is there a Queer Democracy? Or stop Looking Straight: Benazir Bhutto and the Hetero-erotics of Democracy

• In Event: 322 - Regular Session. Feminist Thought/Theory

Abstract

Benazir Bhutto, who was heralded as global feminist icon and democratic célèbre in the U.S and the first woman to lead a Muslim nation, is a key figure through whom we can deconstruct the relationship between gender and politics. In this paper, I address the photographic representations of Bhutto and the consistent aestheticized framing of her to illustrate the way in which the images of Bhutto were able to provide meaning for the sustenance of American empire. In the midst of madly wrought representations of Pakistan as the “most dangerous place on earth,” the figure of Benazir Bhutto emerged as both a stable and comfortable emblem of emancipated modernity and a visual opportunity to narrate empire through a multicultural hetero-normative democracy. The mediums of public image making and visibility, in the case of Bhutto, is inextricably wedded to the conjoined mechanisms that systematically render Pakistani people uncivilized, uneducated, oppressed and backwards. In approaching photographs and narrativizations of Bhutto as the objects of criticism, I interrogate the ways in which she has been reduced to an object of the heterosexual fe/male gaze, analyze the epistemological foundation that supports the ways in which she was seen and the logic that positions political feminine/feminist others into bifurcated categories of oppressed or free specularity, where the possibility of both come to be read through the landscape of the female body.

Author

• Moon Charania, Georgia State University