Remembering Rubina Saigol
Pakistani feminists lost an icon today. Rest in Power, Rubina Saigol - activist, academic, writer and a brave spirit whose incisive words gave power and guidance to a whole generation of Pakistani women.
I was re-reading a wonderful piece she wrote in 2019 about the much-needed shift in feminist politics in Pakistan, from the public to the private lives of women – to talk about sexual and body autonomy, domestic rights and women's roles within their homes and family structures.
Below are a few passages from the piece that I loved reading.
"Aurat March 2019 marks a tectonic shift from the previous articulations of feminism in Pakistan. It [...] has inaugurated a new phase in feminism, qualitatively different from the earlier movements for women rights. While the past expressions of feminism laid the foundation for what we see today, the radical shift of feminist politics from a focus on the public sphere to the private one – from the state and the society to home and family – manifests nothing short of a revolutionary impulse. Feminism in Pakistan has come of age as it unabashedly asserts that the personal is political, and that the patriarchal divide between the public and the private is ultimately false.
Ironically, while WAF members avoided public discussions on the body and sexuality, the state and religious clerics had no such qualms; their focus was squarely on the woman’s body — the need to conceal it, cover it, protect it and preserve it for its rightful ‘owner’. The state was consistently referring to sexuality (for example, in laws on fornication, zina), the veil and the four walls of the house — all designed to control the rebellious and potentially dangerous female body capable of irredeemable transgression.
This is where the new feminists break from the older generation and mark a powerful shift in the feminist landscape. Even as new feminism retains many of the older critiques of the state,[...] it reaffirms the personal and injects it right into the heart of the political. ‘My body, my will’, it tells patriarchy to its crestfallen face. ‘Warm your own food’, ‘I don’t have to warm your bed’, ‘don’t send me dick pics’ — in curt one-liners, the new young feminists reclaim their bodies, denounce sexual harassment, stake a claim to public space and challenge the gender division of labour on which rests the entire edifice of patriarchy.
The new wave of feminism includes people from all classes, genders, religions, cultures and sects without any discrimination or prejudice. The young feminists are diverse, yet inclusive, multiple yet one. There are no leaders or followers — they are all leaders and followers. The young groups of women say openly what their grandmothers could not dare to think and their mothers could not dare to speak".
