Gender/Womens Studies

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Salaam, Sheikh Sahib!
An officer greeted my father in Karachi. My father facetiously whispered to me that this was the difference
between America and Pakistan: Here the police salute me, and in America they chase me. He often criticized
the racism and violence he suffered while living in the US. Handing me the newspaper, he stopped to have a cup
of tea. When he returned I asked my father to clarify a column about the Karo Kari of a local Sindh girl, and he
brushed it off as an unimportant news story. I was deeply disturbed to find that my fathers anger toward racial
violence and inequality did not did not apply to gender violence against women.
As a second-generation Pakistani-Indian student with dual experiences of living in Pakistan practicing Burqa and
Niqab as well as negotiating different spaces in the US wearing hijab and later navigating through the adult
entertainment industry, I found notions of western equality and femininity to be questionable. Indeed, despite my
autonomy in the US, I found myself shifting between different racist and patriarchal dimensions that in covert ways
negate ethnic and female subjectivities. I noticed the ways in which ethnic subjects are gendered female. This made me
question how gender operates in creating perceptions of otherness and structuring power. I sought address these
concerns with academic inquiry in my interdisciplinary study of English, Psychology, and Media & Culture Studies at UCR
through which I interrogate the interrelated relations of race, class, and gender. I believe that my technical knowledge
acquired by engaging with these broad range of courses as well as my practical knowledge prepares me to pursue a
Ph.D. from the Gender Studies program at UCLA. My intellectual trajectory has been shaped by postcolonial and feminist
theory on which I draw to investigate the politics of minority experiences. I analyze film and new media while honing my
skills of literary analysis enabling a holistic and multifaceted approach to interrogating institutions and psychologies of
oppression.
An important theorist who shaped my project as well as my knowledge of decolonizing methodologies and state
violence is Frantz Fanon. Based on Fanons scholarship and critical theory on Eurocentrism, I composed a research
paper, A Fanonian Epistemology for Decolonization, that dismantles the epistemologies of colonial ideology and
realizes a Fanonian truth or anticolonial consciousness. My essay analyzed both filmic and literary texts: Gillo
Pontecorvos film, The Battle of Algiers and Jamaica Kincaids book, A Small Place. My discussion of a Fanonian truth
sought to empower the colonized subject with a sense of self-determinationan idea of central importance to the
project of liberation movements. However, I found that while Fanons nationalist discourse and anticolonial movements
adequately address aspects of colonial imperialism, they fail to address patriarchal imperialism and, thus, perpetuate
the gendered oppression being critiqued. This experience espoused my disheartening experience with my father and
turned my attention to the gender inequality.
The gendered nature of violence, masulinist nature of imperial ideology, and contested trope of the nation was
a key concept of my thesis, Un-gendering the Nation, that uses the novels, A Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai and No
Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff to analyze how female postcolonial authors textually subvert male-centered
narratives and nationalism. In disputing patriarchal nationalism and the imperial ideology of which it is emblematic, my
discussion recuperates the problematic gendered aspects of national consciousness that Fanons scholarship brings to
light. It also explores female south Asian identities
In my production of original visual texts, I continued to grapple with issues of representation, deconstructs
gender, and redresses intersectionality. In a feminist reimagining of Thelma and Louise I refuse a punitive ending in
which the female leads die for usurping male authority. Thus, I create a space for female agency that the Hollywood
production disallows. Using bell hooks scholarship, I use an intersectional approach in casting mixed-race Hispanic and
Indian women as the leads, a gesture that allows for the interrogation of white feminist subjectivity. In revising
patriarchal narratives and deconstructing femininity I expose the mechanics of masculinity, femininity, their diacritic
relation, and their constructed nature. In my second production, a rape-revenge horror film, I expand my discussion of
gender and ethnicity to the nation. It critiques the violent nature of patriarchal order within the nuclear family as well as
the capitalist order of the nation of which it is emblematic. The film employs the Japanese motif of the Onryou, an
avenging female spirit who subverts traditional gender roles, and uses the trope of the female Other. In doing so, it

Gender/Womens Studies
illuminates Edward Saids notions of the Orient in constructing notions of monstrosity or Otherness. Thus, it critiques
patriarchal familialism and the gendered nature of national and social violence which explicitly relates the nation to
women. My final film production is a short documentary that uses independent news media, interviews, blogs, and
critical race theory critique mainstream liberal politics, specifically the Human Rights Commission, for a lack of
intersectionality with other disenfranchised groups specifically in its agenda of marriage equality that seeks to bring
LGBTQ groups into the fold of a white-supremacist and gender normative structure.

Gender/Womens Studies
As a graduate student I want to use a transnational approach informed by postcolonial and feminist theory to analyze
contemporary literature and film as well look to new media (independent news, blogs, etc.) to deconstruct cultural
events that play up on notions of western liberalism and feminism. My project aspires to contribute to new
theorizations about nationalism and feminism with regard to South Asian identity. Given Gender Studies
interdisciplinary approach of analyzing power, visual culture, and knowledge production thorough feminist frameworks I
believe this program will provide me the tools necessary to craft my dissertatiom that encompasses these
methodologies.
After project explain future goal of becoming a professor at an R1 institute as well as a film maker.
I will compare south Asian identities in the contact zonein our current age of globalization: how is the nation-state
gendered? How do notions of western feminism and liberalism play up on I will deconstruct them and create
alternative narratives I would like to theorize beyond the confines of neoliberal nation-state that perpetuate colonial
regimes of oppression and contribute to new forms of feminist theory.
Post 9/11 public cultures, experiencing events here and there
South Asian representation especially ppost 9/11
Western narrative of Malala
Weave in my grad school project throughout, and say that this or that shaped my project even more.
Pose questions and shape project
Dont just want to focus on gender b/c its narrow. Since im also an ethnic subject and many other things I wanted my
education to be broader and interdisciplinary