Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Vortrag von Kamran Asdar Ali

im Rahmen der 11. Humboldt India Project Lectures (HIP)

Female Friendships and Frictions: Sexual Politics in 1960s Pakistani Cinema By focusing on the Pakistani film Saheli (1961) the paper seeks to open up the questions related to emotions, domestic life and sexuality in Pakistan. Indeed, by concentrating primarily on women’s lives as depicted in this film (and other cultural artefacts), I do not seek to dismiss the importance of other studies, but to make an added and necessary argument. It enables me to make visible and audible those instances that may have historically enabled women (and men) in Pakistan to create emotional fields and varied forms of connections to each other. Hence the analysis makes an argument about women’s representation in the popular media in Pakistan in order to create a different archive of women’s cultural and sexual politics and histories.

Kamran Asdar Ali is professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (UT Press, 2002) and the co-editor of Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa (Palgrave 2008), Comparing Cities: Middle East and South Asia (Oxford 2009) and Gender, Politics, and Performance in South Asia (Oxford 2015). His more recent book is Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947-1972 (I.B Tauris 2015). On Leave from UT, he is currently the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS.