Globalization in Everyday Life. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2024. US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 9781503636057.
The Stigma Matrix is an elegantly written and critical contribution to the growing scholarly literature on gender in Pakistan. It beautifully explicates how women navigate stigma while maintaining their dignity and integrity as frontline public workers in a deeply patriarchal context. Women’s formal labour force participation rate in Pakistan hovers around 20 percent, among the lowest in the South Asia region. Fauzia Husain’s ethnographic exploration focuses on primary health care providers, known as lady health workers (LHWs), police officers, and airline attendants. These are among the most visible female employees in the public sector (LHWs alone number around 100,000). Her theoretical framework of a stigma matrix can be usefully applied to women in other sectors of the workforce to help policy makers and researchers appreciate the hostile challenges they negotiate and where the drivers of gendered economic exclusion need to be reckoned with more forcefully.
The book traces how the context of frontline work is embedded in multiple layers of sexual politics. Husain moves beyond locating the sexual tensions and politics of women’s presence in the public domain in tradition, culture, and religion. She explains how the cultural patriarchal practice of purdah, or norms promoting women’s seclusion that shape their exclusion from public space, were furthered through the political project of Islamization that began in 1979, and in which state policy reified norms with further controls on women’s bodily autonomy. She firmly places the British colonial encounter, and its sexualized interpretation of native women’s bodies, as central to her analysis of how the stigma for working women has been constructed historically, while other global processes such as neoliberalism have pushed women into the workforce despite the growing gendered stigma of their participation.
Globalization processes themselves become interrogated in Husain’s analysis, as she shows how the frontline women—whose stories she expertly foregrounds through vignettes in which the reader gets to hear their own words—interpret their position with regard to “global actors and agencies” (81). Thus, policewomen consider their utility towards advancing a more progressive image of the state to enable government to receive more international funds, while health workers regularly interact with global health forces, such as the United Nations and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, and are both overworked and underpaid in services to its agenda. (Throughout the book, Husain poignantly describes how the labour of LHWs is exploited when they are repeatedly forced to participate in the government’s polio eradication drives, a fact that other scholars have also noted motivated their collective action for improved pay and benefits.) The value of locating the stigma matrix for women frontline workers within global processes, she argues, enables us to grasp how it operates at sites where “local meets global, state meets citizen, public and official meet private and personal,” and by examining stigma “in this zone of multiple boundaries,” (231) we can better understand how it operates, and its applicability across other global settings.
So how do these classed and gendered workers exercise agency when trapped within this stigma matrix, where historical, global, and organizational/local forces work together to shape their experiences? Husain uses women’s own use of metaphors to illustrate how they describe themselves as situated within these global processes, and more fully grasp how their exercise of agency is responsive to “multi-layered contexts of meaning and relating.” Airline attendants see themselves as “global butterflies,” invested with the aspirations towards modernity held by the nation, yet in the local imagination they are nonetheless viewed as “frivolous, flighty, and fickle creatures” (82). Health workers are seen as “warriors,” “volunteers who selflessly sacrifice their lives at the altar of the children” (81) and deserving of both increased payments and recognition for the risks they face from militants and the public in the field. Policewomen see themselves as mere “tokens,” symbols of a hollow progressiveness in a “brutal and masculine” site of work (83).
Husain uses the concept of “spectacular agency” to explain “how frontline women negotiate the authority-threatening dramas of repudiation” (226) in the course of their work, such as humiliation by men in the community, the officials to whom they report, or passengers on a flight, all illustrated through carefully detailed descriptions of events. Such spectacles restore their dignity, such as airline attendants calling in the authorities in the UK to deal with harassment in the full view of not only their colleagues and superiors but the wider public as well. Yet the exercise of spectacular agency does not come without risk or a high cost. LHWs’ protracted collective action, which began in 2010 and continues to this day, has been fuelled by their own funds and they have endured painful separation from their families, even as it has brought limited gains in terms of workers’ recognition, increased compensation, and some measure of public regard. Here Husain’s analysis would have benefitted from references to the wider scholarship on the LHW protests, noting how their agency was indeed supported by key women in political parties, civil society organizations, and the feminist movement, thus widening the scope of their agency and ability to manoeuvre within the stigma matrix so effectively described in her book.
Husain’s book offers three key contributions. First, the theoretical innovation and use of a “stigma matrix” to analyze the multiple and layered processes which women frontline workers negotiate is helpful not only to understand their sites of work, but also other sites in a country like Pakistan where all women workers who are public-facing find themselves stigmatized. Second, the detailed ethnography permits the reader to step into women’s worlds more effectively than many other studies of women’s experience of paid work, such as quantitative surveys, may permit, deepening our appreciation for the drivers of their exclusion, the reasons why the experience is so depleting, and why progress towards higher rates of participation has remained so elusive. Finally, as she herself intended, Husain’s work is a significant contribution to our understanding of women’s agency in Muslim contexts. It reaches beyond the influential work by the renowned Pakistani scholar, Saba Mahmood, to appreciate how women cleverly, sometimes desperately, but always bravely, exercise agency as a response to simultaneous local, national, and global forces.
Ayesha Khan
Overseas Development Institute, London