ABSTRACT
When studying the social movements of religious minorities in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan today, the concept of visibility plays a key role. Until only a couple of decades ago, state-sponsored media widely ignored the country’s non-Muslim communities, and public knowledge about their day-to-day lives was scarce. The liberalization of media and, most importantly, the increasing ubiquity of social network sites have helped Pakistani Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Sikhs to gain more visibility in Pakistan’s publics. For many members of these communities, the digital mediation of their grievances plays an essential role in their striving to attain broader solidarities, recognition, and accountability. Increased visibility, however, does not always translate into more general movements of emancipation. Analyzing the activism circulating the alleged forced conversion of Hindu women to Islam, this chapter introduces the concept of “affectivism,” a form of becoming visible in the time of communicative capitalism that simultaneously yields movements of both empowerment (potentia) and restriction (potestas).
