Bold Women, Bad Assets: Honour, Property and Techno-Promiscuities

Abstract

In June 2016, Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani social media star, was murdered. Her death sparked both public outrage and a policy debate around ‘honour killing’, digital rights and sex-positive sexuality across Pakistan and its diasporas. Qandeel challenged what constitutes a proper Pakistani woman, an authentic Baloch and a respectable digital citizen. As a national sex symbol, she failed at the gendered workings of respectable heterosexuality, and during her short lifetime she optimised this failure and public fetish as a technologically mediated social currency (clicks, hashtags, comments, likes, reposts) to build a transnational celebrity brand. I centre Qandeel Baloch’s life and afterlives to think through the economic entanglements of honour, racialised ethnicity, coloniality, sexual violence and social media at the intersections of globalised anti-Blackness and honourable brownness as a matter of global capital. Within these complex registers of coloniality, Qandeel’s life and brutal murder necessitate a rethinking of categories of racialised ethnicity (Baloch), sexual labour (racial capital) and social media (digitality) as vectors of value for capitalism and nationalism. By centring Qandeel, I define honour as a form of racialised property relations. This rereading of honour, as an economic metric of heteropatriarchy, shifts my lens of honour killing from a crime of culture to a crime of property. Women’s honour functions as a necrocapitalist technology that constructs female and feminine bodies as the debris of heterosexual empire through racialised, gendered and sexualised property relations. These relations and registers of honour get further complicated by social media currency and discussions around digital rights, privacy and freedom of expression. Honour is, therefore, the economic management of sexual morality produced through race, religion and imperialism.

The Thermometer Broke! Digital Purdah, Class, and Gender Transgressions on Pakistani TikTok

“…Women who participate in the digital or physical public sphere are harassed (Hassan, 2018), stigmatized, or murdered, like the Pakistani social media star, Qandeel Baloch. Despite such repercussions, Pakistani users routinely violate gender norms online, for example, by performing gender ambiguous identities (Aziz, 2021) and non-normative femininities (Alam, 2020; Shroff, 2021), and by participating in feminist digital counterpublics (Rehman, 2017).…”

Coloniality and Feminist Collusion: Breaking Free, Thinking Anew

“…It further offers how rural women resist and negotiate epistemic and economic dispossession, providing critiques of the coloniality of gender that adopt different metaphysical commitments, as led by rural actors in the Global South. Sara Shroff’s article, ‘Bold women, bad assets: honour, property and techno-promiscuities’ (2021, this issue), offers another innovative methodological approach, rethinking categories of sexual labour, racialised ethnicity and social media in contemporary Pakistan in relation to capitalism, neoliberalism and nationalism. Through the concept of ‘techno-promiscuities’ developed by the author (an investigation of digital sexuality as speculative currency), Shroff reveals how social media star Qandeel Baloch and other young women negotiate techno-capitalist heteropatriarchal regimes built on discourses of hegemonic masculinity, religion, nation and empire, offering embodiment of different forms of feminist agency through their challenge to normative structures of power.…”