<i>Jender Bazi</i> Temporality: Gender-Related Research and Writing in Afghanistan during NATO's War and Military Occupation

Gender-related research during the US-led NATO occupation and war in Afghanistan (2001–2021) was embedded in structures of counterinsurgency warfare. Drawing on anti-colonial and feminist and queer theory and based on empirical research in Afghanistan, I introduce the analytic jender bazi (Dari: the gender game) to theorize the configuration of racializing and gendering processes in which gender roles and relations and intimacy were studied in Afghanistan. I argue that the analytic offers new ways to examine how the temporality of knowledge production in neoliberal institutions and organizations reconstructed knowing the labor of Afghans and affective relations in the military-civil infrastructure and time of the occupation. The political and theoretical premises of concepts and frames of analysis in research and writing on cis women and gender politics and the psychology of cis men and masculinities in Afghanistan, I contend, produced a genre that I refer to as occupation/al writing. The coloniality of Afghanistan studies requires that scholars account for how the affect of institutional affiliations and geopolitics in the age of the neoliberal university contain intellectual discussion and critique in the field.