South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20

Can Fun Be Feminist? Gender, Space and Mobility

in Lyari, Karachi

Nida Kirmani

To cite this article: Nida Kirmani (2020): Can Fun Be Feminist? Gender, Space and Mobility in
Lyari, Karachi, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1716533

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1716533

Published online: 24 Feb 2020.

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1716533

ARTICLE

Can Fun Be Feminist? Gender, Space and Mobility in

Lyari, Karachi
Nida Kirmani
Department of Sociology, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The densely populated, multi-ethnic area of Lyari in Karachi is Feminism; fun; gender
one of the city’s original settlements. The area has become infam- studies; Karachi; marginality;
ous as the site of an ongoing conflict between criminal gangs, Pakistan; resistance; urban
studies; urban violence
political parties and law enforcement agencies for over a decade,
and, for this reason, Lyari has been labelled as one of several ‘no-
go areas’ in the city. However, for the residents of Lyari, the ways
in which they understand their part of the city far exceed these
facile labels. While at times their neighbourhoods do become
fearful spaces, they are also places of comfort, familiarity and fun.
This article explores the multiple ways in which women and girls
experience and understand this area. In particular, it documents
the various ways in which they express and experience enjoyment
in their everyday lives and during exceptional moments. Based on
extensive interviews and participant observation in several neigh-
bourhoods, the research shifts attention away from solely using
violence as a lens to understand urban space and away from see-
ing women mainly as victims of violence. Focusing on the pursuit
of fun and enjoyment as an area of academic inquiry can be an
important way to show how women push against and challenge
patriarchal boundaries. By highlighting women’s and girls’ own
creative navigations and engagements with their locality and the
city, this paper brings new insights into discussions of gender
and urban marginalisation more generally.

Background
The densely populated, multi-ethnic and largely working-class area of Lyari in Karachi
is one of the city’s original settlements. This area has become infamous as the site of an
ongoing conflict between criminal gangs, political parties and law enforcement agencies
for over a decade, and, for this reason, Lyari has been labelled as one of several ‘no-go
areas’ in the city. However, for the residents of Lyari, the ways in which they under-
stand their part of the city far exceed these facile labels. While their neighbourhoods
do become fearful spaces at times, they are also places of comfort, familiarity and

CONTACT Nida Kirmani nida.kirmani@lums.edu.pk

ß 2020 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

2 N. KIRMANI

fun—aspects which are often overlooked in research on marginalised urban spaces,

particularly in the Global South.
This paper explores the multiple ways in which women and girls experience and
understand their part of the city, and in particular whether or how they experience fun.
I argue that focusing on the pursuit of fun and enjoyment can be an important way in
which women push against and challenge patriarchal boundaries even if these acts may
not always fall squarely into the category of what is generally thought of as political
resistance within academic discourse. Based on extensive interviews and participant
observation in several neighbourhoods, the research shifts attention away from solely
using violence as a lens to understand urban space—an approach that has so far domi-
nated studies of Karachi in general and Lyari in particular—and away from seeing
women mainly as victims of violence. Rather, by focusing on the multiplicity of mean-
ings space holds for women and girls and by highlighting their own creative naviga-
tions and uses of these spaces, this paper brings new insights into discussions of
gender, urban space and experiences of marginality.

Lyari: A fearful space?

Located in Karachi’s South district and with a population estimated at between one
and 1.5 million, Lyari is one of the oldest, most densely populated and diverse areas
of Karachi.
Referred to by outsiders as ‘the Colombia of Karachi’ because of its perceived con-
trol by drug mafias, Lyari has increasingly become known as one of the most violent
and crime-ridden parts of the city, and is often painted as a ‘no-go area’ by the media
and law enforcement agencies. This has led to a sense of territorial stigmatisation
amongst Lyari’s residents who, in response, refer to their area as ‘Karachi ki maan’
(the mother of Karachi), marking their place as one of the city’s original settlements
and also highlighting a sense of comfort associated with their area.
Lyari’s negative image stems partially from the fact that it has been home to a var-
iety of criminal groups who have become increasingly powerful over the past decades.
While, like any impoverished urban area, crime has always existed in Lyari, the 1980s
is cited as the period in which violence in Karachi as a whole increased as a result of
the influx of weapons and drugs during the Afghan War. Drug use spread rapidly in
Lyari during this period as knife battles turned into gun battles between rival groups.
During the 1990s, crime and politics became very closely intertwined in Karachi, with
Lyari’s gangs being supported informally by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The
area has witnessed intermittent bouts of violence for the past two decades as a result of
conflicts between criminal gangs, political parties and law enforcement agencies. While
public acts of violence most often targeted men, there were reports in some neighbour-
hoods of gang leaders forcing young women to marry them. For this reason, young
women’s mobility was often restricted to their own neighbourhood where members of
their own gang could protect them. Furthermore, many young women reported drop-
ping out or suspending their studies because of a generalised sense of insecurity during
the period of conflict.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3

When I began my fieldwork in 2012, Karachi was emerging from a period of height-
ened conflict between the two major political parties in the city, the PPP and the
Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), with a great deal of violence targeted against
young Baloch men from Lyari who were suspected by the MQM of being affiliated
with the PPP-backed gangs.1 The following year, the main arena for the conflict shifted
to within Lyari because there was another split between rival factions of the gangs
which lasted for more than a year. Hence, during my first five years in Lyari, I worked
mostly on residents’ experiences of various kinds of violence in the area, including
everyday experiences of violence, representations of violence or resistance to violence.
At the same time, one of my main purposes in conducting research in this stigma-
tised part of the city, which is perhaps a shared goal amongst all ethnographers, has
been to complicate the way in which people understand Lyari, and to move away from
only looking at it through the limited and simplifying lens of violence. However, after
every presentation I have given on my research, people have often responded by asking,
‘How do you go there?’, or remarking, ‘Wow, you’re so brave!’ Despite my best efforts,
through my focus on violence, I was reinforcing the very ideas that I had intended to
problematise with my work. All of those other aspects of the area I am studying—the
energy, excitement, warmth and vibrancy that draws me there—remained silenced in
my research.
Perhaps this is a limitation in my own methodology or writing, but it is also a limi-
tation in terms of how researchers, particularly those studying poor, urban women in
the Global South, are often compelled to only ask particular questions and frame their
research within certain limited categories. If one is writing about violence, how does
one also write about all of those moments when violence is not taking place? And if
one is researching gender-based oppression, then how does one include all of those
moments when women are neither being oppressed nor necessarily actively resisting
power structures? Turning one’s attention to women’s experiences of fun and enjoy-
ment helps to complicate reductive understandings of urban life, particularly in stigma-
tised urban spaces such as Lyari.

The significance of fun

Sociology as a discipline has historically tended to focus on the negative aspects of cit-
ies as a result of industrialisation, including overpopulation, housing crises, poverty
and conflict. While the study of cities in the Global North has diversified to some
extent, studies of cities in the Global South are often trapped in the framework of per-
petual, almost apocalyptic crisis.2 This is particularly true for certain cities such as
Karachi, which has come to be understood almost solely through the lens of violence.
While this is tied to the fact that Karachi has experienced a relatively higher level of
violence compared to other cities in the region, and while this research has shed

1. Nida Kirmani, ‘Fear and the City: Negotiating Everyday Life as a Young Baloch Man in Karachi’, in Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 58, no. 5 (2015), pp. 732–55.
2. Dennis Rodgers, ‘Urban Violence Is Not (Necessarily) a Way of Life: Towards a Political Economy of Conflict in
Cities’, in Jo Beall, Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis and Ravi Kanbur (eds), Urbanization and Development:
Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 235–50; and Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary
Cities: Between Modernity and Development (London: Routledge, 2006).
4 N. KIRMANI

enormous light on the dynamics of the conflicts that have taken place in the city over
the past decades, the almost exclusive focus on violence has also led to a pathologising
of the city as only being defined by violence, with political/ethnic violence receiving the
most attention. While one cannot deny the existence of violence in the city, an over-
emphasis on violence excludes other key aspects of urban life. It also does not help
explain the wider context in which various forms of violence exist.
Apart from complicating the discussion of Third World cities, and of Karachi in
particular, in the context of literature on ‘Third World Women’, and ‘Muslim women’
specifically, the narrative in general has been dominated by the image of an ‘oppressed
Muslim woman’ shrouded in a burqa.3 Studies of Muslim women, particularly those
from less privileged classes, tend to approach women as victims of violence desperately
in need of rescue.4 This discourse is present in studies produced about Muslim-
majority contexts in the Global North, but is also reproduced in the Pakistani context.
Hence, as an upper-class researcher who is read as Pakistani, I am framed as being
both brave and altruistic for venturing into this most dangerous part of the city to ‘help
those poor women’. A focus on the more enjoyable aspects of women’s lives in Lyari
disturbs this very narrow, simplistic, Orientalist image, which objectifies women as pas-
sive victims of violent and backward cultures and of men.
Though I have also focused more on the ‘darker side’ of urban life in my own
research, this does not mean fun and enjoyment were completely absent. Rather, these
aspects of everyday life were always present in the narratives I heard from women in
Lyari and in my own subjective experience of the place. In my research on women’s
employment and domestic violence, for example, some women mentioned not neces-
sarily enjoying their actual paid work, which was often underpaid and unrewarding,
but they did enjoy being outside the home and getting a little breathing space from
their often restrictive families. For example, one of the young women I spoke to,
Saima, who was in her early twenties and worked at a large department store in one of
the malls in the upscale area of Clifton, made a point of showing me a series of selfies
she had taken in the break room wearing bright red lipstick to match the T-shirt that
was part of her uniform. While we spoke about the harassment she experienced on the
way to work and from disapproving neighbours and extended family, there were
aspects of her narrative that exceeded the framing of my question, which included the
fact that she actually enjoyed many things about her job and the freedom it afforded
her both materially and physically. Hence, the aspect of fun/enjoyment was always
there, lingering in the background, peeking out from behind the violence and oppres-
sion, but it was obscured by my limiting lens—a lens coloured no doubt by my own
positionality as a middle-class feminist academic.
Apart from the importance of talking about fun just because it exists and because it
complicates our understandings of cities and of women’s lives, one of the questions
this paper explores is whether the pursuit of fun and enjoyment can be thought of as a
political act and whether in particular it can be categorised as ‘feminist’. One of the

3. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, in boundary 2,
Vols. 12–13, no. IV (Spring–Autumn 1984), pp. 333–58; and Nida Kirmani, Questioning the ‘Muslim Woman’:
Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality (New Delhi: Routledge, 2013).
4. Lila Abu Lughod, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University
Press, 2013).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

earliest serious studies of fun was published in 1938 by the Dutch historian and cul-
tural theorist, Johan Huizinga,5 in which he studied the role of play in the generation
of culture. By contrast, members of the Frankfurt School critically explored the rela-
tionship between capitalism and leisure/enjoyment.6 Following similar lines, Sara
Ahmed has critiqued the compulsion towards happiness, particularly in the Global
North, as one that is driven by capitalism, consumerism and individualism.7 She argues
that in such a context, being a feminist ‘killjoy’ and refusing to buy into the compul-
sion to ‘be happy’ is a necessary form of political resistance. Where North American
and European feminist theorists have discussed the political potential of enjoyment,
they have largely focused more narrowly on the experience of sexual pleasure as
opposed to pleasure in general.8
This paper takes a broad approach to pleasure and includes any act through which
women individually or collectively experience enjoyment. I am inspired in this endeav-
our by the work of scholars of the Global South who approach enjoyment as an
important site of politics and resistance. I draw on the work of Laleh Khalili on
Palestinian women refugees in Beirut, in which she argues that critiques such as
Ahmed’s against pleasure and happiness are geographically and temporally specific.9 In
the case of Palestinian women in Beirut, and also in the case of women in Lyari, the
pursuit of enjoyment is an important opportunity for collective conviviality in an
otherwise challenging and often atomising context, and hence should be read as a polit-
ical act.
In the South Asian context, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade have
written about the importance of loitering—hanging out with no purpose—as an act of
resistance by women in order to claim public space.10 In particular they talk about the
political importance of women occupying public space in a non-productive and non-
consumptive manner and in a manner that involves women taking risks.11 They refer-
ence Bayat’s description of fun:
an array of ad hoc, nonroutine, and joyful conducts—ranging from playing games, jok-
ing, dancing, and social drinking, to involvement in playful art, music, sex, and sport, to
particular ways of speaking, laughing, appearing, or carrying oneself—where individuals
break free temporarily from the disciplined constraints of daily life, normative obliga-
tions, and organised power. Fun is a metaphor for the expression of individuality, spon-
taneity, and lightness, in which joy is the central element. While joy is neither an
equivalent nor a definition of fun, it remains a key component of it … . [Fun] often
points to usually improvised, spontaneous, free-form, changeable, and thus unpredictable
expressions and practices.12

5. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949).
6. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Free Time’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, Henry W. Pickford (trans.) (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 167–76; and Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge, 1956).
7. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
8. Cora Kaplan, ‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism’, in Frederic Jameson (ed.), Formations of Pleasure
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 15–35.
9. Laleh Khalili, ‘The Politics of Pleasure: Promenading on the Corniche and Beachgoing’, in Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 34, no. 4 (2016), pp. 583–600.
10. Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (New Delhi:
Penguin Books, 2011).
11. Ibid., p. 110.
12. See Asef Bayat, ‘Islamism and the Politics of Fun’, in Public Culture, Vol. 19, no. 3 (2007), pp. 433–59 (p. 434).
6 N. KIRMANI

Phadke, Khan and Ranade subsume fun under the broader umbrella of pleasure and
argue that pleasure ‘undermines the very possibility of order and control’ in a society
in which ‘ideas of propriety are often centred on controlling women’s movements’.13
Hence, women having fun, especially in public spaces, are often viewed as threatening
because they challenge the notion that women’s presence in public is only acceptable
when they have a purpose.14
In the following section, I focus on a selection of episodes of fun and enjoyment
that I observed while spending time with young women from mixed ethnic back-
grounds belonging to what could loosely be described as the lower middle class in
Lyari15 in order to explore further the potential that fun holds in terms of challenging
gender norms. This paper approaches fun and enjoyment through James Scott’s notion
of infrapolitics,16 which refers to small, everyday actions of refusal and resistance and
argues that these small acts can also have wide-ranging effects on the organisation of
power relations. However, this does not mean falling prey to the allure of ‘the romance
of resistance’.17 While the pursuit of enjoyment can both purposefully and inadvert-
ently push the boundaries of dominant gender regimes,18 and hence be classified as
feminist resistance, this is not always the case. Building on a small but growing litera-
ture on the political significance of happiness and enjoyment amongst women from
marginalised groups,19 I argue that the pursuit of fun and enjoyment are important
means through which women and girls both confront and conform to prevailing gen-
der norms. An analysis of these episodes highlights the multiple meanings enjoyment
can hold for women and disturbs simplifying binaries of resistance and submission,
violence and peace, to reflect the complex negotiations that characterise the rich texture
of everyday life in marginalised and conflict-affected urban localities. It is through
these types of everyday negotiations that gender orders are both reinforced
and challenged.

Episodes of enjoyment
As a researcher who has been attuned to looking for violence, it took me some time to
adjust my focus in order to be able to see the enjoyment taking place around me. This
problem was made worse by the fact that those who I encountered were also not used
to being asked about that aspect of their lives, but rather expected that I wanted to

13. Phadke, Khan and Ranade, Why Loiter?, p. 113.

14. Although written about Mumbai, Why Loiter? has also had an influence on debates and activism on the
Pakistani side of the border, spurring groups such as ‘Girls at Dhabas’ and ‘Girls on Bikes’, which aim to spark
conversations and expand women’s access to public space.
15. The class composition of Lyari is extremely complex. While, historically, the area has been known to be largely
working class, with the decline of factory work and employment in the port, men in the area are currently
employed in a variety of fields including as lower-level government employees, petty traders and as workers in
the service sector. While most women are not engaged in paid employment, a growing number are employed
in the booming low-cost private school sector and many are employed in the health or service sectors.
16. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1990).
17. Lila Abu Lughod, ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women’, in
American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, no. 1 (1990), pp. 41–55.
18. Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
19. See Khalili, ‘The Politics of Pleasure’; and Bianca C. Williams, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic
Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7

hear about the problems they were facing. As Proudfoot points out, the experience of
enjoyment often cannot be captured through the technique of interviewing because these
experiences exist in the extra-discursive realm.20 For example, 19-year-old Hina, who
assisted me with this research, said that women in her neighbourhood hardly have any
fun in their lives. She complained about their lack of freedom, the restrictions they face
from their families, and the constant judgement of neighbours—issues that young
women face across the city. However, when I spent time with Hina in her neighbour-
hood, the picture I saw was quite different from the one she described to me. Yes,
women were not as visible in public space, and yes, they were constrained by various
social restrictions, but once we entered the narrow galis, there were lots of women and
girls ‘loitering’ in front of their houses, chatting and smoking hookahs. They would also
go up to the rooftops to escape the heat of their cramped living quarters during the fre-
quent power cuts that plagued most areas of the city, including Lyari. This gave women
a much-needed break from their household responsibilities and a chance to congregate
and catch up on the neighbourhood gossip. Perhaps Hina did not identify these everyday
activities as being explicitly ‘fun’ because they were so mundane, or perhaps these activ-
ities were not considered ‘fun’ because they were still constrained in particular ways
(occurring within or close to home and in between other responsibilities), but certainly
there was enjoyment interwoven within the fabric of everyday life.
Apart from these everyday moments of conviviality, women would use the oppor-
tunity provided by religious festivals and rituals to get out of the house and enjoy
themselves, something common across the subcontinent and also observed by Phadke,
Khan and Ranade in their work on women living in slums in Mumbai.21 A visit to a
shrine, for example, would provide women with a legitimate reason to take a trip out
of the neighbourhood or the city and enjoy an outing. Furthermore, much like
Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, the month of Ramadan allowed a relaxation of social
norms, which women seemed to enjoy the most. While neighbourhoods were virtual
ghost towns during the day, the streets were transformed after sunset by a party-like
atmosphere, particularly as the Eid holiday approached—a phenomenon that is com-
mon in most non-elite Muslim neighbourhoods across the region. For women in Lyari,
Ramadan provided a legitimate excuse to go out with their friends and female family
members in the neighbourhood, often under the pretence of shopping, but more often
just to wander around almost as fl^aneurs, enjoying the sights and sounds of the street.
Very often, the pursuit of enjoyment was something women, and young women in
particular, did on the sly in ways that were ‘sneaky’ or using the spaces available within
accepted norms in unacceptable ways in order to create space for themselves to find
enjoyment, thus not openly challenging restrictions, but using spaces within the
bounds of accepted social norms to their own advantage. For example, as in many
Muslim-majority contexts, women in Lyari often use the veil strategically in order to
increase their mobility and at times to get away with things that might otherwise be
deemed controversial.22

20. Jesse Proudfoot, ‘Interviewing Enjoyment or the Limits of Discourse’, in The Professional Geographer, Vol. 62, no.
4 (2010), pp. 507–18.
21. Phadke, Khan and Ranade, Why Loiter?, p. 133.
22. Homa Hoodfar, ‘More than Clothing: Veiling as an Adaptive Strategy’, in Sajida Sultana Alvi, Homa Hoodfar and
Sultana McDonough (eds), The Muslim Veil in North America (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2003), pp. 3–40.
8 N. KIRMANI

Women also push the boundaries of cyber space through a type of virtual veiling.
For young women in particular, social media is opening up a platform to explore dif-
ferent sides of their identities and different types of relationships. However, it is still
not acceptable for most young women to have Facebook accounts in Lyari. The minor-
ity who manage to access social media do so in secret, using a pseudonym and never
publicly sharing their own photo on the platform. They can use their accounts to initi-
ate conversations with different people, make friendships, hold discussions, and often
flirt. Social media and mobile phones have in fact transformed the ways in which
young people communicate, find romantic partners and have fun in ways that are a
constant source of anxiety for members of the older generations. While access to tech-
nology is still limited, it is more widespread in middle- and lower-income urban local-
ities such as Lyari than one might expect, and it is radically transforming social
relationships and opening up new possibilities for the experience of enjoyment for
young people in general.
For instance, one Sunday, I went on a ‘picnic’ with a group made up largely of
women students between the ages of 19 and 25 from a vocational training centre with
which I am affiliated, and which provides free or low-cost classes in English, IT, beaut-
ician training and sewing, mostly to young women in the area. There were about 25 of
us on the trip, and we took a coach trip to Thatta, two hours outside of Karachi, to visit
several tourist sites. When I arrived at the centre in the morning, most of the young
women were quite dressed up for the occasion in brightly coloured shalwar kameezes.
Dressed in my everyday wear with comfortable sandals and hardly any make-up, I was
conscious that I looked quite shabby in comparison. Naila, who helps the centre with
accounts and is a student at the local university, was wearing very high heels—so high
that I wondered how she would walk to all of the sites we planned to visit during the
trip—and full make-up.
Although on normal days most would be wearing a black burqa, very few were
wearing them today. One of the women, however, never took off her niqab throughout
the day, and the rest of us kept laughing at her for taking selfies while still wearing it.
But she was only exceptional because she took selfies with her niqab on. Otherwise,
most of the day seemed all about taking selfies in every possible spot—in the bathroom
of the restaurant we stopped at to break our journey, in the bus, and even in and
around one of the shrines we visited, which made one of the caretakers scold them, but
which hardly stopped them. A few of the young women were also scolded by older
male strangers over the course of the day—at the shrine and then at a mosque—for not
dressing properly, which they just shrugged off. After all, these men really did not have
any power over them.
There was a freedom these young women had when they were away from their own
neighbourhoods. They truly did not seem to care what people were saying or thinking
about them, which was not possible when they were closer to home. They also seemed
to relish this freedom. This was most apparent when we went to Kheenjar Lake, which
was full of families and groups of young men who had come to spend the day playing
around in the water, sitting in tents by the lake, eating, listening to music, and gener-
ally enjoying themselves. Here you could see the young women revelling in their free-
dom. When we piled into a motorboat for a ride around the lake, Areesha, who teaches
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

the beautician course, kept standing up, spreading out her arms and screaming at the
top of her lungs with joy—attracting a lot of attention but not really caring about it.
When we visited other spots, Areesha would flirt with random guards and police offi-
cers in a way that she could never get away with in her own neighbourhood. On the
bus on the way back, we were all singing and dancing in our seats and breaking out
periodically into fits of laughter. No one seemed to want the day to end. Some of the
women kept asking the bus driver to stop at Aladdin Park (an amusement park) on the
way home despite the fact that we were already going to return much later
than expected.
Over the course of the day, the enjoyment of dressing up and taking selfies was
clear. One could argue, along the lines of Abu Lughod, that this kind of enjoyment
reinforced a restrictive and gendered consumer culture that places pressure on women
to conform to a particular beauty standard.23 At the same time, this could also be
viewed as an important means of self-expression for these young women in a context
where women’s sexuality in particular is constantly policed and controlled and could
even be viewed as risky considering the chances of photos being leaked (either pur-
posefully or by accident). Secondly, the reason why the young women from the voca-
tional centre were able to let loose was because they were away from prying eyes in
their own neighbourhoods. This gave them the freedom to take off their burqas, dress
up, laugh out loud, flirt with strangers, and generally be irreverent. It provided a break
for these women from being constantly under surveillance. While this did not necessar-
ily challenge gender norms within their own context, it was precisely the exceptionality
of this event and its geographical distance from their homes that allowed for the possi-
bility of freedom to enjoy. While the young women on the picnic were in some senses
challenging gender norms, they were doing so away from the prying eyes of their fam-
ily and neighbours. These momentary suspensions, though exceptional in some senses,
might give these women the confidence to push boundaries when they are back ‘home’
in their everyday lives. Once they have tasted ‘freedom’, they might not be willing to
give it up so easily.
On another day, I had a conversation with two young women, Sameen and Maham,
about what cycling means to them. Sameen is 19 and Maham is 25 and both work for a
community organisation called the Lyari Girls Cafe, which is a non-
governmental organisation (NGO) that offers a variety of free classes to girls and
women in the area. The Lyari Girls Cafe started organising bicycle rides every few
Sundays last year, which was a deliberate effort to claim public space for women and
girls. This echoed the efforts of another group, ‘Girls on Bikes’, which had organised
similar rides in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. However, while Girls on Bikes was
mostly made up of upper-class women cycling in upper-class localities, the Lyari Girls
Cafe catered to women from the lower-middle-class communities in Lyari. While the
act of cycling may not seem particularly controversial, it is rare to see women or girls
of any class riding bicycles in Pakistan whether for transportation, exercise or leisure,
although from conversations with older women, it seems to have been more common
in the past. For this reason, riding a bicycle has come to hold a kind of symbolic value

23. Abu Lughod, ‘The Romance of Resistance’, pp. 41–55.

10 N. KIRMANI

when it comes to women asserting their agency and their right to occupy public space.
It is also simply a source of enjoyment.
When they first started their bike rides, the members of the Lyari Girls Cafe met
resistance from the local branch of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a Right-wing religion-based
political party with a significant amount of support in Lyari, and although they still
reportedly face a great deal of harassment, over time, they have been able to carve out
a space for themselves. More recently, Sameen and Maham have started taking their
bicycles out together by themselves, which they found both nerve-wracking and exhila-
rating. While Sameen’s family did not mind her cycling, she would have to sneak out
of her house early in the morning to avoid being seen by her disapproving male cous-
ins. I spoke to the women about why cycling was so important to them:
Sameen: First of all, we stay fit by cycling, and the second reason is that we have found
a solution to the pollution problem through cycling. There is a lot of pollution! And
what is important is that when we cycle, we feel a sense of freedom. We come very
close to freedom, and in the fresh air early in the morning—we really like cycling then
and we feel ‘empowered’.
Maham: And often we hear people say, ‘Lyari isn’t Defense’,24 so we say, ‘Even if we go
to Defense, what will be different there from Lyari?’ We say: ‘We want Lyari to stay as
Lyari. We don’t want to make it Defense’. If girls are cycling on the streets, why are you
saying it is like Defense?
Nida: And girls don’t actually cycle on the street in Defense. They don’t even walk on
the street there!
…
Sameen: People say this is ‘Naya [New] Pakistan’ [sarcastically] when they see us.
Maham: ‘Tabdeeli aa gayee hai (change has come)’.25 And someone else said: ‘Baji, you
are a girl. You aren’t a boy. Why are you cycling?’ I said: ‘Bhai, why are you cycling?
This is a sport for girls now!’
Compared to the picnic, there is a much clearer articulation of resistance in these
women’s narratives. The young women at the Lyari Girls Cafe were deliberately and
consciously challenging gender restrictions through the act of cycling. While many of
their justifications could be read as attempts at legitimising their behaviour in a socially
acceptable manner (for example, the reference to health and the environment), there
was also an explicit articulation of a feeling of freedom and ‘empowerment’ when they
cycled—an opportunity to breathe in an otherwise stifling environment—which dem-
onstrated the inextricable link between their pursuit of enjoyment and their assertion
of their ‘right to the city’. The fact that they were doing this in their own locality, under
the disapproving gaze of family members and neighbours, underlined the boldness of
this assertion.
At the same time, while they at times cycled in their own neighbourhood, they
mostly preferred to go to other neighbourhoods in Lyari or to an area just outside
Lyari where there was more open space, and they did so early on Sundays when there
were relatively few men hanging out on the streets. As well, apart from Sameen and

24. ‘Defense’ refers to the Defense Housing Authority, which is an upper-class area of Karachi.
25. This is a reference to the election promise by the current prime minister, Imran Khan, to bring tabdeeli (change)
and usher in a ‘Naya Pakistan’ if he was elected.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11

Maham, most of the members of the Lyari Girls Cafe who went on the cycling trips
were quite young because restrictions on dress and mobility increase after girls reach
puberty and approach what is considered a ‘marriageable age’. Hence, in this case, as
well as in the case of Sameen having to sneak out of the house early, there is an aspect
of manoeuvring around gender restrictions rather than challenging them outright. Like
the women at the picnic, Sameen and Maham managed to find ways of experiencing
fun and enjoyment by strategically navigating within, around and pushing back against
the gendered restrictions placed on their mobility.

Conclusion
While women and girls find opportunities for fun and enjoyment in multiple spaces, in
the gali, on the roof, at a neighbour’s house, in the mall, at the market, at a shrine and
in the virtual space of Facebook, WhatsApp and, more recently, Tik Tok, the common
thread seemed to be that, most often, fun and enjoyment happened for women outside
their own homes. This is unsurprising given that for the majority of women and girls,
the home was the site where they faced the most social restrictions from their male and
older female family members. This goes back to the importance of having fun in public
emphasised by Phadke, Khan and Ranade.26 For the vast majority of women, the fur-
ther one travelled from home, the more freedom one had to challenge gendered codes
of behaviour. Hence, controlling women’s mobility was also key to preserving the gen-
der order.
Returning to the original question, were these experiences of fun and enjoyment any
more than a momentary break from an otherwise repressive environment? And did
these episodes hold within them the possibility of transforming gendered power rela-
tions? While it is true that women’s experiences of enjoyment often took place during
exceptional moments or in secret, and despite at times feeding into gendered con-
sumerist desires, these moments can be viewed as providing openings for women to
push back against rigid gender codes. Jameson has argued against the moralising cri-
tique made by some within the Left of pleasure as a justification for capitalism.27
Rather, he sees the allegorical potential of pleasure as a means of imagining the
‘systemic revolutionary transformation of society as a whole’.28 While Jameson is
speaking in a purely Marxist sense and not referring to gender relations per se, one
could also extend his argument to the potential that enjoyment holds for the trans-
formation of the structure of gendered power relations. This points to a lacuna within
much feminist theorising, which has tried to locate women’s agency in more explicit
forms of protest and activism and overlooked the transformative potential of everyday
activities such as fun and enjoyment.
At the same time, in focusing on fun and enjoyment, one should be careful not to
slip into romanticising the lives of poor and lower-middle-class women, which are
fraught with very real restrictions in terms of their mobility from their families,

26. Phadke, Khan and Ranade, Why Loiter?

27. Fredric Jameson, ‘Pleasure: A Political Issue’, in Fredric Jameson (ed.), Formations of Pleasure (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 1–14.
28. Ibid., p. 13.
12 N. KIRMANI

communities and society as a whole. For example, Saima, who worked at the depart-
ment store, has since left her job because her fiance and his family would not accept
the fact that she was working in such an establishment. Sameen has resigned from the
Lyari Girls Cafe and has stopped cycling because she said she needed time to focus on
her studies, but her colleagues told me that she had likely left due to pressure from her
family. The members of the Lyari Girls Cafe were, at the time of writing, facing a
renewed offensive on social media from the local religious parties for tarnishing the
image of Lyari and ‘corrupting’ local women and girls after they had received coverage
in the international media through a video made about them by Al Jazeera, and due to
their participation in the 2019 Aurat March, which was held on International Women’s
Day. Hence, even the limited spaces that women claim for themselves in order to
experience any kind of joy in their lives are constantly under threat.
It is also worth noting that much of what I have described in this paper in terms of
how women have fun is not unique to Lyari or Karachi or even Pakistan. One thing
that is particular to Lyari, however, is that such opportunities would not have been
there during the period of heightened conflict when the mobility of all residents was
restricted. This was the case regardless of gender, and my earlier research focuses on
the restrictions on mobility faced by young Baloch men during this period.29 However,
for women whose mobility is already restricted, the conflict meant that outings without
an explicit purpose—just for fun—would be much less likely to have occurred. Thus it
is only since 2013, when a paramilitary operation was launched in the city as a whole
and violence (at least at the hands of non-state actors such as gangs) subsided, that one
can see the resumption of social activities in Lyari and the opening of spaces such as
the Lyari Girls Cafe.
Finally, focusing on fun and arguing for a more complex understanding of margin-
alised urban spaces does not mean ignoring the issue of violence. As Pavoni and
Tulumello argue, there is no such thing as a ‘violence-free’ urban space and the imagin-
ation of such a space in security discourses tends to produce new kinds of violence.30
Rather, like fun, violence is always a part of everyday life, whether it is the memory of
past violence or the imminent threat of future violence, and whether it is physical,
structural or symbolic in form. And, as Verkaaik argues, at times violence is even expe-
rienced as a form of ‘fun’.31 In an economically-deprived area such as Lyari, which has
experienced almost two decades of violence at the hands of multiple actors, and in the
lives of women who constantly face the threat of violence in their daily lives, one can-
not forget the fact that violence exists. However, focusing exclusively on violence gives
an incomplete picture. Including an analysis of other aspects of social life, such as expe-
riences of fun and enjoyment, provides a more complex picture of the richness that
constitutes everyday urban life and highlights the multiple ways in which women cre-
atively negotiate within, around and against various spatial and social boundaries, thus
allowing space for the agentive possibilities of pleasure to emerge.

29. Kirmani, ‘Fear and the City’.

30. Andrea Pavoni and Simone Tulumello, ‘What is Urban Violence?’, in Progress in Human Geography (2018),
doi: 10.1177/0309132518810432.
31. Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 13

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the women whose stories inspired this paper, my friends at the Lyari
Girls Cafe and Sindh Tech Skills Development Centre who opened their spaces and hearts to
me and facilitated the fieldwork for this research. I would also like to thank the South Asia
Program at Cornell University and the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative at the Lahore
University of Management Sciences for allowing me to present and receive feedback on earlier
drafts of this paper. Finally, I am extremely grateful to the editors of this special section, Ulka
Anjaria and Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, and the three anonymous South Asia reviewers for their
valuable and insightful feedback, which helped me to further clarify my thinking and hone
my argument.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).