Becoming Educated, Becoming Self-Disciplined: Women's Education and the Production of "Virtuous Agents" in Pakistan

• In Event: 35.037 - Contesting and Embodying Modernity/Islam: Education and Development Paradigms in Nigeria, Pakistan, Mali, and the United States

Abstract

Objectives:
International development agencies view education as the main tool to empower Muslim women and to modernize Muslim countries (Abu-Lughod 2009; Kandiyoti 2005). However, recent feminist and development scholarship demonstrate how education produces not only new opportunities but also new regulations for women (Bartlett 2008; North 2013; Robinson-Pant 2003). Through using ethnographic data collected with women teachers from low-income and rural communities in Pakistan, this paper argues that these opportunities and regulations operate through a cultural narrative that presents educated women as self-disciplined subjects. This analysis complicates the narrative of women’s education as universally empowering, and marks a multidimensional shift in gendered ideology at the nexus of local and global influences.

Theoretical Framework:
In order to examine how educated women perform a self-disciplined subjectivity to access new opportunities, I employ feminist poststructuralist frameworks (Butler 1999) that theorize gender as a performance, rather than a fixed identity, that is acted out in everyday relationships. This conceptualization helps to understand how being educated implies being able to self-regulate for women from rural communities in Pakistan, and, it is this gendered performance that makes new roles and opportunities accessible to educated women.

Methods & Data:
This paper uses ethnographic data collected from 2008 to 2012 with women teachers working for community schools supported by a transnational development organization to provide education to girls from rural and low-income communities in Pakistan. The data includes participant observations conducted in classrooms, parent-teacher meetings, and community meetings and in-depth interviews conducted with thirty-two women teachers. I analyzed this data using deductive codes, such as meaning and purpose of girls’ education, and inductive coding, such as distinction of educated women from uneducated women

Results:
The results show that the women participants of this study are validated as “real” educated women through performance of a self-disciplined subjectivity. Educated women, thus, are allowed to do paid work outside of home and gain financial independence but without challenging the role of the male figurehead, become assertive but without engaging in verbal or physical fights, become visible in public domains but through demonstrating a gendered domesticity, and participate in male-dominated decision making process but through displaying a reserved yet polite mannerism. Educated women, thus, are allowed to modify certain gender norms while strictly following others. In addition, unlike “uneducated” women, educated women are “trusted” to take up their new roles without an active surveillance from their families and communities.

Significance:
In the context where women’s education is perceived as a magic pill to resolve issues ranging from poverty to religious extremism in Muslim countries, this paper complicates the global narrative of women’s education as inherently and universally empowering. It also shows why it is important for educational policymakers to ground the meaning of education and gender empowerment in local sociocultural contexts.

Author

• Ayesha Khurshid, Florida State University