“Should I Go and Pull Her<i>Burqa</i>Off?”: Feminist Compulsions, Insider Consent, and a<i>Return to Kandahar</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I examine Nelofer Pazira and Paul Jay's 2004 documentary, Return to Kandahar. The film's narrative revolves around Pazira's search for a friend (Pazira is an Afghani-Canadian). At one point, Pazira asks herself, “Should I go and pull her burqa off?” Given how the invasion of Afghanistan was cloaked in supposedly feminist desires to liberate Afghani women, it is not surprising that this question implies a “benevolent” or “modernizing” intervention. I focus on how Pazira asks this question of herself as an Afghan subject (a reflective question) but in the presence of a Western audience. Although this may support contemporary debates around authority over voice and representation, it also produces the native informant: the classic anthropological sidekick who tells her faithful audience about the novel idiosyncrasies of her “traditional” society while inviting various interventionist discourses. I thus argue that Return to Kandahar is not merely a site where series of discourses including feminist interventionist compulsions and Orientalist tropes on modernity and Islam are negotiated, it is also a site where Pazira becomes an Orientalized insider subject who mediates the audience's encounter with the Other; she is positioned within a supposedly traditional society and yet also exposed enough to modernity to speak to the audience. My discussion is organized around the question Pazira asks herself about taking off a woman's burqa: the voyeuristic witnessing of a conversation supposedly occurring within the text between the Afghan female subject and herself thus becomes a site to know, and ultimately intervene in the affairs of, the temporally-distanced “non-modern” Other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".