Performing vernaculars of Joy: Aurat March Lahore and the politics of feminist resistance.

Abstract

Aurat March is a collective led by urban middle and upper middle class women and gender minorities, who have marched every year since 2018 on the International Women’s Day in Pakistani main cities. Although rooted in a grounded “interwoven tapestry” (Kamal 2024) of women’s collectives in Pakistan (Rehman 2021), the movement has challenged existing patriarchal structures in new disrupting ways. Considering resistance as “a diagnostic of power” (Abu Lughod 1990), Aurat March volunteers have transformed the visual politics and the cultural inheritance of women protests, forging new vernaculars of resistance against the very existence of the power that oppresses them.
In light of this, the paper explores how volunteers articulate and reimagine resistance in Lahore during the “Feminist Dholki”, a yearly gathering set up shortly before the march as a fundraising. Drawing from Borsa’s theorization of resistance as relational, “a process of identification, articulation and representation”(1990), the Dholki is explored as a performative site where volunteers construct alternative frameworks where joy is central in their identification as resisting political subjects. Through the collective rewriting and playful performance of punjabi tappay (wedding rhymes played in traditional Dholkis), volunteers build safe spaces to express alternative political relations (behenchara), and claim desired forms of belongings from which they are excluded, at the interplay of class and gender.