Negotiating Empowerment: Pakistani Women Exercising Agency in Domestic and Public Spheres

This article explores women negotiating empowerment in domestic and public spheres as beneficiaries of a women’s empowerment project. While these empowerment interventions are noteworthy, they are also misleading because they ignore the local expressions of agency, where women at home also exercise power and conscious decision-making in their own contexts, just as much as any other working women--which is equally significant when talking about empowerment. We argue that there are other expressions of empowerment that are neglected, trivialized, or unacknowledged by the mainstream discourse. In a similar context, we argue that local women, while understanding the NGO’s definition of empowerment, not only have their own opinions on their ‘docile’ lives as wives, sisters and mothers in the domestic sphere but also take a course of action in public that can be interpreted as ‘negotiating empowerment’ in ways that lead to personal gain, thus exercising agency