Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore how women survive and negotiate the contradictions of life in a city like Karachi. In order to explore the interstices we turn to women’s voices that are present is diaries, biographies, memoirs and even fiction; sources where we find women speaking in non-public spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore how women in Pakistani cities like Karachi survive and flourish in the interstices of the city and negotiate its contradictions in their own particular way. Hence in Karachi women use urban space for mobility, transgressions, and the different pleasures that they seek, in the process "negotiating" the everyday in favorable and unfavorable terms. They may also exist in a social and cultural landscape of potential harassment, with their movements being regulated by the imminent threat to their bodies and emotions. In order to explore these interstices we may have to turn to women's voices that are present in non-formal archives such as diaries, biographies, poetry memoirs and even fiction; sources where we find women speaking in non-public spaces.

For this presentation, among other sources, I will use the poet and author Azra Abbas' short book, Mera Bachpan (My Childhood) which depicts Karachi of a not so distant past and gives us a window into Abbas' early life. Another source would be the poetry of the poet Sara Shagufta (who dies young) that shares the challenges she faces in a city where her being a woman and her notions of sexual freedom are commented upon and censored. The paper will be sensitive to the inaudibility of women's voices in public spaces, as suggested above, and will turn to archives of non-sociological writings, and genres of representation to bring forward a different story of a city.

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