Theorizing Institutional Feelings, Bodies, and Spaces: The Case of Feminisms and Women’s Studies in Pakistan

In this article, I draw on Postcolonial, Muslim, and Western feminist theories combined with self-reflexivity as a feminist research method to reflect on my experiences as a professor of English and a feminist educator at a state university in Southern Punjab, Pakistan. Using the self-reflexive approach from a feminist standpoint, I unpack the institutional feelings, reactions, emotions, responses, and reception practices that the teaching of Feminism and Women’s Studies entail in this context. The goal of the research reported here is to theorize institutional feelings and reactions to further our understanding of how these gendered ideologies and discourses—promoted through discursive and coercive measures—might not only impede feminist epistemology and praxis within this context, persecute feminist academics as Westernized and irrelevant, but also lead to the curtailment of general academic freedoms and violation of women’s human rights in similar other Third World contexts. Furthermore, this essay theorizes the ways in which feminist bodies are read, interpreted, and silenced within institutional spaces that are shaped by historical forces of state-sponsored Islamization campaigns that are built upon the bodies of women. The article illustrates how feminist bodies and the work that they do disrupt historically constructed hetero-patriarchal spaces structured by Islamization ideologies.