A contemplation of the complexities and contradictions inherent in the pursuit of women’s empowerment
Abuse is not confined to vulnerable women alone. The victims or survivors can include various labels, dictums, and watchwords. One such impactful term is ’empowerment,’ especially concerning women’s emancipation. Both academic literature and discourse beyond academia have extensively utilized this expression and notion, sometimes to the point of misuse, resulting in conceptual confusion and misapplications that I identify as feminist concussions.
A simple internet search yields countless pillars, principles, and processes of empowerment. Donors, technical aid agencies, and UN bodies often allocate significant resources to produce training manuals and high-level platforms aimed at elating already influential alliances that control the destinies of millions of disenfranchised women, ironically exacerbating disparities.
Too often, seemingly benign content found in UN documents or reports funded or supported by donors often sparks controversy when translated or rendered into local languages, including Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Dari, Hindi, and Bengali, which are some of the key languages in the patriarchal belt of South Asia.
In my humble capacities, I have made contributions towards demystifying gender and some related aspects through community works and TV. For instance, I produced, directed, and scripted a seminal TV series called Gender Watch from 1999-2000 on behalf of a national nonprofit that I co-founded and established with a one-time prominent figure in the country. This piece is not about the deceptions and destructions that I endured in pursuit of laying the foundations of a non-elite feminism in my pompous society. That series was aired on the state-owned Pakistan Television Network (PTV), winning me the PTV Excellence Award in 2001. This marked the first time a private production was nominated for an award by this state institution. Gender Watch institutionalized and mainstreamed the Urdu/Pakistani alternative of the word/concept ‘gender,’ i.e., ‘sinf,‘ as earlier it was incorrectly but commonly used interchangeably with the equivalent of ‘sex,’ i.e., ‘jins‘.
Just in case any of you view me as a successful professional or as one of those elites who are currently ‘lamenting’ elitism in their talks and writings, let me put on record that I am not from that clan. Having compromised my career in the conventional sense by speaking aloud about such perspectives and calling out deception in the social development sectors and industry (luckily, I always followed my calling and never bothered about formal careers), I bear no conflict of interest (COI). This earned freedom not only lightens the wallet but also the conscience. However, I do not recommend these ‘follies’ to be followed by the faint-hearted.
Every year, International Women’s Day is celebrated on March 8th. The probability of using this day to utilize taxpayers’ money and donations from rich organizations or to launder black-market money through the guise of impressive foundations, aid agencies, etc., is hardly dared to be identified. The ceremonial displays scarcely impact the lives of excluded women. This extends beyond downtrodden, illiterate, rural, or slum-dwelling women to include qualified, urban, and modern-looking women who fail to learn the skills of networking and pleasing those big shots who matter in the industry.
Consequently, the very core of women’s empowerment—namely, the self-worth of millions of women—is undermined each year through defectively planned activities and slogans that have not been field-tested. Many pseudo-feminists and paid activists are presented as the representatives of a wider majority of women who have never had a voice; even if they did, it would not be in their dialect and diction or on their terms of autonomy. This certainly is hurtful not only at an emotional level but also impacts many other paradigms of empowerment.
Any strategy or innovation model, no matter how fancy it appears, how confidently it is articulated, how widely it is disseminated, how much traction it gets on social media, how loud the applause is, or how many awards it wins from apparently well-meaning and intended power hubs is meaningless if it fails to translate inspiration and inclusion in local contexts.
This year’s International Women’s Day in 2024 is once again occurring in a selectively sane world, yet witnessing atrocities such as the genocide in Gaza, the oppression of women in Afghanistan, the displacement of mainly women and children in various conflict zones, and the continued statelessness of many ethnic groups like the Stranded Pakistani Biharis. The ongoing violations of minority rights and numerous other human rights abuses often do not make headlines.
Close to home in Pakistan, a ‘new democratic’ government is taking off, creating different debates besides defining clear differences between feminists of all forms, politically pro-women, and officially anti-women groups visibly.
Some intellectuals, with self-assigned responsibility for stewarding feminism in Pakistan, are taunting ‘others’ for not congratulating ‘women in offices in politics.’ There are strong, if not valid, views from the latter too, who do not accept winning through wisely chosen powerful parents. Within the ‘others’ are those who cite examples of clumsy men with strong surnames. These confirmations and rejections would ensure that empowerment remains a dream for a vast majority of Pakistani women. Thus, a greater proportion of learned, laborious women leaders who have neither the privilege of class nor connections will never be duly acknowledged. The exploitation of empowerment continues to accelerate.
Happy Women’s Day 2024
The author is a Pakistani Intersectional feminist, and a freethinker, and can be reached at @Apna_Wallet.
