the regenerative potential of performances in the public life of occupied countries like Afghanistan. This is not to reiterate the common stereotype according to which Third World subjects would be stuck in irrationality. On the contrary, envisioning non-Western public spheres as “carnivalesque” underscores the creative, energetic, ambiguous (and often horrifying) forms of subversion and resistance that have emerged as a result of neoliberal or military occupation. Because the carnivalesque creates a sense of togetherness, a lived collective body that is constantly renewed, non-Western public life challenges the moral assumptions that underpin the liberal public, especially in the domain of gender relations where “emancipation” is often thought of in terms of a public “coming out” and a breakup with “tradition.”
Furthermore, the notion of the carnivalesque can help us rethink women’s agency, especially in contexts where women are confronted with the double burden of nationalism and imperialism. In this book, I attempt to explain how women from different walks of life, generations, and ethnic and social backgrounds use carnivalesque performances and repertoires to get around or accommodate norms and prescriptions that regiment their lives. I focus on women’s everyday practices and in particular women’s body work, emotional performances, and expressive genres because resistance to systems of domination is often taking place at the margins of these systems, in the interstices left uncontrolled or in spaces opened up at a specific historical moment (Cowan 1990). A study of women’s everyday practices demonstrates that “agency” is not only shaped by cultural systems of values that the occupation has radicalized but is also made more complex by motives and social imaginaries that inhabit a specific moral universe and in which women’s bodies have come to occupy a central symbolic role.
The feminine performances I analyze in this book allow the eruption of a feminine experience that is silenced in language but that receives validation through the mobilization of broader social imaginaries pertaining to the potentially threatening nature of women’s bodies. I push this idea to its limits by examining how the public visibility of women’s suicide, through self-immolation or poisoning, acts as a transgressive symbol of femininity excluded, rejected from existing fields of discourse, thus forcing an opening in representation. The nature of power relations in Afghanistan today is such that women cannot speak in many political contexts, which is precisely why women come to recognize that they must, as Veena Das puts it, “learn to communicate by non-verbal gestures, intonations of speech, and reading meta-messages in ordinary language” (1988, 198).
The study of Afghan women’s poetry and the cultural imaginaries that constitute their world helps us to better understand how an individual woman’s ability to access public life is dependent on her capacity to mobilize socially appropriate cultural expressions. I show how public women play with the polysemic nature of hegemonic political/religious repertoires (notions of jihad and martyrdom, for example) in order to assert their presence in male-dominated arenas. These covert reinterpretations, in spite of their inherent ambivalence, bring nuances to and marginally challenge traditional gender discourses. In the same way, women’s emotional performances, even under their most dramatic forms like suicide attempts, carry with them communicative potential in the same way as the grotesque and the exuberant in carnivalesque performances. These highly dramatic gestures that follow gendered forms of emotional expression strengthen realities of identity while bringing some legal validity to women’s demands. By creatively engaging with these well-known cultural repertoires, women do not only confirm their allegiance to the gender order but they also demonstrate its intrinsic fragility. These “polyphonic discursive formations within the tradition itself” (Raheja and Gold 1994, 25) do not function in my view as mere “rituals of rebellion” (Gluckman 1963), ensuring the continuity of the political and moral order of society. Their repetition, while reinforcing the “reality” of gender difference (Butler 1990), also allows for the shifting of meaning according to contexts and situations.
Fictional State Building
“Democratic transition” in Afghanistan has to be studied from the perspective of women because women represent a central catalyst of disputes and controversies. Indeed, as in other colonial encounters, women have become central subjects of public debates and political attention over the past ten years. The vitality with which the visibility of women in public life is discussed in contemporary Afghanistan by the international community, Afghan politicians and power holders, as well as ordinary people, underscores the centrality of women in symbolically shaping the future of the country. An analysis of reactions to and effects of their presence in public can help us unpack the political reconfiguration of public life in the “post-Taliban” period. Indeed, polemics that have emerged around women’s roles signal the broader moral anxieties around culture that have emerged as a result of the occupation. In a society torn by violence and war, women’s bodies have become the field through which statehood enacts its power (Aretxaga 1997; Das 1996).
With other academics who have attempted to theorize the state as a fantasy (Navaro-Yashin 2002), as a fetish (Taussig 1992a), as an idea (Mitchell 1991), or as a fiction (Aretxaga 2003), I want to underline the elusive, porous, and mobile boundaries of the state in a context where the “state” is considered as “failed.” In the context at stake a myriad of actors such as NGOs, UN agencies, the World Bank, private companies, and local militias and narco-traffickers assume a large part of the traditional Weberian functions of the state to the extent that the state mostly materializes itself through the use of violence, symbolic or real. In order to understand what “state building” may mean when the state is no more in charge or able to regulate many areas of social life, one needs to rethink the state beyond traditional categories of “structures” and “apparatus” (Navaro-Yashin 2002).
The reconstruction process has mostly focused on rebuilding state infrastructures: ministries, hospitals, schools, and courts, most of which have remained dysfunctional—and sometimes, even empty—for lack of security, personnel, and resources to pay civil servants’ salaries. Once the stage for the performance of statehood has been set, the state has largely remained a ghostly figure, a powerful fiction fueling popular anxieties and discourses of corruption, secrecy, and arbitrary violence. The “virtual reality” (Aretxaga 2003) of the state, its phantomatic presence, is nevertheless enacted in the relation of simultaneous attraction and repulsion that holds together its sovereign power. The state, therefore, is perhaps better captured in its margins (Das and Poole 2004) than in its supposedly transparent and rational bureaucratic forms. Veena Das and Deborah Poole argue that “the forms of illegibility, partial belonging, and disorder that seem to inhabit the margins of the state constitute its necessary condition as a theoretical and political object” (2004, 4).
But there is a more general point to be made. The uncertainty that surrounds the state is not specific to the Afghan context. Indeed, everywhere the state, as any institution endowed with the power to produce “the real in the world” (Boltanski 2008), is a semantic reality, a “being without a body” that can only speak through spokespersons. Ambivalence toward the state is inherent to social life since spokespersons who are supposed to translate the will of the state may in fact impose their own judgment. This tension between the need to have institutions in order to preserve a sense of stability and the impossibility to fully rely on them because of their fictional nature is what Luc Boltanski calls a “hermeneutical contradiction” (Boltanski 2008, 28).
In the case of Afghanistan, this fundamental state of suspicion is heightened by the fact that state representatives are less easily identifiable. They are to be found within a myriad of more or less formal organizations, with diverse and sometimes even contradictory political agendas, what Jane Cowan (2007) has identified as a “spectrum of sovereignties” in the context of the “supervised state.” Meanwhile, as much as the state is feared, nationalist discourses feed social imaginaries with expectations toward the state that often contradict the actual experience of disempowerment, violence, and marginalization (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). It is precisely in this tension that I want to think of the subjective and affective reality of the state as it unfolds in the everyday events of public life through desires, fantasies, rumors, and moral panics.
Following
