MORAL INNOCENCE AND POLITICAL PRAGMATISM: THE SELECTIVE VISIBILITY OF PAKISTANI WOMEN IN GLOBAL FEMINIST DISCOURSE

Abstract

This research explored the ways in which Pakistani womanhood is created by global feminist and human-rights discourses in terms of regimes of selective visibility that favour the moral innocence against political expediency and institutional agency. In a comparative textual and discourse analysis of I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Daughter of the East by Benazir Bhutto, the research paper shows that transnational feminist discourse disproportionately extends women's victimhood and moral uprightness, making their power, compromise, and statecraft less visible in the global arrangements of visibility. Based on postcolonial feminist theory, discourse analysis, and studies of silence and absence, the article theorises absence as a non-random absence but rather as an organised phenomenon of discursive effectivity caused by unequal relations of power, which govern intelligibility, legitimacy, and moral acceptability. It is analysed that whereas the story of Malala is universally popularised with the help of a humanitarian grammar depoliticising the agency, the story on the topic of female political leadership by Bhutto is relatively mute or restructured because it is implicated in power, governance, and ambiguity. This study tackles the mainstream feminist theories that confuse empowerment with innocence through its foregrounding of the politics of visibility and erasure, and prefers a broader definition of women's agency to incorporate all aspects of negotiation and compromise and institutional power in postcolonial society.