Urban Feminist Visuality in Contemporary Pakistani Art : Art and Activism after 9/11

Urban Feminist Visuality in Contemporary Pakistani Art traces feminist rebellion within urban Pakistan’s visual discourse, using social, cultural and art historical theories, and through a postcolonial and non-western feminist lens, it envisions an alternative art history.

Urban Feminist Visuality in Contemporary Pakistani Art traces feminist rebellion within urban Pakistan’s visual discourse. Using social, cultural, and art historical theories, and through a postcolonial and non-Western feminist lens, this book envisions an alternative art history that gives credence to cultural, historical, and even individual complexities to gender representation of urban Pakistani women. The volume unpacks artworks and visual media that include histories of ancestral wisdom, migratory anxieties, intergenerational feminist struggles, and (neo)colonial legacies. This book engages with female artists who strive to create a nuanced, gendered visuality by challenging and destabilizing monolithic representations, focusing on artistic responses to gender politics that emerged after 2001. The result is a disruption of the binary that has been formed around gendered brown bodies. This book is ideal for researchers and students in visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, and sociology.