Comparación personas externas a Financiera Juriscoop

Studies on migration for Pakistani-origin subjects have focused on primarily male workers from working-class or middle-class backgrounds moving to New York City (Ahmad 2011; Rana 2011; and for migration to Dubai, see Vora 2008). In Pakistan, male workers have been the target population with regards to the creation of transnational labor markets (Rana 2011). While female transnational workers have been a motivating factor for changing domestic economies as well as family systems in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, Pakistani officials oppose these migration trends by offering counter examples of the abuse of women. This is justified by a need to “protect the honor of Pakistani women” (Ibid. 111). In this sense, labor migration for women in Pakistan is understood as feasible only for middle-class, professional standing women, not for those from working class backgrounds. In this study, the college youth I am concerned with are coming from working class backgrounds and aspiring to join the middle-class. The young women face similar metasemiotic frameworks about female migration that depend on a patriarchal mindset regarding

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the protection of Pakistani females.

Due to the limitations of transnational migration for Pakistani females, rarely do studies on Pakistan-origin migration engage with both male and female subjects, particularly for youth populations. In this search for a “more expansive notion of diaspora as a phenomenon that exceeds any causal link to travel, movement, or displacement” (Campt and Thomas 2008:2), we must be careful to not privilege the male subject as the primary agent in diasporic formation. Scholars have yet to fully investigate the ways that gender norms and cultural expectations shape educational and professional aspirations for Muslim female and male social personae. To address these under-explored themes, this analysis focuses on the gendered aspects of Pakistani youth mobilities in university spaces and in online social media spaces, and explores how their future aspirations are always gendered. While earlier globalization and migration scholarship tends to reify binary notions of home/host or displacement/homeland, such binary frameworks have long privileged the migration and experience of male subjects as the primary agents in diasporic formation. However, if attention is paid to how gender constructs the migrant experience for both men and women, it is possible to understand how metasemiotic frameworks of patriarchy and accompanying models of social norms are intimately connected to the gendered nature of transnational migration. In my ethnographic research, I observed that gender was a central organizing principle through which a Pakistan-origin Muslim youth subjecthood is constructed. What the female student should or should not do or the expectations on a male student by his family or university were salient discussion topics by which future aspirations took shape. In both rural and urban contexts, Pakistan has been described as a patriarchal society where “women are treated as chattels, ‘given’ or ‘acquired’ through arranged marriages, to spend their lives in the service of male-dominated social system” (Alvi 1991:125). This rather damning perspective

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underlies a social structure that impacts male and female college youth and their aspirations. By emphasizing an approach that focuses on students’ mobilities, we can consider how their mobilities are affected, and sometimes rendered immobile, due to conflicting metasemiotic frameworks in the form of patriarchal norms, Muslim familial expectations, and

academic/professional expectations.

For the in-migrants I worked with, while they hoped/planned/strategized to acquire an education that would propel their personal and professional aspirations, the question of where one will ultimately live was often left unanswered, uncertain, to be decided at a later date. This question may be answered after completing their education when most of the girls were expected to get married, or perhaps after receiving their first job offer. Horizontal mobility was intimately related to projections of vertical mobility, but always with several contingency plans in place. In other words, it is not a neat unidirectional process, where moving to get an education would correspond to completing the degree program and finding a well-paying job. For example, once Zara

completes her law degree, she aspires to apply for a master’s program through the Fulbright program or the Commonwealth scholarship program. She plans to focus on tax law but acknowledges that her application may be read more favorably if she focuses on human rights law. Her lateral mobile migratory movements from Jhang to Lahore and a potential move to the US or UK are directly linked to aspirations of vertical mobility. At the same time, she has argued with her mother and uncle to delay her own marriage—a social and familial expectation—in favor of pursuing higher education. For many female Pakistani in-migrants, marriage looms as the main alternative to academic endeavors, as discussed in the introduction. For another

participant, Tasneem, her family moved from a village in Punjab to New York City where she has studied speech pathology. She is engaged to her first cousin who lives in the UK and following

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her wedding in 2017, to be held in their ancestral village, Tasneem will move in with her future husband and mother-in-law/maternal aunt. Her horizontal mobility is also linked to multiple social mobilities, where becoming a married woman will alter her status in the family as well as her financial status. Tasneem is also majoring in speech pathology, but in one of her last

conversations, she expressed a concern of whether her training and internship for speech pathology in American will translate to employment in London. For Zara, Tasneem, and other students, future mobilities remain uncertain, and this uncertainty is culturally organized and with historically-laden narratives about women’s role in society.

Drawing Parallels between Mediatized Pakistani Patriarchal Culture and Participant Narratives

I observed these narratives about education and gender roles in the visual/filmic artifacts that participants shared with each other on online social networks. For example, one popular social media entertainer, Zaid Ali Tahir, or Zaid Ali T as he is known online, is part of a group of Pakistani-Canadians who create short (2-4 minute) films, and then share their media objects prolifically on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and elsewhere. I came across one such film titled “Failing exams (Brown guys vs. brown girls)”. This video begins with the caption: “When a guy fails exams.” We then see a young Pakistani man sitting on a dirt pathway in front of green grass, wearing a white t-shirt with small holes and brown stains, a red cloth draped over his shoulder. There are several men’s dress shoes to the right of his body with assorted shoe polish containers and brushes. Appearing as a shoeshine boy, he loudly advertises his services in Urdu: “For 5 rupees, get your boots polished. Brother, for 5 rupees, I’ll polish your boots. I haven’t eaten in two days.” Notably he uses a reference to Pakistani currency in the statement. This is followed by another all-black screen and the following words: “When a girl fails exams.”

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In this clip, Zaid plays the role of a girl, despite his patchy black beard.

Figure 1 Screenshot from Zaid AliT Youtube Video

As a Pakistani girl, he wears a bright, red dupatta on his head and a red kurta, or loose tunic-style shirt, covered by black and gold embroidery at the neckline. He sits on a black leather couch in front of a beige wall. Someone outside of the frame tosses red flower petals while a wedding song is editing into the film. “Mubarak ho tumko! Yeh shaadi tumhari…” [May your wedding be blessed]. Zaid’s facial expression is not fully celebratory in contrast to the song, indexing a tension in the scene. Although the video’s title has ‘Brown’, as a racialized category that subsumes anyone from South Asia, Zaid’s identity as a Pakistani-Canadian is evinced by the Urdu used in the video as well as the reference to Pakistani currency. In such widely-shared online videos, the gendered obligations of Brown, i.e. South Asian-origin, youth who do not perform well on academic exams are parodied as a type of mocking critique. And yet, this parody reflects an understanding of how gendered roles with regards to academic success, or lack thereof, are understood by Pakistani-origin college youth. In another video made by Zaid Ali T, titled “Brown Girl vs. Brown Guys” and viewed over three million times, Zaid and another social media entertainer, Lilly Singh, argue over who has a more difficult time with regards to family

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expectations and gendered norms. The narrative flows where Zaid ‘complains’ all the ways that he is unable to decide his own career (he can only be a “doctor, engineer, or lawyer) to which Lilly retorts that her future is about getting married and having babies, even though she has a degree in psychology. The parody continues for four minutes with each trying to ‘one up’ the other about whether brown girls or boys have a more restrictions given by their families. In the comment section, viewers offer thousands of comments in the form of critique and praise to the mediamakers. These comments and the circulation of these videos by study participants

collectively formulate a set of gender-based narratives regarding Pakistani-origin youth and their mobility trajectories.

The young women (and men) in this study are aware that while they are studying in colleges, they are also expected to balance their individual mobility trajectories with gendered kin-based social expectations. For example, when Zara is worried about being seen as ‘too’ modern, there is a fear of her becoming too different from the women back in Jhang, that she assuages by changing her clothes into looser fitting, i.e. more modest, and veiled attire. For Noreen, she explains that, contrary to the dominant stereotype of Muslim woman defined by her hijab, she does not privilege her hijab as central to her Muslim identity, but rather draws from multiple imaginaries, including those ‘back home’ and those in her college’s MSA community. And yet, the notion of

hayaa, or respect, is significant for how she dresses herself. Across multiple participant

frameworks in Lahore and New York City, each student is conscious of disciplining her wardrobe such that they fall within the gendered expectations. Their wardrobe is a single marker

constitutive of a larger set of expectations that reify and validate a patriarchal set of norms, where young women are expected to get married to a partner chosen by her family, and young men are expected to find gainful employment while still supporting their parents, getting married once

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they are able to support a family. For female participants, their mobility trajectories are impacted by expectations to marry; while for male participants, they are expected to become independent earners. This metasemiotic framework is organized around a patriarchal home structure where men have particular roles to earn and financially care for the family while women are expected to produce offspring and care for the home. This metasemiotic framework can be foundational but may provide a foil to the frameworks encountered by mobile subject in the university space. In the following chapters, I explore how students’ multivalent mobilities negotiate and adapt differentially across multiple metasemiotic frameworks. For participants, their overlapping subjectivities as first generation college students, as Muslim youth, as gendered youth with Pakistani heritage collectively constitute a Pakistani-origin, Muslim, college youth formation, but one that is not place-based in the traditional sense. Instead as the coeducational, English-medium American-style college campuses provides one site where they navigate self-making projects when confronted with lifestyles and cultural norms that were markedly unfamiliar to their pre- college lives.