Beyond the Protest: Affective, Spatial, and Creative Practices of Feminist Resistance in Aurat March Lahore

The research employs feminist theory as both an analytical and a methodological lens to explore the spatial, creative and affective practices of Aurat March women volunteers in Lahore. Drawing on interviews, audio-visual research and active participation, it foregrounds volunteers’ experiences and meaning-making processes as they navigate patriarchy, analysing the entanglements of collective feminist work and everyday resistance. The first chapter explores how volunteers contest gendered power relations in the city through everyday spatial practices and artistic interventions, considered place-making strategies, negotiating violence, moral regulation and reclaiming the city through leisure and collective loitering. Chapter two examines how volunteers articulate resistance to patriarchy by re-signifying cultural symbols and vernacular songs, mobilizing emotions and affective registers while interrogating class, gender, and ethnic positionalities. Chapter three examines how volunteers situate their politics within the historical trajectory of Pakistani women’s movements, unsettling a wave-centric narrative, and arguing that feminist legacies are relationally produced through embodied performances and affective encounters. Overall, the research expands the scholarship on resistance and feminism by moving beyond dominant white feminist-centric frameworks, by proposing more interdisciplinary approaches and locally-grounded understandings of feminist expressions in the region.