Gender, Identity, and Imperialism: Women Development Workers in Pakistan (Comparative Feminist Studies)

This book is an ethnographic study of a group of Western women development workers living in Gilgit, northern Pakistan. It focuses on their efforts to construct comfortable lives and identities while temporarily working abroad in this Muslim community. It also analyses the political consequences of their actions, addressing the ways in which these women perpetuate and resist unequal global power relations in their everyday lives. The author traces the legacy of many of these relations from the colonial period into the present, and provides ideas about how they can be changed to realise a more just global social reality. Contents......Page 6 Series Editor’s Foreword......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 11 Gilgit District, Northern Areas......Page 13 Gilgit City......Page 14 Introduction: Points of Arrival and Departure......Page 16 Parameters of Study......Page 25 Tracking the Text......Page 38 One: Bazaar Situations......Page 40 Exploration Sites......Page 46 Postpartition Travel Sightings......Page 49 Tourist Sights......Page 51 Development Sites......Page 53 Home Sites......Page 55 Historic Citings......Page 57 Two: Vulnerable and Spatializing Subjects......Page 60 Constructing the Danger......Page 64 Vulnerable Subjects in Gilgit......Page 67 Spatializing Subjects......Page 80 A Vulnerable Imperial Logic?......Page 96 Why Do They Come to Gilgit?......Page 100 Free Selves/Subjugated Others......Page 108 What to Wear, What to Wear?......Page 119 Working Women......Page 130 Free or Not?......Page 139 Why Did They Come?......Page 144 The Cult of Domesticity......Page 146 The Power of the Cult of Domesticity......Page 150 Achieving Home and Self......Page 152 Managing Servants......Page 162 Managing Western Families......Page 173 Domestic Governance and Spatial (Re)Organization......Page 181 Epilogue......Page 184 Agency Speculations......Page 196 Notes......Page 200 References......Page 218 C......Page 238 E......Page 239 K......Page 240 P......Page 241 T......Page 242 Y......Page 243 An ethnographic study showing how Western women living in Pakistan as international development workers constructed new identities in a Muslim community. Cook shows how these transnational migrants both perpetuate and resist unequal global power relations in everyday life, tracing the legacy of this from the colonial period to the present.