Halal Dating, Purdah, and Postfeminism: What the Sexual Projects of Pakistani Women Can Tell Us about Agency

Abstract

Drawing on forty interviews, this article employs the framework of sexual projects to investigate how middle-class Muslim women navigate the contradictory requirements of sex and agency at the intersection of postfeminism and purdah in Karachi, Pakistan. While existing accounts of embedded agency risk reinscribing dualisms between Islam and the West, the three-pronged sexual projects approach stresses the relational and temporal dimensions of action and agency, focusing on the continuities and interconnections between them. Pakistani women manage the contradictory requirements of sex and agency in this context by crafting a middle-of-the-road response—halal dating—a sexual project that bears surprising affinities with the American hookup. Both halal dating and the hookup deploy strategic ambiguity, a strategy of impression management aimed at protecting women’s reputations by allowing them to occupy both sides of the slut/virgin binary. Both halal dating and the hookup galvanize allies for symbolic, logistical, and affective support, and both activate agency by jettisoning love, exchanging temporally costly commitments for truncated, affectively constrained, rational kinds of intimacy. A sexual projects framework not only allows us to glean similarities between these different contexts, it provides a crucial entry point for understanding what kinds of cultural, relational, and temporal arrangements are acquiring hegemonic authority in a global era, with what implications for inequality. Demonstrating how a sexual projects framework works, this article offers new insights for feminist conceptions of agency.

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