ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I make a preliminary argument about the relationship between women, Islam and the Pakistani nation-state through the conceptual framework of “moral regulation.” In their path-breaking work on culture and state formation, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer defi ned moral regulation as “a project of normalizing, rendering natural, taken for granted, in a word ‘obvious’, what are in fact ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order.” Their insight that “[m]oral regulation is coextensive with state formation, and state forms are always animated and legitimated by a particular moral ethos” (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 4), as well as George Mosse’s (1985) pioneering work on nationalism and sexuality, opens the way to understanding the crucial role discourses of morality and respectability play in establishing and maintaining the modern nation-state. Since women are generally interpellated as repositories of their culture and tradition and as embodying the honor of their kin/community, and the nation is imagined not just in communitarian but actually in familial terms, control over women’s (and occasionally men’s) sexuality becomes a constitutive feature of the process of nation-state formation.
