‘I fear she’s going to be killed’ my friend prophesied around two months ago, as we met for the first time in 7 years. I agreed. Qandeel was too out there. Too much of a middle finger flying in the face of our society’s moral and sexual hypocrisy. We agreed that she was empowering almost, given how oppressive Pakistan was starting to feel. No room. No room to be and to breathe. No room for the expression of sexuality, even cis-gendered heterosexuality, let alone queerness. We were right. Qandeel Baloch is dead. We are no prophets. Nor clairvoyants. One doesn’t need to be anymore. We just catch the news every now and then. We just swipe down. Hit refresh. See the bodies as they come up. Dead. Relevant. Cold. Hot.
Qandeel isn’t the first. There will be more. In fact, the past two months have seen several cases surface of women being murdered for pursuing their choices. Eloping with a boyfriend. Getting married against parents’ wishes. I remember news of one girl who was restrained on a bed by her mother and burnt alive. I don’t remember her name. Any of their names. I forget. The amnesia of class and gender privilege conjoin to meet me in this graveyard of perceived ‘honour’; tombstones without names, lives measured in column inches, editorialized under post mortem think pieces, filed under ‘Honour Killings.’ There are so many cases. Given her visibility in virtual publics, Qandeel’s murder feels more personal, I’ll admit, despite it being an ‘everywoman’ crisis. So it is that Qandeel Baloch is dead, an exceptional woman victim to an unexceptional culturally embedded crime. Another name in the ledger of misogynistic violence at large.
To all the sexually frustrated misogynists who may have appropriated Qandeel’s body and cleavage for their gratification and managed at the same time to slut shame and commit her to fire and brimstone in the life eternal:
You can wipe the stains off your midriff, but not off your conscience.
You. Are. Hypocrites. Tissues can’t erase this. Blood sweat and jizz on the tips of your Qiblah-bound accusatory fingers. Guilt after tumescence.
You relish displays of sexuality. But you dehumanize and cannibalize the bodies that display and embody said sexuality. And now the vultures are encircling what is left over of your prey; your private pleasures your public predations. Scant details. Strips of flesh that stick to the bone. Taking notes. A sleight of hand, a turn of phrase that could send this story home. Taking notes. Anything that scores. No one has the courage to shift the goalposts.
You berated, no…savaged Qandeel for soliciting your attention. Yet you paid attention. Tell me how that works again? Now it would be remiss of me if I did not add that Ms.Baloch was two steps ahead of you and exploited this circular feedback loop like a media pro. Indeed, it was the source of her celebrity and notoriety that she was able to conflate schlock and sex appeal. She quite deliberately constructed her social media presence and persona in sight of this Kardashianesque cross-over between fame and infamy. She preempted you. You didn’t throw her any curve balls. She did one on us. She was a disruptive force on social media; a disturber of our peace and our news feeds. She had you. Hot. Bothered. You, a vector of shame. But looking to defer it to the woman. Always the woman.
You pride yourself in your masculine members, but you are so vulnerable to culturally transmitted post-coital Shame. Instead of owning the venereal infection that is Shame, recognizing that it is yours, and yours by way of the sexually repressive culture you belong to, you redirect it to the woman. You lay ‘hell fire’ at her feet (or was it…Heaven?). By her breasts her bosom. You infect her. Your handy receptacle of Shame. But also your dick’s claim to fame.
You say: be gone you ‘filthy slut’! Tauba. Astaghfiruallah. ‘Whore’. You like what you see but you can’t make admission of this so you visit upon her a different sort of violence: you de-sex her. A rag to rub against. Till she wipes you clean of sin and stain. Repository of your self-reproach, you take her out to the piety bazaar, make her walk on behalf of your shame, peddle her ‘budmaashi’ (waywardness)after she just closed your shop. After she ended what seemed like an era of blue balls. After she led you into, and out of: prayer. confession. Ay maula. Ufff Allah. I want to ask you, You Who Be Custodians of Public Morality: where are they? The trapdoors in your mosques.
Qandeel generously (if not cynically) invited and mediated our collective gaze. She also returned it, not least by turning the lens on herself and her vampy shtick. There is something compelling about a woman inverting the gaze. I always got the sense that this outlandish girl, more than striving to entertain us, was having a rollicking time entertaining herself. In one of her videos, aglow in rhetorical suggestion, she asks the viewer a question to which she already knows the answer: How I’m looking? Qandeel Baloch was auto-erotic- much like the monocular media we find ourselves surrounded by today: Hit Record. Not talking about red eye; I’m talking about the Red Eye. I’m talking about the sentiment reflected in one of my favorite Lady GaGa songs, ‘Paparazzi’ : ‘I’m your biggest fan/ I’ll follow you until you love me/ Paparazzi/Baby there’s no other superstar you know that I’ll be/ Your paparazzi’, a song that expresses the symbiosis between lens and subject, between apparatus and actors and in doing so, channels the zeitgeist of our media-marinated age. In some measure, Qandeel’s medium was her message, notwithstanding that she was still evolving on the latter front, finding herself.
That we can’t handle a nonconformist provocateur expressing her sexuality on social media, that we can’t handle her designs on fame and infamy alongside career prospects in entertainment, that we can enjoy it all as you would a circus animal and still not care about her personhood, leaves me deeply troubled for this country’s future. Are we handling the taboo of sexuality in our society at all? Are we ever/even addressing it? Because that’s the elephant in the room that Qandeel rode in on, declaring, witness me. I can be free. I can be sexy. I can be exhibitionist. I can do these things. I should be able to express these things. I can try and divorce sexuality from shame. Whatever your personal take on her videos and the content she generated, this act of demanding witnesshood and reveling in self-exhibition: that’s powerful. Even potentially political when a woman does it. In Pakistan no less. And attends upon her sexuality to do so in a society as phobic and cloistered as ours in these matters. Her DIY content and production is arguably benign, but her action, her performativity is anything but. It is oppositional. Rebellious. Irreverent. She was a jester figure in the court of public approval and approbation, staking out a claim in territory not meant for respectable, shareef women. Traditionally, women aren’t expected or encouraged to assert their presence outside the parameters of domesticity. Take room. Take space. Declare themselves. Qandeel to me is the woman Ariana Grande invokes in her song ‘Dangerous Woman’. She embodied khutra (danger). She expressed herself from an interstitial space between the public and private sphere(s). A space of vlogging, selfies and webcams affording her the latitude (both technological and moral) to flirt with her viewers from within her chaar dewaari (four-walled ness), and tread/tease out the flammable fault lines between publicness and privateness. She was effectively being private in public, and public in private: prurient in the land of ‘purity.’ This vantage point emboldened her to negotiate public fears and private fantasies. Exposing this societal cleavage in her characteristic manner is where she derived her spunky, oopmhy, expository wit from: forget the cricket team, that’s the strip-tease she did end up delivering to us, fully manipulating the frissons between our barely concealed curiosities about sex and our conservatisms and repressions surrounding sex. That sweet spot…right in the middle. Um um ummm. That erogenous zone between philia and phobia. She hit that. As provocateurs are want to do, she didn’t just reveal the cracks in the mirror that Pakistani society holds up to itself, she reveled in it. She turned shards into shade. Epic shade. She was more exciting than your workout today. Your organic meal. Your vacation.
Hers will be spun by our conservative media into a cautionary tale of risk/risque assessment: a prudential, risk-averse guide listing things not to do if you want to stay alive as a (Muslim) woman. So we return to a caricature of that age old weighty question of the trade off between liberty and security. Apologists will say she was her own biggest security risk, conveniently ignoring that nothing she did, and no sort of expression anyone undertakes, should ever warrant concern for one’s fundamental safety. It is the year 2016. But who am I kidding? Qandeel wasn’t safe; more importantly, she didn’t do safe. For safety isn’t just a thing provided, it is a thing done too. It is an enactment of societal expectations and standards. Isn’t safety, then, mimetic of the status-quo? Security you say? Isn’t the specter of security another sort of paternalist-statal prison? Another doubly binding and patriarchal trap, lending credence to the role of weaponized man as savior/protector? Unless we don’t feel secure in our social contract(s), as free citizens and free people, no amount of security can offer succor against this violence. We might be safe, but only because we’re being safe. Talking safe. Expressing safe. In other words, endangering our sacred ontological truths. Reproducing existing social structures, happily occupying our roles and limits within them. A society that latches on to this untenable facade of security for dearest life is, ironically, quite existentially insecure. Qandeel shed this, and other skins. She tried on new ones. Glamorous ones. Flashy ones. She was a digital, self-curated low-budget burlesque show called ‘Ms.Behavior’. How about ‘Bae-Haya’ ?
Sexuality is about respect. Mutuality. Reciprocity. Dialogue. Conversation. Connection. Expression. It can be a space where erotics meets civics.
Sexuality (both between and within persons) is about the bilaterality of bodies. That is why its healthy development and expression is paramount to the flourishing of society. It is an operative and natural aspect of social life. If it’s not those things, if it’s not bilateral, it’s called rape. Right Brock Turner? Right.
It is unnerving that we live in a world where the press rubric covering Turner includes his swim times and Ivy Leaguer status and someone like Qandeel’s includes sideways, oblique references to her ‘questionability’ and controversy. Always that askance aslant consideration of the woman’s background; tacit suggestions of her own complicity in inviting death by asphyxiation. Many in our press are obituarizing Qandeel as a woman who shouldn’t have been killed despite her ways. Aw. Thanks. That’s kind. Charitable. Just what her brutalized body and soul need right now. Charity and compassion are two different things. Her brutal murder demands the latter. Take your charitable crumbs and shove them up your superior ass.
I anticipate that Pakistani media and society will posthumously bury Qandeel again through ritual character assassination; I like calling it the second killing. They will exploit her sensational, headline grabbing death. They will get in. Breaking news break her in. They will get out. Digest and eject.
Media coverage of death, especially of a ‘tainted’, sexually ‘corrupted’ post-virginal public figure like Qandeel has necrophiliac undertones. Not only will they revisit the scene of the crime, her body will become inseparable from the scene of the crime. Her innocence will become equivocal. The optics will emphasize the near-criminality of her writhing, posing, seductively comported body, and that knowing pout. The news is on right now and they’re constantly saying: ‘Ghairat ke naam qatal kur diya’ (‘they killed her in the name of honour’). It’s being repeated over and over. An ugly mantra. Just say he killed her. Ghairat ka naam, Qandeel aur us ke qaatil ke naam se jorna bund kur dein. By constantly repeating the motive of notional honour, you’re reinforcing that honour and ratifying it; you are ceding it further ideological ground. This is the net reverberative effect, at least. It has become a national soundbite. Every time something like this happens, they pull out the standard issue Rolodex of words: Izzut. Ghairat. Budnaami. Haya. Honour has had enough airtime on our news, has claimed enough lives. Fuck honour. Enough. Enough. We are sick of the systemic, endemic death-cult of honour killing. We are sick not of burying our ‘sisters, mothers, daughters, wives’, but sick of burying women. Because a woman is more than a permutation of those four relational identities. Because a woman can exist outside the loci of kinship- (Qandeel herself expressed an unknown degree of estrangement from her family). Because a woman does not merely exist to tick your paternalist tick boxes: guardian. brother. protector. provider. keeper. Because a woman can and should be free to belong to: herself.
But let’s leave all that and talk about her sexy videos. Did I mention her sexy videos? No worries. In wake of the crime, the news media certainly did. The talk shows did too. It’s good for ratings. They’ve brought her on previously for a reason. To stir things up a bit, the sweetener in our tea, the sugar in our otherwise tangy shout shows. Surely, it’ll continue in wake of her death too. They will undoubtedly use Qandeel’s murder to continue with de jure criminalization and regulation of sexual expression. They will be at pains to emphasize the causal chain that led from Ms.Baloch’s contentious ‘she had it coming, because she had them coming’ sexuality to her murder. The subtext will read: kids, don’t try this at home. The reputation that precedes her, will come to exceed her (as it often does women in our sexist society/world. This is already happening as we speak.) Her humanity. Her personhood. Her volition. Her will or whims. Her desires. Her calling in life. Ambitions? Those become footnotes in this malecentric, moralizing narrative. What’s more important than these trivialities? Her murderer (and brother) Wasim’s perspective. Wasim has been brought before the press and asked to explain his motives not even 24 hours since news of Qandeel’s death broke. To add further insult to injury, he was given press coverage and a platform to reproduce the apparent honour narrative.
Many will read (with good reason) her 15 minute Warholian career as a flight from and fight against domesticity and domestication.
More will speciously argue that had she embraced her domestic destiny, as sister, wife and daughter, she’d be safe. She’d be alive. There’d be kids. Think of the kids.
This is disingenuous for one reason: the crime scene was her home in Multan. The site normally associated with safety and ‘purdah’ (veil/curtain) for the woman becomes a mortuary space of death. It’s telling. It’s perverse. The domestication of women works in tandem with the domestication of abuse and sexual violence. It’s symbiotic. The corollary of domesticity is privacy. What clearly are structural issues of misogyny become ‘private matters.’ Private matters become unspoken matters. Secrecy and stigma sediment into erasure. Wounds clot. Trauma coagulates. The Oppression curdles. Marked bodies. Lacerations dressed in lies. Who will breach it? Who will incisively reveal it? Home is where the violence often is. Home is where the brother found her.
The space that was supposed to protect her so-called ‘izzut’, her family pride…the filial bonds that were supposed to shield her from the corrupting world outside the four doors of home and hearth failed her egregiously, as they have failed thousands of women across the world in situations of domestic violence. This spatial context should not go unnoticed. It will go unnoticed.
Ms. Baloch will, unfortunately, become illustrative of the (mortal) dangers of letting your women run wild and free, untethered to the domestic unit, to home and household. See what they become! See how much fun they can have…oh dear. Can’t have that. A woman enjoying her body? How DARE she? A woman claiming her sexiness? That’s just an occupational hazard. Think of the poor brother! Think of the kids (she hasn’t had yet)! The kids that must accompany every single woman, in parentheses.
They will desperately seek out a corrective strand from this story:
‘If a woman in your life is on the path to disclosing her sexuality, enjoying herself, doing her thing, indulging her femme-ness, take her to a corner. Put her there. Have a word. Lest she forgot, remind her who she is. A woman. Set limits for and upon her. She starts. Have the conversation end there. Have her negotiate with the back of your head. Which she has memorized, by now, the contours of. Its silhouette. The ridges of. Having massaged it. Having willed to get inside it.The way it sits, legs spread, on your shoulders. Sits back. Smokes a joint. Makes all that you labor for, look effortless.
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Sex, all variables held constant, is not bad. It is neutral. It just is. It can be awesome. It can be banal. It can be awkward. An erection does not lie.
But your preachers, your politicians, your moral arbiters: they do. One of them threatened sexual assault on a feminist activist on live television not so long ago (I certainly hope that was a lie).
You — that repressed, frustrated, slut shaming guy, had your fun. Got your money shot. Your selfie. You thought she looked hot, but…maybe because you couldn’t have her, you thought…no…you retread your steps…what’s there to have? She’s already had. Too much for your fragile ego to handle.
How can Qandeel have any value, any worth, any person-hood if she is perceived to have been around, in person or in image? A woman self-possessed must be dispossessed. Disposed, because disposable:
‘Qandeel insaan thee? Ya dukaan? Bund ho gaiyee hain. Aik aur khul jai gi.’
Many people are sharing their sympathies using pathetic qualifiers beginning: ‘even though….’ ‘she may have been…such and such, but she didn’t deserve this…’ ‘jo bhee thee, insaan thee’ (‘whatever she was, she was human)’ Jo bhee thee? Really?
Your being a fan or not is of no weight here whatsoever. An innocent woman was killed in an unconscionable act of murderous, gendered, misogynist violence. Period. Caveats, qualifiers and post-scripts belie Pakistani society’s sex-phobic prejudices and its internalized shame and need to distance itself from sex(uality). Her overt displays of sexuality aren’t relevant in the context our news media will import them into: that of probable cause and motive, imbued evidentiary value in the court of morality, forensically parsed with sanitary gloves, underscored by telling frowns and ‘tsk tsk tsk’s.
And yet, they are relevant. Where they are especially relevant is in the realm of countering taboos and taubaisms. Qandeel was victim to the taboo surrounding sexuality, specifically female sexuality as judged in Pakistan. A sexuality circumscribed and suspect. It is her sheer force of will, audacity and her piquant wit that saw her take on these taboos and not submit to their silencing effects. She expressed herself despite, and in spite of them. That’s righteous. That’s brave. To me, she is yet another unapologetic free-speech/expression martyr. She died living her life, and defending her right to live and advance it, on her own terms. That can’t be said for many.
To be clear, martyrdom is not what she had in mind, though. Life. Life’s good. I’m not about to edify her horrible death here over and above the imperatives and directives of her life. But it is what her killer had in mind. The resounding signal sent is this: a woman having a good time (without permission and outside Hudood) lives on borrowed time.
Qandeel’s murder should be situated in context of a shaming culture surrounding sexuality in Pakistan. Misogynists and alpha patriarchs tap into this deeply embedded reservoir of shame too. Not only are they inclined to loathe her sexuality, but their own. The gendered power differential, however, is quick to shield straight cis men from the violences- sexual, emotional, physical and psychic- so routinely visited upon women, queer and non binary people, bodies and spaces.
Lest we need a reminder, lest you forgot Ramzan’s televised piety parties, we live in a socioreligious Islamic milieu where, in Durkheimean vein, motherhood is deemed sacred and female single-hood- profane, a liability on izzut, haya and khandaan ka naam (the family name). This creates undue stresses and pressures on both those demographics. Walking on heaven? How about we let mothers walk on earth for once. We need to ask ourselves as a society, if we consecrate the hallowed grounds of motherhood, just what are we desecrating? In our valorization of motherhood and profanation of singledom, we vilify women who are not mothers, or not maternal (enough) or on a road to somewhere other than inevitable marriage and motherhood. It is no coincidence that when we see former ‘fallen girl’ Veena Malik cradle her baby in all her redeeming post-natal chastity, all’s forgot and forgiven. Marriage and kids vindicate. Countless Pakistani ‘It’ women/starlets/sirens have sought to conjugate with a man as a survival strategy. Surival? Just kidding. Married mothers can be murdered for honor too. Honour leaves no woman behind! You could be sequestered within the four walls of your home, you could be a domestic goddess. Honour can find you. Surveil you. Condemn you. Throw acid in your face. Burn you alive. Bury you alive. Stone you. Feed you to rabid dogs.
Qandeel was certainly no victim figure in life. Her life story (details of which were unethically and unprofessionally divulged on media) saw her survive and thrive against victimization. But it is of the utmost importance to ensure that in death, rather, after death, Qandeel is afforded access to a narrative of posthumous victimhood, one customarily denied women who are victims of (honour)violence. Celebrating her life, paying homage to her choices, her agency, sexuality and freedom and laterally emphasizing her victimhood are not mutually exclusive projects. We must do both. While it is an ambivalent pleasure to see her gain iconic, pop (cult)ural status, we must not let this take away from the corporeality of her (body of) work and violent death. Qandeel should be with us now. She should be alive. Her death is abominable and perverse. Her life ended prematurely, and so there is work to do. Work to continue. Spaces to take up. We must politicize her death. Because it was sealed, signed and delivered upon her doorstep, courtesy the politics of misogyny and patriarchy. This is personal. This is political. Those two things are entangled in a Gordian knot…
Here’s another. Qandeel manifested the regressive misogynists’ fears- a free woman; their fantasies — a free woman. It’s a crippling paradox. It’s a knot they can’t figure out how to untie so they use it as a noose instead and ring it around the woman’s neck. Till it snaps. Till it breaks. Till they can resolve their forced binary upon the jugular: Life/Honor. Till they can destroy the very thing that excites them: Sex/Death.