Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is a cultural and literary exploration of contemporary female narratives of protest in South Asia that are informed and injuncted by its ever-shifting geopolitical modalities. With the rise of globalization, neoliberalism and multiculturalism, South Asian geopolitics comprise a quest for a constant resistance of biopower and a recalibration of subjectivity formations. The book offers a sharp retort to Western Feminism's monolithic subalternization of the Third-World woman as the perpetual victim of endless suffering. The manifold iterations of protests foregrounded in the book are manifest evidence of the autonomous voices of Third-World women who have evolved as agentive subjects capable of contending with multiple structures of power. In contemporary Pakistan too, women's protest movements are situated within the context of gender-based violence and blasphemy-based violence against religious minorities, nurtured and fostered by government persecution and draconian discriminatory laws.