Bazaar Stories of Gender, Sexuality and Imperial Spaces in Gilgit, Northern Pakistan

Abstract

This paper provides a material and spatial analysis of processes of sexual imperialism in contemporary northern Pakistan. I interrogate Western women development workers’ experiences of sexual vulnerability in Gilgit, and argue that their representational practices and spatial negotiations are ambivalently organised by a discourse of racialised sexuality that emerged largely in the European era of high imperialism in the context of Western imperial relations and lingers into the ‘colonial present’. This discourse evokes a vaguely articulated moral panic about ‘lascivious’ indigenous men who lust after white women. Western women cope with sexual threat by scrutinising Gilgiti men’s behaviours, regulating social interactions with them, avoiding sexualised local space, and arranging their private spaces to exclude threatening men. Eroticist and racist discourses about Other men that are circulated through these efforts to cope with sexual danger reinforce established social, sexual, and spatial boundaries, which keep imperial hierarchies between Gilgiti men and Western women intact.