SOAS Research Online

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Abstract

There has been for a while a steady flow of critical studies of the women’s movement in Pakistan—that discursive and social formation of and about women that has been memorably described by Farida Shaheed, one of its foremost representatives, as a “movement with feminist demands.”¹ These studies query what the movement has become now that it has a long and eventful past, different political and cultural trajectories, individual and organizational harbingers, as well as those “who had failed” to keep up with the exigencies of a given period—in short, a sense of collective selfhood.