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Kabul Carnival

Name: Kabul Carnival
Brand: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
SKU: 9780812246964
Price: 173.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESSISBN: 9780812246964

Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan

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$173.00

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By Julie Billaud
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
Release Date: July 14, 2015
Format: HARDBACK
Dimensions: 229 x 152 mm
Weight:
Pages: 256

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After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule was widely publicized in the United States as one of the humanitarian issues justifying intervention. Kabul Carnival explores the contradictions, ambiguities, and unintended effects of the emancipatory projects for Afghan women designed and imposed by external organizations. Building on embodiment and performance theory, this evocative ethnography describes Afghan women's responses to social anxieties about identity that have emerged as a result of the military occupation. Offering one of the first long-term on-the-ground studies since the arrival of allied forces in 2001, Julie Billaud introduces readers to daily life in Afghanistan through portraits of women targeted by international aid policies. Examining encounters between international experts in gender and transitional justice, Afghan civil servants and NGO staff, and women unaffiliated with these organizations, Billaud unpacks some of the paradoxes that arise from competing understandings of democracy and rights practices. Kabul Carnival reveals the ways in which the international community's concern with the visibility of women in public has ultimately created tensions and constrained women's capacity to find a culturally legitimate voice.

Julie Billaud is a Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Prologue: "If Only You Were Born a Boy" Introduction: Carnival of (Post)War PART I. PHANTOM STATE BUILDING Chapter 1. Queen Soraya's Portrait Chapter 2. National Women's Machinery: Coaching Lives in the Ministry of Women's Affairs # Chapter 3. Public and Private Faces of Gender (In)Justice PART II. BODIES OF RESISTANCE Chapter 4. Moral Panics, Indian Soaps, and Cosmetics: Writing the Nation on Women's Bodies # Chapter 5. Strategic Decoration: Dissimulation, Performance, and Agency in an Islamic Public Space Chapter 6. Poetic Jihad: Narratives of Martyrdom, Suicide, and Suffering Among Afghan Women Conclusion: The Carnival Continues Chronology Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

"Kabul Carnival is a breeze of fresh air. Reading this well argued ethnographic book on women's gender politics in Afghanistan allows for a more sophisticated approach to how we view 'the other'- the gendered other (Afghan women), as well as the religious other (Muslim Afghans)." (PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review) "Kabul Carnival examines the contested and changing gender politics in Afghanistan, largely focusing on recent issues but locating them in a wider historical sweep, setting a context in which orientalism and debates about modernity are echoed in the contemporary international agenda to reconstruct Afghanistan." (Patricia Jeffery, University of Edinburgh)

Kabul Carnival

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