In the weeks that followed, I noticed an uptick in media productions—music videos and magazine articles, in particular—by both the Pakistani army and the Taliban. Each blamed the other for the attack. The army released music videos labeling the Taliban as “the coward enemy,” while the Taliban mimicked the same genre, even the same melody, to mock the army for being corrupt, as each sought to influence public opinion. Importantly, both the state and the Taliban mobilized Islam, gender, and emotion as they sought public support for their respective political claims. I therefore decided that Sovereign Attachments would examine public cultural articulations like these, as each side advanced its right to rule and engage in legitimate violence—and advanced these claims specifically via mobilization of gendered images, kinship feeling and heteronormative family life.

In the book I take the reader through a set of gendered figurations that emerged from my close reading and unpack these figurations to understand the constellation of ideas and histories that produce them. Donna Haraway describes figurations as distillations of shared meanings through which we make sense of the world around us. And Imogen Tyler identifies “figurative methodology” as a useful approach “to describe the ways in which at different historical and cultural moments specific ‘social types’ become overdetermined and are publicly imagined (are figured) in excessive, distorted, and caricatured ways.^” By unpacking figurations and following their social and political work, we can discover the terms, registers, and affects through which sovereign attachments—that is, affective attachments to entities claiming state authority—develop in Pakistani public culture. In the dyadic relationship between the Pakistani state and the Taliban, we notice how scripts of gender and Muslimness (or competing notions of normative Islam) become the very means through which sovereignty is performatively iterated. For instance, when the Taliban explain their project as reinstituting khilafat, they are seeking the loyalty of a Muslim observer by harnessing affect that has accumulated over time in the idea of a Muslim dominion. 

Drew Kerr: Your proposed concept of Islamo-masculinity signals a specific (type of) battleground between the Pakistani state and the Taliban, which intersects the performativity and discourses of a few key forms. The sovereign, sovereignty, religious authenticity, intimacy and care (through terms of kinship), violence, and gender all become energized as affective anchors for reading and viewing publics. Could you say more here about how the circulation of such cultural forms serves to interpellate, recruit, and shape specific political attachments and general sense-making? What might that invite us to think about when studying publics broadly?

Shenila Khoja-Moolji: I propose that state and non-state actors intensify relationships of sovereignty in the context of Pakistan by performing normative masculinity and Muslimness. I name this melding: Islamo-masculinity. Islamo-masculinity permits performers to mobilize both the privilege of normative masculinity and that of normative Islam, while demarcating aberrant masculinities. It relies on particular figurations of femininities—daughters in danger or the mourning mother, for instance—in order to become relationally legible. It also interlinks with discourses of heteronormativity and modernity. Islamo-masculinity then does things; it mediates the relationships of sovereignty that exist between claimants and attentive publics, between the individual and the collective. It is how we, the public, become attached to power and give consent to its exercise. 

Drew Kerr: I’m repeatedly struck by the rich ways you develop the dyadic tensions across a number of cultural figurations (for example, soldier/militant, the people’s daughter/wayward sister, mourning/melancholic mother). Far from reducing the conflict of categories to static dominations of either-or, you reveal the really entrenched dialectical maneuvers and iterative negotiations at play across real actors of and imaginations of the state, Taliban, and the people (mothers!). The book structure itself also brings to life a special type of dyad through Part 1 and Part 2. Can you say more about the ways dyads came to life in your research and how the two parts of the book operate in concert with each other, contributing to the overall project?

Shenila Khoja-Moolji: I examine a range of cultural productions, including musicals, magazines, social media, art, and memoirs, to draw out recurring figurations—such as valiant soldier, perverse terrorist, dutiful daughter, and mourning mother—which show how claimants to sovereignty hope to convince their audience by mobilizing gender, Islam, and kinship. Specific figures I examine in the first part include the soldier, the terrorist, the state sovereign. I show that sovereignty is a relationship, an attachment to power that has to be cultivated, and emotions, collective memories, understandings of normative Islam, performances of piety, and masculinity all play a role in how this relationship is established.

There is, however, also an indeterminacy in sovereign attachments that leaves room for the emergence of alternate politics. I show such forms of relationships in Part II through the figures of the unruly daughter and the melancholic mother, for example, who refuse statist prescriptions. The melancholic mother, for instance, rebuffs the memorialization of her dead son through the moniker of “shahid” (martyr). The book thus shows the simultaneity of attachment/consent to power and detachment/resistive politics.

Drew Kerr: While contests of sovereignty in Pakistan sit squarely at the heart of the book, this is very much a story about cultural texts and their publics, too. Who do you envision as your book’s publics and what would you want them to do with it? Or perhaps a slightly tangential way I might ask this: how would you locate this book in relation to the cultural productions it engages? 

Shenila Khoja-Moolji: My hope is that the performances of sovereignty that I consider in the book can help us understand how inequalities—religious, gendered, ethnic—are reproduced. The lifeworlds that I have traced, however, are not a given. So ultimately, students of gender, Islam, and South Asian studies may read the book to think critically not only about how we become invested in power but also how to create different patternings and arrangements of the world.

References

Donna Haraway. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge: p. 23

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2015. “Reading Malala: (De)(Re)Territorialization of Muslim Collectivities.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35(3): 539–56.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2015. “Suturing together Girls and Education: An investigation into the Social (Re)Production of Girls’ Education as a Hegemonic Ideology,” Journal of Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education 9(2): 87-107.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2016. “Doing the ‘work of hearing’: Girls’ Voices in Transnational Educational Development Campaigns,” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 46(5): 745-763.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2017. “The Making of Humans and Their Others in and through Transnational Human Rights Advocacy: Exploring the Cases of Mukhtar Mai and Malala Yousafzai.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42(2): 377–402.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2018. Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia. Oakland: University of California Press.

Imogen Tyler. 2008. “Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain,” Feminist Media Studies 8(1): 18.