Reimagining Public Spaces for Pakistani Women Women through Sadia Khatri's "City of Mitr"

Abstract

Public spaces in Pakistani society are gendered as they are traditionally considered a male dominated space. Any sight of a woman sitting in a dhabba is met with unpleasant glances and amorous stares. Sadia Khatri, however, subverts these standards in her story “City Of Mitr” where she presents quintessentially opiniated females who learn to navigate their place in public spaces. In this article, we aim to analyse Khatri’s story by drawing upon Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of bodies-cities to establish how the city imposes limits on women’s bodies and how these limits can be negotiated. By drawing upon Helene Cixous and Karen Barad, we argue that our language is responsible for patriarchal binary thinking, thereby maintaining the male/female binary and this discursivity is not limited to language only, it has a material existence. Thus, it is responsible for shaping out identities and reflects in the way how we construct the material world around us. But if we change the language through which the world is constructed, it would also change the way we think about it. As a result, it would manifest in how we imagine our cities and architecture. David Harvey that since we believe that society is made and re-imagined, then it can also be remade and reimagined. Through this article, we attempt to show how Khatri re-imagines the city from the perspective of women. And how Pakistani women, like Khatri’s mitris, can reclaim the public spaces if the language by which the world is structured is changed.  Key words: public spaces, gendered, city, body, language, architecture