Description
Girls at Dhabas (G@D) is feminist collective in Pakistan rallying online to reclaim public spaces for women. The group primarily targets dhabas (roadside tea-stalls) which remain exclusively male spaces. By grounding my exploration of feminist activism in the work of G@D, I unpack what it means to be a feminist in Pakistan, what power structures they tackle and hope to dismantle from their social location and how they view transnational feminist solidarity. My thesis explores the nuances of G@D’s work given their precarious position, accused of being complicit in ‘elite feminism’ while consciously fighting to take control over the way their narrative is told by foreign media. This thesis examines the challenges faced by G@D members such as patriarchal codes of honor binding women’s mobility in Pakistan. I contextualize and analyze the role of dhabas as radical sites of activism in G@D’s work. I also explore how these activists are ‘queering’ public spaces in Pakistan. My efforts to cover G@D’s work are focused on documenting the narrative of an ‘organic’ women’s movement which operates in the context of Pakistan and is mindful of the inherent racism and patriarchy in the global neo-liberal capitalist agenda and the complicated histories of feminism in the South Asian region. I examine how members of G@D deploy the physical and digital occupation of public spaces to challenge patriarchal narratives restricting women’s mobility in urban Pakistan. In conversation with G@D members I highlight how the development sector and corporations systematically hinder the work of G@D and how G@D members position themselves strategically to combat these power structures. Using post-colonial and transnational feminist theories as an analytical lens, I conclude that given the ‘crisis of representation’ of women and queer issues in the global South, the reach of the NGO-industrial complex and Pakistan’s precarious entanglement with the War on Terror, G@D members remain skeptical of true solidarity and effective cross-border collaborations with feminists from the global North. Their positioning on the margins of the neoliberal and neo-colonial world order makes them a valuable epistemic resource while also erasing their identities, agency and activism.
