“Should I Go and Pull Her<i>Burqa</i>Off?”: Feminist Compulsions, Insider Consent, and a<i>Return to Kandahar</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it