The Stigma Matrix is a welcome addition to gender scholarship on Pakistan. It explores Pakistani women’s employment experiences in three sectors- as police officers, air hostesses, and Lady Health Workers (LHWs)[1]– with a focus on how these “frontline women”, as Husain calls them, navigate the stigma associated with their occupation of public space. As employees of government institutions[2], these women extend the state’s reach to gendered sites and subjects that are otherwise inaccessible to the state due to purdah (veiling/segregation) norms that govern women’s appearance in public space. In doing so, Husain argues, these very agents are stigmatised for violating the purdah norms that the state reproduces through them. Thus, contrary to the liberal expectation that women’s increased labor force participation will necessarily result in their ’empowerment’, or that taking on the role of state agent/representative will vest these women with an authority that they are otherwise denied, The Stigma Matrix paints a complex, dynamic, and contradictory picture of these women’s experiences of being state agents or ‘frontline workers’ in each of these lines of service work. The book’s particular focus is on the navigation of stigma by these workers and the numerous, diverse, and complex ways in which stigma both constrains these women’s abilities to perform their roles as public service providers and/or authorised state agents and also shapes their sensibilities and strategies of resistance (which Husain refers to as ‘de-stigmatisation efforts’).

Husain understands stigma as “not just a set of physical or symbolic marks, but an ordering instrument” employed by local and global elites (p. 232). Drawing on Imogen Tyler’s (2020) work, Husain argues that sexual/gender-based stigma in the Pakistan/South Asia context has served a variety of political and economic functions spanning both the local and the global, such as aiding empire and capital accumulation, legitimising colonial interventions, and, in the contemporary Pakistan context, as political currency to further authoritarian Islamisation projects by political actors both within and outside the formal state apparatus.

One of Husain’s key motivations for writing the book is to “capture the oft-obscured global dimensions of local gender-based stigmas” (p. 230). The ‘stigma matrix’, Husain argues, is a conceptual and methodological tool that enables such an investigation by offering a multi-scalar and multi-dimensional approach to studying stigma, one which can be used beyond the particular contexts explored in the book. Keeping in view the micro, meso and macro levels at which stigma operates, Husain remains attentive to multiple layers of context:  individual and institutional, local and global, historical and contemporary, which together create the conditions within which frontline workers experience as well as contest stigma. Husain argues that the stigma matrix (in the Pakistan context) is produced around the notion of purdah, which is deployed both by the state (to reproduce patriarchal gender norms) and by frontline women themselves (in search of privacy and dignity). Husain understands purdah idioms and practices to be bound simultaneously by class and gender, so that when women attempt to redefine meanings in one arena, they are ensnared by the other (p. 238). Husain uses Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) work to theorise the entanglements of class and gender in Chapter 1 (see p. 30) but does not develop this theorisation to its full potential in her later chapters. Additionally, given the book’s focus on Pakistan’s frontline workers who serve as public-(inter)facing state agents, it would have benefited from including an account of the deeply personalised, patronage-based social relations that constitute the Pakistani postcolonial state and shape the actions and subjectivities of its agents.

Alongside stigma, agency is a major conceptual focus of the book. Specifically, Husain theorises agency as both ‘symbolic’ and ‘relational’, emphasising the attempt at recruiting allies as a central feature of frontline workers’ agentic practice. ‘Spectacular agency’, one of the core themes in the book, shows women using/creating spectacle as a meaning-making exercise that enables them to perform a variety of femininities as well as to recruit allies/sympathisers in their immediate and/or wider contexts. While spectacular agency enables women to “highlight their problems, punish their abusers, and critique the system” (p. 219), it is a strategy that comes with its own costs. These costs include not just risking further indignity and stigmatisation should the spectacle fail to elicit the desired response(s), but also the cost of ‘successful’ instances of spectacular agency which often deploy symbols that reinforce dominant gender and class stereotypes and thus, on the societal level, serve to re-stigmatise rather than de-stigmatise, women.

The book is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted primarily in the city of Karachi between 2015 and 2018. Primary data collection was done through 120 formal in-depth interviews and through numerous instances of careful observation of research participants in their workplaces and homes. Secondary data gleaned from training manuals, news items, websites, and social media commentaries were used to contextualise the narratives that emerged from the primary data.

As a fellow ethnographer, I find Husain’s story of the research process– tucked away into the Appendix–to be of great interest and importance. It makes visible the author herself as a character in the story, and reveals not just her methodological dilemmas, ethical conundrums, and political motivations, but also provides important insights into how the book’s contents, its arguments, and points of emphases were shaped. This is why the ‘methods Appendix’ is where I felt the most resonance with the narrative, and also where some of my questions about the book were answered and others arose.

For instance, even though Husain explains briefly in the Introduction that she chose these three forms of employment for investigation “because of their connection to stigma, purdah, and globalisation” (p. 22), it is in the Appendix that we learn that the connection was initially made by her research participants when speaking about the experiences of other (women) friends and relatives who were employed in these sectors. However, they are not the only lines of women’s work that illustrate these connections. If one were to extend one’s view to Pakistani women’s employment in other service sectors- such as office secretaries, receptionists, media workers, or beauty parlour workers in the private sector- or to domestic service and sex work which are major forms of women’s employment in the informal sector, one could argue that each of these lines of work provide unique insights into connections between stigma, purdah, and globalization which are both local and global, historical and contemporary. In fact, the kinds of stigma associated with domestic service and sex work in particular are arguably more debilitating for women workers than in the lines of work investigated by Husain.

While Husain describes women across the three arenas (police, LHWs, and air hostesses) collectively as ‘working-class’, Chapter 4 (which focuses on the LHWs) acknowledges- albeit fleetingly- the important class differences between the three groups of women and how the institutional differences between the three lines of work are also marked by class. These differences are particularly noticeable in the resistance strategies deployed by each group, particularly in their enactment of individual and/or collective agency- with the latter deployed only by the LHWs, who are largely poor, low-caste, with few employment alternatives and greater restrictions on their physical mobility than the other two groups of women (Mumtaz et al., 2013). Though Husain does not address this in the book, it can be assumed that those who become policewomen or air hostesses have relatively wider options- and thus more ‘choice’ than LHWs- when it comes to choosing a line of work. As noted above, this has implications for the kinds of resistance strategies that women in each of these groups deploy, the most stark illustration of which appears towards the end of the book (see Chapter 6, pp. 219-225). These pages describe the LHWs’ incredibly courageous, committed and remarkably well-organised collective resistance that spanned a period of two years, and which was met by the full coercive apparatus of the state with a viciousness that is not seen in its dealings with ‘respectable’ middle-class or elite women.

Reading the story of the protesting LHWs being dragged, beaten, and attacked with batons and water cannons by both male and female police officers made me wonder if Husain had explored this or other such incidents with the women police officers with whom she had developed research relationships. It made me think in particular about the need to further investigate if/when the ‘protective sisterhood’ that Husain experienced during fieldwork from women police officers (see pp. 262-264) extended to other women, not just to these workers’ female peers or subordinates at work (a dynamic that is explored in the book) but also to other working-class women they encounter in the line of duty- like the LHWs- or to other women in their homes and family networks, the latter of which are key sites of gendered political subjectivation that we do not get to see at all in the book despite their relevance to exploring the manifestations and contestations of stigma for these women.

This brings me to my final set of comments, which concern Husain’s discussion of agency. While Husain mobilises Tyler’s (2018) work to provide an alternative to the “often individualistic, ahistorical and politically anaesthetised” conceptualisations of stigma (Tyler, 2018, p. 746, quoted by Husain, p. 242), she does not make a similar critique of the concept of agency. Given her repeatedly stated dissatisfaction with the idea of an always-particular and locally-contained “Muslim women’s agency” which is “pious, compliant, and conforming” (p. 21) and constructed in opposition to the “liberal-secular agency” exercised by “Western women” (see pp. 20-21, 226, 231), I expected greater engagement with feminist theorisations of agency and with the relationship between agency, resistance, and feminist/liberatory politics that has been the subject of much debate in feminist theory, both within and beyond Pakistan (Iqtidar, 2011; Madhok et al., 2013; Mahmood, 2005; Mojab & Zia, 2019; Zia, 2018). Indeed, despite the dangers, I think it is important to venture into this political minefield, rather than side-step it, as I think Husain does. Mahmood (2005) writes, and I agree, that “our analytical explorations should not be reduced to the requirements of political judgement . . . [but] it is not that the two modalities of engagement- the political and the analytical – should remain deaf to each other, only that they should not be collapsed into each other” (p. 196). In my view, Husain’s careful investigation of women’s navigations of stigma and agency could have been extended to comment on the political implications of these women’s strategies and subjectivities, without any requirement for these subjects to appear either as feminist heroes or as compliant victims. To sum up, I draw on Hemmings and Kabesh (2013), who offer a succinct rendering of my thoughts when they write: “A feminist account of agency may recognise agency but still want to intervene politically to encourage different choices, rather than validating identities attached to ‘otherness’ in a politically limiting vein” (p. 32).

References:
Hemmings, C., & Kabesh, A. T. (2013). The Feminist Subject of Agency: Recognition and Affect in Encounters with ‘the Other.’ In S. Madhok, A. Phillips, & K. Wilson (Eds.), Gender, Agency, and Coercion (pp. 29–46). Palgrave Macmillan.
Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203900055
Hisam, Z. (forthcoming). Paid Care Economy and Workers’ Power: A Study of Lady Health Workers’ Movement in Pakistan. In Siegmann et. al (eds), Gender at Work in Pakistan, Routledge.
Iqtidar, H. (2011). Secularizing Islamists? : Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wa in urban Pakistan. University of Chicago Press.
Madhok, S., Phillips, A., & Wilson, K. (Eds.). (2013). Gender, Agency, and Coercion. Palgrave Macmillan.
Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press.
Mojab, S., & Zia, A. S. (2019). Race, Class, and Agency: A Return to Marxist Feminism. Journal of Labor and Society, 22(2), 259–273. https://doi.org/10.1111/wusa.12427
Mumtaz, Z., Salway, S., Nykiforuk, C., Bhatti, A., Ataullahjan, A., & Ayyalasomayajula, B. (2013). The role of social geography on Lady Health Workers’ mobility and effectiveness in Pakistan. Social Science & Medicine, 91, 48–57. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.05.007
Tyler, I. (2018). Resituating Erving Goffman: From Stigma Power to Black Power. The Sociological Review (Keele), 66(4), 744–765. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118777450
Tyler, I. (2020). Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350222809
Zia, A. S. (2018). Faith and Feminism in Pakistan: Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy? Sussex Academic Press.

Endnotes:
[1] Lady Health Workers are community-based health workers providing primary health care services to women and children in rural areas and urban slums and “seen as an effective and efficient means of linking remote and marginalised populations to the health system” (Mumtaz et. al. 2013, p. 48).
[2] Despite working for the state as public health providers, LHWs have historically been denied the status of ‘public servant’ or ‘government employee’, hired instead on a contractual basis which has excluded them from civil services employment benefits (Hisam, forthcoming). Thus, while the state denies LHWs the status of ‘state agent’, the latter are viewed (often sceptically and/or apprehensively) as state agents by the communities they serve, as the book explores in some detail. In the case of airline workers, Husain is referring to air hostesses employed by Pakistan International Airlines- Pakistan’s ‘national’ carrier’- which can be more accurately described as a semi-government institution that has been undergoing privatization for some years, making the ‘public’ status of the institution and its employees ambiguous. Despite these differences, Husain categorizes all three groups as ‘frontline workers’ due to their employment by/for state institutions and the public-facing nature of their work.

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