There was an simple sense of aid, and subsequent pleasure, that I derived from understanding that part of my lived experiences had been inscribed on placards and posters for the world to witness.
On March 8, 2018, a day designated for the celebration of girls internationally, lots of of individuals took to the streets of Karachi to take part in, what can be, the primary Aurat March in Pakistan.
The members had united beneath the loosely outlined banner of ‘unity’, ‘empowerment’, and ‘reclaiming public areas’. In successive Marches, organisers circulated a proper manifesto together with setting a special theme for the occasion yearly. This yr’s slogan, “riyasat jawaab do, bhook ka hisaab do” [The state must give answers, give accountability for our hunger], attracts our consideration to the state’s failure to offer and defend its populace.
These themes, nevertheless, serve extra as an organising technique than a proper dictum. One observes quite a lot of messages, considerations, and experiences shared on the occasion, each within the type of staged performances in addition to the raised banners and posters.
What’s fascinating is that the mainstream understanding of the character and calls for of the Aurat March is overwhelmingly knowledgeable by the recognition of a choose few posters which are vehemently debated on social media websites and nationwide tv. The anger in direction of the posters and the general motion has through the years escalated into the organising members receiving threats of sexual and bodily violence.
In truth, members of the Aurat March 2020 organised in Islamabad had been physically attacked throughout the rally by members of a counter protest, leaving a number of folks injured. This yr too, protesters were charged with batons by the police in Islamabad.
A lot of the vitriol can, to this present day, be witnessed on-line on Fb and Twitter—starting from elaborate critiques of the posters, doctored images of the Aurat March protesters holding posters with sexual messages, to the launching of a web based counter motion referred to as ‘Mard March’ [Men’s March] that considerations itself with responding to widespread Aurat March posters with their very own model of the identical.
Among the many posters that raised a social media storm was the “khud khana garam karlo” [heat your own food] poster that was noticed on the first Aurat March. The poster, together with many different comparable ones that sprouted in subsequent Marches, was closely criticised for its frivolity and triviality — it was accused of dampening the seriousness of the March by highlighting issues that certified as ‘non-issues’ in a rustic the place ladies had been nonetheless being murdered within the identify of honour.
What usually will get misplaced in these debates is the artistic and radical potential of the on a regular basis and the frivolous in unsettling accepted discourse on gender and political motion — a dialogue that the posters within the Aurat March motion provoke.
Revisiting khud khana garam karlo and other posters
No poster in the first Aurat March attracted as much media attention, analysis, and ultimately a thread of justifications from local feminists as much as the ‘khud khana garam karlo’ poster.
In a means, the poster’s recognition on social media was for a lot of their very first introduction to the Aurat March, and for others, the only takeaway level that merely authenticated their pre-existing doubts in regards to the morally corrupt nature of a March that referred to as for girls to depart from the sanctity of their houses and topic themselves to the soiled streets and soiled gazes that they’ve for lengthy been taught to worry and keep away from.
Compelled by the overwhelming social media exercise the poster generated — from articles and interviews, to numerous Fb memes and tweets debating the validity of the message — the creator of the poster, Asna Hussain, went on record to clarify the motivation behind the poster:
“Too many a time, I’ve heard the defenders of the patriarchy argue, “Wo chai kyun banaega? Wo larka hai!” [Why would he make tea? He is a boy!] and “Uski khair hai? Wo larka hai!” [He’s fine, he’s a boy!]. After I bought sick and bored with being instructed this and demanded khud khana garam karlo [Warm your food yourself] on the latest Aurat March in Karachi, our whole group burst out in anger.”
In detailing her private expertise, Hussain sketches the shared on a regular basis realities of many Pakistani ladies who carry out every kind of care labour of their households every day. Her assertion on the disproportionate distribution of home duties comes as no shock.
Gendered labour and the urgent social expectation from ladies and younger ladies to carry out care work is a widely known and mentioned topic, with a copious physique of regularly rising scholarship to assist us perceive its workings. A handful of comparable posters demanding an elevated participation of males in home and care labour had been additionally noticed within the second Aurat March. One other widespread one following the identical stylistic options of the “warmth your personal meals” poster — a seemingly informal and acquainted comment delivered as direct speech — was “mujhay kia maloom tumhara moza kahan hai?” [How would I know where your sock is?].
The reference to on a regular basis occurrences and engagements with the continued ‘mundane’ and intimate features of day-to-day residing is obvious within the posters described above.
What can be price noting is that the fashion by which the considerations are raised additionally occurs to convey a way of familiarity and direct relatability. The considerations are framed as dialogues extracted from conversations that will erupt each day in households the place wives get up early within the morning to handle their husbands’ right-before-leaving-for-work moments of disaster involving a lacking sock or last-minute ironing process, or the place a drained male voice asks his mom to serve him meals the second he enters the home.
These conversations are additionally not unknown to those that have home staff out there to carry out many of those mundane duties, but are prompted into motion the minute their brother requests a cup of tea and the home assistance is nowhere in sight. To not point out the nexus of the gender-class imbalance that may be a actuality for many home staff themselves.
Even when these prolonged requests or directions are challenged, met with straight-forward denial, or largely go unfulfilled, the posters pushed these implicit expectations that usually manifest behind closed doorways, out within the public eye. The dialogues that usually animate folks’s home lives had been now being initiated, somewhat, continued within the open house of the streets and public parks by the protesters.
The pictures above had been circulated on Twitter beneath the khud khana garam karlo hashtag. They supply us with a transparent sense of the underlying logic that dictated the criticism directed at posters participating with gender points which are constitutive of girls’s mundane day-to-day realities.
Points worthy of the motion’s consideration, equivalent to earnings disparity, training inequality, rape tradition, home violence, interval taboos and so forth are starkly juxtaposed with the khud khana garam karlo demand.
Clearly, the binary opposition between purposeful/necessary and trivial/insignificant is at play right here. But additionally notice that home violence and taboos surrounding durations are points which are generally listed beneath the banner of ‘non-public’, ‘private’, or on daily basis, but the critic of the khud khana garam karlo poster above has no qualms accepting them as vital points.
Why? Due to their legibility as an already established discourse that one can simply distance themselves from and talk about as a human rights challenge relevant to all and any, however by no means to themselves particularly.
“(Un)real issues”
But what happens when the ‘ongoingness’ of everyday living and the texture of realities that converse with ordinary spaces are invoked in a time bound and charged event like the Aurat March? It is perhaps important to clarify that the posters in question blended well with the overall vivacious and celebratory atmosphere of the events. The Marches are often animated by musical performances, staged short skits, moving personal speeches, and scattered dances erupting impromptu at different parts and stages of the events.
It was later, when these posters were isolated from the overall vibrancy of the happenings and subjected to the internet’s scrutiny that a discourse surrounding the appropriateness of the posters, and subsequently the March itself, surfaced and consumed all other accounts and experiences related to the March — a transference of lived experience onto the restricting level of discourse.
Underlying these critiques of the inappropriateness of the posters was the notion that the productive and change-inducing potential of the movement was being squandered on frivolities when it could have been directed towards addressing more pressing gender related issues and injustices.
Supporters of the March too found themselves in an uncomfortable position defending these posters, hence, their rebuttals mostly involved pointing instead at the plethora of other posters that raised issues that held the conventional appeal of being crucial.
Critics, in return, were also accused of fixating on a handful of careless posters that were held not representative of the larger agenda of the March. The issue such a stance poses has been succinctly summarised by Sadia Khatri:
“What are the implications of redirecting folks to the manifesto after they convey up the posters? What separations are coded within the motion of holding up this manifesto as a qualification of ‘actual’ points? After we use the language of actual and severe, we create a distinction between ‘precise’ points and ‘pretended’ ones. After we rush to make clear that we’ve included ‘necessary’ causes in our calls for, we propose that different causes are unimportant.”
Our concern is just not solely the significance of the problems raised, but in addition the artistic potential of the on a regular basis that may open higher methods to conceptualise gender-related points that happen in actual time and house and may generate simpler and enduring modes of accountability.
The ‘severe’ structural points that critics of the Aurat Match anticipated the ladies to advance — equivalent to baby marriages, training inequality, home violence, honour killings and so forth — have for lengthy been acknowledged and brought up as causes by quite a few NGOs and different welfare establishments as crucial human rights points.
Whereas there isn’t a denying the existence of those issues, or the truth that regardless of the eye they obtain, they nonetheless stay prevalent points confronted by ladies in Pakistan, being swept beneath the human rights discourse has granted them the standard of being summary classes. They’ve been rendered a timeless high quality and are faraway from the potential for occurring in actual time and house.
They then turn into points that may be haunting any family, metropolis, or village throughout the nation — simply not our houses. In distinction, the posters involved with on a regular basis happenings alluded strongly to particular areas, occasions, and relations the place these points generally manifest — making them recognisable as realities of our personal houses that may now simply be realised within the precise moments of males getting into their houses from the outside and demanding a scorching meal or when frantically trying to find a lacking sock whereas preparing for work; they now turn into statements that intimately deal with not an summary anyone or anyone, however the very males we all know and reside with!
Aired within the public throughout the distinctive time of the Aurat March occasion, the message of those posters expose us to the character of gender inequality — a lived actuality that’s processual, on daily basis, and intimately tied to atypical house, time, and residing.
Of humour and play
Characteristic of all such posters deemed as ‘frivolous’ is the underlying playfulness and humour with which grave social realities are presented to and comprehended by the public. Many of these posters that were popularly criticised for indulging in trifling and insignificant matters highlighted everyday experiences of women through cutting humour.
While certain messages appear to be intentionally spun with the thread of humour, others take on the garb of humour by suggesting a playfulness that entails directly addressing the perpetrators of unjust acts and compelling them to engage with the issue at hand.
As one of the numerous other Pakistani women who could not help but laugh at the sheer cleverness of those messages, I found myself frantically nodding my head in agreement to the veracity of the mentioned happenings.
There was an undeniable sense of relief, and subsequent pleasure, that I derived from knowing that a part of my lived experiences — realities that are experienced in the hidden or suppressed from erupting out in the open — were inscribed on placards and posters for the world to witness.
A major contributor to this described feeling of relief and pleasure was also knowing that these often-unexpressed experiences were lived and shared by many other women across the country. The creative capacity of humour makes it possible to not only bring to our attention those social practices and truths that shape the shared worlds of women who have, or are still living in the urban centres of the country, but also the ways in which we collectively create, recreate, maintain, and accept that reality.
The conversations evoked in the posters are familiar but it is also easy for familiarity to make us think that we have a better grasp about a subject or situation and impose those contours of understanding on other people’s experiences.
The familiarity of the everyday situations brought up in the posters can be argued to hold the same kind of effect on the men who later initiated the Mard March [men’s march] mission on-line. The problems raised by the posters throughout the Aurat March had been on a regular basis information that most individuals had been intimately conscious of, leading to a swift response by males on social media debating why the efficiency of sure gender roles was cheap and therefore justified.
None of those surfacing counter arguments denied the existence of such practices. What they hinted at was a one-sided understanding of those acquainted conditions based mostly on a simplistic logic of reciprocity that utterly discounted the structural inequalities at play (a number of the placards that circulated on-line beneath the Mard March hashtag straight responded to Aurat March posters, borrowing the identical rhetorical fashion, equivalent to, “get your personal bank card” or “convey the yoghourt your self” — bringing yoghurt and roti [bread] from a close-by store are outside duties which are identified to be carried out largely by males within the household).
It’s in irony and humour that we discover artistic methods to interrupt from such limiting patterns of familiarity. They play a essential function in emphasising the gap between our notion of issues and other people’s lived realities, and function a device that can be utilized by folks to critique their on a regular basis lives.
Humour, irony, and associated classes that fall beneath the purview of on a regular basis minutiae turn into a invaluable useful resource by means of which the fixity of social and political classes could be challenged.
Imbued with colloquialism and witty humour, the Aurat March posters managed to unsettle the formalism related to political rhetoric that presupposes a knowable and unchanging actuality in favour of a nuanced and complex notion of social worlds — one which presses us to look past the facile argument of reciprocity (which justifies ladies’s efficiency of sure roles just because males carry out others) into the intricate webs of energy and gender inequality at play.
A query that occupied me as I browsed by means of the saved images of posters was why I discovered these particular posters humorous within the first place. It could not be false to imagine that these placards made purposeful use of humour to query prevalent gendered practices.
However there may be nothing significantly humorous about refusing to discover a misplaced sock, or not giving in to the demand to warmth meals for the boys in our households — I, for one, have all the time discovered such insistence and my refusal to conform an pointless and annoying inconvenience to say the least.
What, aside from the truth that the message resonates with a large number of ladies, then, renders the mentioning of those patterns on a placard the standard of being sharp and amusing? It was maybe the acknowledging of those frequent, but usually ignored, happenings out within the streets and public areas that elicits an ‘aha, that’s intelligent’ response from many people.
One other essential motive why these posters appealed to many as humorous was as a result of they rendered as a focus, points that struck many as trivial, informal, and even random contemplating our established understanding of socio-political marches as pressing requires political motion and social change. A level of seriousness is hooked up to such processions since they usually relay a disaster demanding instant remedial measures.
The very considered these playful posters marking a political motion going down in prime places of the cities is sufficient to shock, and in some instances even shock, the viewers. The seriousness hooked up to political actions and the decorum anticipated of gendered our bodies in public areas, destabilises standard modes and mannerisms related to protest tradition.
It’s these uncertainties and parts of shock, manifesting as a result of multiplicities of our bodies, impacts, messages, and voices, that troubles our held conceptions of political and social areas as coherent wholes.
From the presence of playfulness and humour within the March emerged resistance to the accepted discourse on gender and political motion, various constructions of lived gender realities, in addition to new methods of conceptualising areas as open and all the time within the making.
Why settle for less?
“It is a time to transgress more, in this beautiful moment when everything has exploded, when the scales are in the air and new norms are being set,” writes Khatri.
With the Aurat March gaining momentum every passing yr, it’s certainly a beautiful time to push the circumscribed boundaries of normative politics and additional the dialogue on the political potential of ‘on a regular basis’ — the time and house the place Pakistani ladies reside and expertise the realities of gender inequality most prevalently and intimately.
The normative discourse on gender inequality and political motion can not absolutely seize the dynamic nature of gender realities which are so tightly woven within the cloth of individuals’s on a regular basis lives. These realities demand to be learn and understood within the concreteness of actual atypical time and house.
The on a regular basis, with all its spontaneity, humour, messiness, frivolities, and minutiae, could be mobilised to unsettle the formalism of political rhetoric and create new political areas and modes of accountability that have in mind the intricacies of on a regular basis gender inequalities.
On this necessary second, when ladies are introducing new methods to press their calls for and provoke artistic political dialogues out within the streets, why resist the dynamism of this effervescent politics by insisting they recite the traditional script? If scales actually are within the air and the artifice of the imposed public-private binary is being uncovered by the protesting ladies by means of their invocation of the on a regular basis, why accept much less?
Header picture: “Warmth your personal meals” poster noticed throughout the first Aurat March. — Picture: Daybreak Photographs/ File