A Turn to Governance: Feminist Conundrums and Pakistan’s Neoliberal Future Past

Feminist theories and epistemologies from the global south comprise a vast array of critical praxis, which has maintained a complex and often ambiguous web of relations with transnational feminist movements. On the one hand, in their attempts to decentre and disrupt the entrenched global northern knowledge-production mechanisms, southern feminisms have ventured to articulate the difference with which feminist knowledge is sought, fought for and attained in non-northern political and social contexts. On the other hand, global southern accounts of feminist resistance have shed new light on the complicities and entanglements southern women’s and feminist movements have struggled with in their slow accession to the global corridors of power, governed as they were by decidedly global northern types of feminist and non-feminist knowledge and power-relations. This brief intervention should ideally cover both of these crucial aspects, i.e. the successes of certain strands of feminist politics and epistemologies in Pakistan that were at their most powerful and path-breaking when relying on local knowledge as well as a not-so-hopeful trajectory of governance feminism in Pakistan, which took a decidedly neoliberal turn