Developing Transnational Relations and Subjectivities: The Politics of Virtue and Empowerment in Gilgit, Northern Pakistan

Scholarly discussions of globalization have recently expanded from a debate about its defining characteristics, to include a focus on complex transnational flows of people, culture, and power. (1) While many feminists have attended to the trajectories and effects of economic power in a globalizing world, few have contributed to the discussion of cultural processes affected through the movement of people around the world. Deborah Mindry (2001) is a notable exception. In her work she contributes to our understanding of cultural globalization by investigating the moral politics of that shapes transnational relationships among women from the First and worlds, primarily through international non-govemmental organization (NGO) interventions. Mindry's ethnographic research, conducted with various women's associations in South Africa, demonstrates that NGO fundraising in the West, as well as grassroots development activity itself, are partially enabled through a feminized family philosophy that depicts privileged Western women (2) --who ostensibly have a natural connection to and responsibility for their sisters abroad --as benevolent liberators of poor, simple, and oppressed Third World Women. Mindry claires that NGO rescue narratives about poor women in far-flung places are infused with this politics of feminine virtue, which satisfies Western women's concerns for their global sisters' well-being even as it (re)constitutes their own gender identities as selfless and nurturing mothers. This feminine sense of self, with its domestic and benevolent facets, is rooted in intersecting discourses of gender and imperialism which were circulating globally as early as the Victorian era when Western women travelled abroad to enlighten their colonized sisters. As the historically significant, transnational moralizing discourse of feminine virtue has received little attention from scholars studying either globalization or women and their relationship to development and NGO activities, Mindry (2001, p. 1189) examines how it currently configures [global] relationships among women, and operates as a mode of power that constitutes some women as benevolent providers and others as worthy or deserving recipients of development and empowerment. She is also concerned with the continuities and discontinuities of these dynamics over time, especially since the era of high imperialism. In this article I contribute to the literature on cultural globalization in general and Mindry's work in particular by complicating this notion of a transnational feminine politics of virtue. To do so I draw on findings from a program of research that has sought to interrogate some of the contemporary transcultural processes that produce inequality and sustain nineteenth-century European colonial power relations in postcolonial contexts, while attempting to provoke new understandings and alternative behaviour patterns which are more equitable and just. As part of that project, which was inspired by a concern to think through my own complicity in these processes as a Western tourist and researcher in Pakistan, this paper applies insights derived from ethnographic fieldwork among white Western women development workers living in Gilgit, northern Pakistan to examine how the complex and contradictory intersection of philanthropy, development, and empowerment is negotiated as women discursively constitute their subjectivities in this social setting. The paper traces the characteristics of that discursive nexus and its power consequences by exploring the relationship between development workers' understandings of themselves and local Muslim women as particular types of subjects in the transcultural development setting of Gilgit. Iargue that perceptions of self and other are informed by Western women's global travel experiences, international development philosophies, the politics of virtue, and lingering discourses of race, class, Orientalism, and imperialism. …

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