Dealing with Danger: Spatial and Mechanical Manipulations in Gilgit, Pakistan

Abstract

This article provides a spatial and technologically-oriented analysis of sexual imperialism in contemporary northern Pakistan. I interrogate Western women development workers’ experiences of sexual vulnerability in Gilgit, and argue that their representational practices and spatial negotiations are ambivalently organized by a discourse of racialized sexuality that lingers from the colonial era. This discourse evokes a vague moral panic about ‘lascivious’ indigenous men who lust after white women. Western women cope with sexual threat by regulating social interaction with men and avoiding sexualized public space. But when this is not possible, women prefer to negotiate that space in vehicles, which serve as protective barriers between themselves and Gilgiti men. I draw on Bruno Latour’s actor network theory to explain how jeeps are transformed into social actors as they are employed by Western women to manage gendered, racial, sexual and spatial relations. Once mechanized social actors are implicated in these hierarchical and exclusionary imperial relations, they help perpetuate and solidify them through time and across space. Eroticist and racist discourses about Other men, which are circulated through this effort to cope with sexual danger, reinforce established social, sexual, and spatial boundaries that keep imperial hierarchies between Gilgiti men and Western women intact.