Urban Pakistan and Women’s Mobility in Securitised Lahore

Overview

This article examines how policing affects women’s mobilities in the context of Lahore, Pakistan, and how it shapes sense of belonging and citizenship in the wider public sphere. Research on urban Pakistan is sparse to begin with, even more so with regards to surveillance of public space and the intersection of class, gender, and ethnicity in structuring women’s mobilities. While there are some examples of quantitative research that examine attitudes towards the police, as well as work on gender and mobilities, no existing literature examines the two in conjunction with each other. Through qualitative interviews with ten women between the ages of 21 and 55, this article examines the affective experience of negotiating the exclusions and restrictions enforced by the state through law enforcement, as well as how boundaries of class are spatialised alongside gender. The findings of my research indicate that at best there is a strong sense of ambivalence towards the police, and a sense of fear at worst. The police play a vital role in enforcing a gendered public morality to restrict women from engaging in ‘deviant’ behaviour, such as smoking in public or wearing Western clothing. Furthermore, my research examines the strategies that women employ to ‘manage’ their presence in public spaces in response to state surveillance and control. Crucially, it also takes a critical look at how class privilege structures participants’ understandings of their own positionality within public spaces, and how they instrumentalise these privileges to ‘protect’ themselves.