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8 - Governing Thirdness at Work
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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Summary
The question of earning money ultimately confronts everyone in society and the khawaja sira are no exception. In this chapter, I focus on the sources of income and economic inclusion of the khawaja sira, most of whom live in deep poverty. In line with my focus on governance and citizenship of the khawaja sira, I primarily focus on the experience of khawaja sira in formal workplaces in this chapter. Another reason for this analytical choice is that, with the exception of begging, the informal ways of making money are increasingly drying up in most urban centres of Pakistan. As I discuss in more detail in the next chapter, there is a set of bureaucratic apparatuses that limit the khawaja sira's ability to make money even through begging. Moreover, formal employment is often presented as the most effective way to ensure economic inclusion of the khawaja sira. However, as I discuss in this chapter, given the various ways in which they are governed, disciplined, and ostracized in the workplace, this is not a straightforward ‘solution’ for the khawaja sira and would require a lot of associated work on creating inclusive workspaces. However, for the sake of comprehensiveness, I first provide a brief overview of their traditional informal sources of income before analysing their experiences of formal employment.
Traditional Source of Income
Traditionally, the most legitimate source of income for the khawaja sira was collection of badhai: money given to the khawaja sira at festivities such as marriage or birth of a child, generally accompanied by a dancing and singing performance by them. Badhai, a seemingly innocuous ceremonial activity, has at its roots in multiple intersecting historical discourses. The khawaja sira are given badhai at marriage ceremonies primarily because of traditional notions of their ability to confer fertility upon newlywed couples (Nanda 1990; Reddy 2005). However, another reason to remain in the good books of the khawaja sira, especially at ceremonial events such as marriage and birth of a child, was the fear of their curses, which historically have been considered very potent (Nanda 1990). According to many members of the community, yet another important reason the khawaja sira were historically socially sanctioned to visit homes where a newborn was present was to facilitate the adoption of children born with ambiguous genitals by the khawaja sira community.
9 - Governing Thirdness on the Street
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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If We Don't Beg, Should We Do Burglaries?
The governments are so arbitrary. They are creating strange laws. They may create a new strange law any day … Allah will hold them accountable one day. (Farzana)
The Department of Social Welfare, Women Development and Bait-ul-Maal, commonly called the Social Welfare Department (SWD), of the Government of Punjab launched a rehabilitation programme for beggars in 2014 to minimize begging in urban public spaces in Lahore. Under this programme, which was similar in its ambitions to the anti-panhandling and anti-homeless laws in multiple parts of the world, the individuals caught begging at urban public places were brought to the Beggars’ Home (also known as beggars’ rehabilitation center), a welfare facility established by the SWD where the beggars were detained for a few days and also provided medical and religious treatment and vocational training. According to the official website of the SWD, the khawaja sira were provided free medical, vocational, and religious treatment. However, in practice, no vocational or technical training is provided. Instead, the Beggars’ Home worked primarily as a detention centre where the beggars were kept hidden from the public eye under the guise of rehabilitation.
Since begging was the most common way the khawaja sira were able to eke out a living, they had been disproportionately affected by this programme.
They stop us from begging. What do we do if we don't beg? Look at our clothes, our shoes. The winter is coming. If we don't beg what do we do? (Nargis)
You tell us what we should do if we don't beg. Should we do burglaries? We have to beg to stay alive. They have created this new rule out of nowhere [that we can't beg]. They don't listen to anyone. One can't appeal to their decision. The people [begging] on the roads [at traffic signals] men, women, and us, we have to carve out a living by begging. We can't do daily wages labour; we don't have any family to support us. Should we just jump in water in die? (Rosy)
Indeed, given their trying financial situation, many considered begging to be one of their most fundamental rights in society.
This is so unfair that people from other cities can come to Lahore and earn a living but the khawaja sira who are descendants [jaddi] of the area are not allowed to beg. (Saeeda)
6 - Resisting Legal Thirdness
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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There is no use of the third gender when one doesn't have any resources or [social] support … The Supreme Court had directed the government to give us all our rights, but their decision was not implemented. The government doesn't accept us … It [only] implemented the [part of the decision about] IDs so that it could claim it had done something for the khawaja sira. The ID doesn't provide us food or fulfill any of our basic needs. (Ashi, chose to register as a khawaja sira)
The government has done nothing for us. Allowing us to have IDs [as khawaja sira] is not a big deal. We don't even want to have IDs as khawaja sira because we can't do hajj [mandatory pilgrimage for Muslims] and then there are also other things [like share in inheritance] where we face hurdles [if we register as khawaja sira]. (Nadia, chose to register as a man)
While the Supreme Court decision and its subsequent implementation by NADRA was accompanied by much fanfare, the response of the khawaja sira to this new third gender category has been less than overwhelming, with most khawaja sira choosing to register as men instead of opting for the third gender categorization. According to a 2015 report, only 1,432 khawaja sira had opted for the third gender category introduced by NADRA (The News 2015). As the estimated number of khawaja sira in Pakistan ranges from 80,000 to 400,000 (Baig 2012; Ebrahim 2013) it implies that less than 2 per cent of the khawaja sira had registered under the third gender category since it became officially available to them in 2011. Most of my research participants who had IDs (as men) prior to the creation of the third gender category elected not to get their IDs as khawaja sira after the Supreme Court decision. More importantly, my interactions with the khawaja sira and the frontline workers of NADRA suggest that a considerable number of khawaja sira who got their IDs after the aforementioned decision still chose to register as men. Another indication of the limited appeal of the third gender category for the khawaja sira became apparent when the 2017 census of Pakistan found only 10,418 individuals in the category.
Index
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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Bibliography
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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2 - Governing Thirdness through Religion, History, and Language
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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There are multiple terms used to refer to the khawaja sira community in Pakistan, the most common in early academic literature being hijra, khusra, and khawaja sira. These terms have similar meaning in contemporary usage in Pakistani society and are generally considered umbrella terms that include all individuals who do not conform to their socially assigned gender or sexual identity. Within the khawaja sira community, however, these different terms are associated with significant internal discourses of authenticity that govern the identity, livelihood, and behaviour of the khawaja sira. As is documented most prominently by Faris Khan (2014) and Reddy (2005), there is a lot of internal tension within the khawaja sira community about their relative status vis-à-vis each other. As I discuss later, these terms are often used to communicate particular identity and status to both insiders and outsiders.
In terms of their usage within the khawaja sira community, the terms hijra and khusra are largely considered synonymous, with the latter being used more commonly by Punjabi speakers (most of my research participants). These terms are almost always invoked in comparison to the term zenana to claim authenticity and difference within the khawaja sira community. The label khusray (the plural of khusra) is usually reserved for individuals who have undergone surgical modification (generally genital excision of testicles and penis) of their body. This practice, which is increasingly becoming uncommon in Pakistan given the religious stigma associated with it, is much more common among Indian hijras (Reddy 2005) and considered a rite of passage to join the community. However, members of the khawaja sira community who identify as khusra generally claim to be born as intersex individuals and do not mention surgical modification of the body to outsiders. The khusray consider themselves to be the most authentic representatives of thirdness because they claim to be the only subgroup within the khawaja sira community that conforms to the traditional notions of authenticity and legitimacy about the khawaja sira identity. In doing so, the khusray reinforce the traditional notion that body is a major, if not the exclusive, site from which an authentic khawaja sira identity can be claimed.
11 - Waste, Governance, and Inclusion
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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When I started my fieldwork, I was interested in investigating the multiple forms of governance that intersect with the lives of the khawaja sira and how this intersection influences social equity by creating, sustaining, or contesting conditions of living at margins of the state and society. Various chapters of this book are explorations of this main theme. From the informal institutions identifying and disciplining the khawaja sira, to the insistence of law to fix their fluid identity, and the frontline workers limiting their presence in the public space, it is easy to identify a unifying theme operating through all these disparate forms of governance. In this concluding chapter, I explain this central governing leitmotif through the metaphor of waste.
There are multiple reasons for choosing this metaphor. As Jacobsen and Poder (2008, 51) note, ‘[w]aste is a conceptual tool of thinking sociologically with negations’. There are multiple sister concepts like the homo sacer (Agamben 1998; Catlaw 2007), abject citizenship (Kristeva 1982; Sharkey and Shields 2008), and inexistence (Badiou 2009; Prozorov 2014a, 2014b) that speak to some aspects of the khawaja sira's social situation. However, the metaphor of waste, which combines the idea of being discarded with the emotion of disgust, not only communicates best their social standing but also helps explain bureaucratic framing of the khawaja sira as moral pollutants in the public space.
In this regard, Douglas’ (1966) watershed work on waste is insightful. While many researchers have noted the problems associated with categorization schemas of society, it was Douglas who most clearly articulated that things that cannot be categorized easily given the governing social norms and categorization schemas, ‘matter out of place’, are often deemed disgusting, impure, and, hence, classified as waste. In other words, ‘the origin of waste stems from a social bifurcation between integrated and repressed individuals’ (Jacobsen and Poder 2008, 51). While Douglas’ work focused on all things (and people) classified as waste, it was Bauman (2004) who enunciated the concept of human waste most clearly. Bauman's concept of human waste (or wasted humans) aims to capture the experiences of the others, the deviants and the minorities who represent the failure of the classifying and order-building business of the state.
7 - Governing Thirdness at the Bureaucratic Offices
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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Following the global trend, and responding to the wave of terrorism since the start of the twenty-first century, there has been an increased focus by the state agencies in Pakistan to make sure that every citizen has a legal ID. This politico-legal environment has seen the khawaja sira—who traditionally did not have legal IDs—increasingly becoming concerned about having a legal ID. As mentioned in Chapter 5, a survey by the SWD found that only 16 per cent of the khawaja sira had legal IDs by 2019.1 While there were multiple factors due to which a very low percentage of khawaja sira had a legal ID, a major reason was that they seldom needed a formal ID in their routine lives. Shunned from formal institutions and workplaces, acquiring a legal ID rarely used to be a priority for them.
Owing to the mushrooming security checkpoints in all major urban centres of Pakistan and overall increased state surveillance, getting the legal ID has gradually become a major concern for the khawaja sira in recent years. For example, Rania, a khawaja sira rights advocate, mentioned that she had never felt the need to have a legal ID for anything until recently. However, due to the heightened security situation in Pakistan, she felt the obligation to acquire a legal ID. Similarly, another khawaja sira whose ID had been stolen a while back said that she never thought of applying for a new ID until recently as ‘one can't live without having a legal ID anymore’. Many other khawaja sira also reported increasingly being asked to prove their (legal and sexual) identity at security checkpoints by the police. Another factor contributing to the increased importance of legal IDs was the introduction of the legal third gender category by the government. As noted in the previous chapter, for some khawaja sira the legal ID represented a document that legitimized their unique identity.
While having a legal ID had become increasingly important for their everyday lives, at the time of my fieldwork most khawaja sira found it difficult to acquire it due to lack of cooperation by family members and harassment by cis-gender applicants at the frontline offices of NADRA.
1 - Governance, Thirdness, and the Khawaja Sira of Pakistan
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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In 2009, a few khawaja sira returning from a private wedding were arrested, maltreated, and harassed by some local policemen in Taxila, Pakistan. This incident, although no different from many others in a long history of violence and exclusion faced by the khawaja sira in Pakistan, proved momentous. Moved by their plight, Aslam Khaki, a local jurist filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court of Pakistan about the legal rights of the khawaja sira (Redding 2015). From 2009 to 2011, the Supreme Court of Pakistan gave multiple directives regarding the social position and legal identity of the khawaja sira, the most prominent of which was the creation of a new gender category to recognize their unique identity. In the final decision, the Supreme Court declared that the khawaja sira
in their own rights are citizens of this country and subject to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 1973, their rights, obligations including right to life and dignity are equally protected. Thus, no discrimination, for any reason, is possible against them as far as their rights and obligations are concerned.
This decision was the first time that the historically marginalized khawaja sira community of Pakistan was recognized by the legal and administrative apparatus of the country.
After the Supreme Court decision, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA)—the public agency in Pakistan which issues legal IDs (known as Computerized National Identity Cards or simply CNIC)—created a third gender category, officially called ‘Khawaja Sira’, in its national registration system. Celebrated at the time as a watershed moment by human rights advocates, there were high hopes associated with the Supreme Court decision. It was assumed at the time that legal recognition would also result in better socioeconomic inclusion of the khawaja sira community of Pakistan. However, the subsequent limited impact of this case on the lives of the khawaja sira and the almost unanimous disavowalof the legal third gender category by the khawaja sira community tells a completely different story.
In this story, legal recognition of marginalized groups like the khawaja sira community, especially when done on the basis of problematic discourses, represents a minor part of the socio-administrative apparatus that governs their lives.
4 - Governance in the Khawaja Sira Community
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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The subordinate status of a counterpublic does not simply reflect identities formed elsewhere; participation in such a public is one of the ways its members’ identities are formed and transformed. A hierarchy or stigma is the assumed background of practice. One enters at one's own risk (Warner 2002).
Individuals leaving or being thrown away from their families due to their perceived deviance from traditional notions of masculinity—whether that is because of their femininity, impotence, intersex characteristics, or some other reason—often end up joining the khawaja sira community soon afterwards. For a variety of reasons, the khawaja sira community is the only social group that welcomes them. Living alone is seldom an option for most individuals in Pakistan because society considers living as a family a normative ideal (Ebrahim 2013). This is especially the case for single women and the khawaja sira for whom renting rooms or apartments can be a nightmare given the reluctance of landlords and the (moral) suspicion with which they are viewed. Adult men in the vicinity can be a nightmare to deal with as a single woman or a khawaja sira, who often struggle to cope with the unwelcome advances of the men trying out their luck with what they often perceive as someone ‘open for business’. Moreover, as Cavalcante (2016) notes in the context of transgender lives, ‘[d]ue to the marginality and precariousness of gender variance, living a transgender life requires reliable structures of care and concern; structures that help to make the management of everyday life possible’ (118). The khawaja sira community through its extensive kinship system provides precisely this ‘structure of care’ where individuals discarded by their family find refuge.
For the khawaja sira, their community is a wide umbrella that gives shelter to all individuals who want to join them. Every new entrant, whether they are joining because of their femininity, impotence, or any other issue related to gender or sexuality, can find someone who can relate to their story within the khawaja sira community. In my observation, everyone appeared to be accepted with open arms within the community. There are certainly internal hierarchies and discourses of authenticity, especially between those who have undergone emasculation.
10 - Resisting Bureaucratic Governance of Thirdness
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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The police stop us at the traffic signals. I beg them and beseech them to let me go. (Nazia)
When I go to beg somewhere [and any police officer sees me], they say, ‘What are you doing? Don't beg here, go there [out of our jurisdiction]’. If they try to detain me, I throw myself at their feet and implore them to leave me [which usually works]. Whatever money I have on me; they take that away. (Meera)
The khawaja sira often find themselves on the receiving end of disproportionate administrative burden, hyper-surveillance, and moral policing by frontline workers of government. An important consequence of these administrator–citizen interactions is the curtailment of their everyday citizenship and social inclusion. Although one can romanticize the idea of resistance and ‘speaking truth to power’ (Farmer 2003), and academics are perhaps guiltier of it than anyone else, the harsh reality of the lives of most marginalized individuals is that they have to enact ‘cost reduction’ strategies (Emerson 1962) when confronted by the threat of power by the state officials. As Scott (1992) argues, ‘[w]ith rare, but significant, exceptions the public performance of the subordinate will, out of prudence, fear and the desire to curry favor, be shaped to appeal to the expectations of the powerful’ (55). That is why various performative and verbal ‘gestures of submission’ (Held 1999) are often the typical response of the khawaja sira when they encounter bureaucrats with the power to detain or arrest them. These gestures of submission, often a combination of bodily and speech acts (such as falling to the feet or imploring loudly), are quite common among the individuals of lower socio-economic status when confronted by those in authority in Pakistan.
These gestures of submission are meant to reaffirm the status and self-image of the police officials. For the khawaja sira, these act as short-term rational cost strategies that minimize the cost of compliance to the ‘powerful other’ (Emerson 1962, 35), in this case the cis-gendered police officers acting on behalf of the state. However, as Emerson (1962) notes, cost-reduction strategies seldom act as balancing operations in asymmetric power relations.
Part III - Bureaucratic Governance
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to critique the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticise them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked so that one can fight them. (Foucault and Chomsky 2006, 41)
While we often focus on what is written in laws and policies as an indicator of citizenship and rights of different groups, frontline offices of the government are the major sites where the classification regimes of the government actually come to fruition. From categorization at birth (through the birth certificate) to issuance of official identity (cards) and eligibility for various services of the state, frontline workers make most decisions that influence the lives of marginalized groups in many significant ways. This happens because identity in contemporary states is formed only when a citizen passes through the obligatory (bureaucratic) passage points (Callon 1986; Hardy 2003). Hence, the interaction between citizens and street-level bureaucrats—members of bureaucracy who directly deal with the public—represents this critical juncture where formal rules intersect with social power relations to form realized public policies.
The paradigmatic case of the classifying role of frontline bureaucrats is illustrative in this regard: Who gets classified as deserving and who does not—though partly determined by official policy (Schneider and Ingram 1993)—is influenced to a great degree by the choices of the frontline bureaucrats of different government departments. While one individual is given a verbal warning, another is given the full financial penalty under the given law for committing the same transgression (Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel 2014). Similarly, individuals applying for social welfare might be classified differently on the deserving–undeserving axis based on the discretion of the frontline workers (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003; Schram, Fording and Soss 2009). Frontline workers may also withhold services from transgender individuals considered ‘not normal’, sometimes with deadly consequences (Fernandez 1988; J. K. Taylor 2007). These multiple bureaucratic agential cuts (Barad 2003) influence individuals not just by defining who they are and what is socially acceptable but also by limiting and defining the possibilities open to them in life.
Contents
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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3 - Governing Thirdness in the Family
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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Family is an important informal boundary-making apparatus where individuals are classified along the normal–abnormal axis. This classification plays an important role in enforcing the social norms related to gender and sexuality (Feder 1997). Differences on these axes of identity are not taken lightly within Pakistani families and any individual deemed to be deviating from social norms is exposed to a range of disciplinary techniques aimed at correcting their socially defined deviant behaviour. The disciplinary practices and violence to which the young khawaja sira are exposed in their families seem to stem from two different impulses. On the one hand, parents are concerned for the safety and well-being of their child who, they correctly suspect, will be seen as deviant or abnormal, will face bullying and harassment at school, and will probably not find formal jobs later in life. On the other, they are also worried because the moral pollution associated with the khawaja sira is considered contagious; it infects their whole family, tainting their name and honour, and exposing all members of the family to harassment, teasing, and bullying. The institution of family is also exposed to disciplinary pressures mediated through extended kinship networks, neighbours, and friends of the family who make sure that the dominant gender norms are followed within each family. Overall, family and (significant) others play an important role in ensuring that children or young adults deviating from such norms either become ‘normal’ by conforming to their gender assigned at birth or get relegated to the formal and informal social institutions meant to ‘keep them in their place’ where it is ‘normal’ for such people to end up.
Categorization at Birth
As soon as a baby is born, the material-discursive apparatus comprising the parents, doctors, bureaucratic rules, social norms, and academic discourses declares whether ‘it's a girl!’ or ‘it's a boy!’ This declaration is supposed to decide the gender and sex identity of the newborn for its entire life and the infant is now supposed to spend life conforming to this declaration in which she/he had no choice.
Part I - Social Governance
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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There is no subject, no body, sex or gender, prior to the repressive constraints and generative power of culture … If transvestites, hermaphrodites, and other transgender categories occupy a space of desire and possibility, of undecidability, then they do so no less as socially and historically constituted subjects than as those who inhabit the conventional space … they interrupt. (Johnson 1997, 24–25)
When I began my fieldwork, it seemed that the following generic, ready-made response captured the reason for all khawaja sira joining the community.
From the beginning, I used to like playing with girls. I loved playing with dolls. I also liked putting on my mother's [or sister’s] make-up, wearing feminine clothes and dancing. I also used to perform feminine roles at home. My family couldn't accept that as I grew up. That is the reason why I left home and joined the khawaja sira community.
However, it was only gradually that I began to understand that this homogenizing narrative hides a whole range of underlying heterogeneous origins of the individuals who eventually become part of the khawaja sira community, some of which do not have anything to do with their desire to be performative women. As I gradually became more familiar with the khawaja sira and their vernacular (Farsi), some of them were kind enough to open up more about their childhood and share some uneasy details. I met Chandi, a young khawaja sira, living in a slum on the outskirts of Lahore. She had been raped repeatedly in her childhood by her uncle. The trauma of that episode had clearly not left her:
Only those who have been raped in youth join this [the khawaja sira] community … Once you have been raped, that never leaves you since everyone around you knows that about you. Such people, even if they leave their homes and shift somewhere else know this in their hearts [that they were raped]. Gradually, such people start developing feelings that they should have a boyfriend … The khawaja sira always starts like that.
List of Abbreviations
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Part II - Legal Governance
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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In considering many of the challenges that we face in matters of societal diversity, our inability to have an honest dialogue about how we develop our understanding of group construction and the impact of such construction on policy development keeps us on a road that prolongs ongoing challenges. (Farmbry 2009, viii)
An important way in which the state intersects with lives of marginalized individuals is by adjudicating or deciding on the legal definitions for various categories of individuals. The second half of twentieth century saw the rise of ‘politics of recognition’ (C. Taylor 1994) where marginalized groups tried to improve their social status by seeking formal legal recognition and protection of their identities. In contrast to the first half of the twentieth century, when redistributive justice was the predominant demand of marginalized groups, the primary demand of identity-based movements was recognition of their separate identity-based rights. These movements were based on the idea that by official recognition of their identity and associating rights with that identity, the problem of social marginalization will eventually disappear (McNay 2014). Examples of such recognition-based movements include, but are not limited to, the African American civil rights movement (Kluger 2011; Morris 1984); ethnic minorities’ movements for civil rights (Donato 1997; Rosales 1997); women's rights movements (Kerber 1980; Rhode 1991); gender queer groups’ struggle for recognition (Clendinen and Nagourney 2001; Smith 2008); and of individuals diagnosed with mental illnesses (Fleischer and Zames 2001; Scotch 1988).
However, the politics and consequences of recognition have been contested on multiple fronts in recent years because of persistent social exclusion and marginalization in society. First, Nancy Fraser (1997, 2000) and her colleagues (Fraser and Honneth 2003) have problematized the exclusive focus of identity-based movements on recognition by the state at the expense of redistributive demands. According to Fraser (1995, 2000), the rise of the politics of recognition combined with the fall of communism led to an increase in social injustice in certain societies since regressive economic policies were often not the primary focus of attention of the identity-based movements of marginalized groups. According to Fraser (1995, 2001), redistribution and recognition are equally important and distinct aspects of marginalization and social equity can be achieved only if both these categories of social injustice are addressed.
Frontmatter
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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Acknowledgements
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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Dedication
- Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
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