FEAR, HONOR, AND EVERYDAY SURVIVAL: WOMEN NAVIGATING PUBLIC SPACE IN PUNJAB

Abstract

Abstract Views: 27

This paper considers the experiences and negotiation of women in Punjab in place making that is influenced by fear, cultural honor and the pressures of daily survival. According to eleven ethnographic interviews and participant observations in Rawalpindi, the work demonstrates the state of gendered mobility that is controlled by interacting forces of cultural morality, patriarchal expectations, financial weakness, and habitual harassment. Through use of feminist anthropology, stigma theory and the theories of surveillance and habitus, the research shows that the bodies of women are created as moral spaces where the judgments of the community, the expectation of religion and the control of family meet. These overlapping pressures do not only restrict the mobility of women but also inform them with the emotional landscapes of fear, caution, and strength. In spite of such limitations, women gradually devise methods to move about in the transport, the markets, and the workplaces to balance the economic necessities with the social decency. The results show that female negotiations in everyday life are immersed into a larger system of morality and structure that presupposes such description of space as masculine and such appearance of women as conditional. The article states that to effect useful change it is not enough to improve the infrastructures but necessitates cultural change that subverts honour-based limitations, accepts sexist harassment and the patriarchal control of the women visibility in the social life.