The stigma matrix: Gender, globalization, and the agency of Pakistan's frontline women By FauziaHusain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024. 306 pp.

Fauzia Husain's The Stigma Matrix is at once a vivid story of women in Pakistan's workforce and a conceptual framework for understanding the multiscalar valences of gendered stigma. Focusing on women who undertake “frontline work,” in which they occupy public spaces, the book opens with several stories of the violent threats and assaults they face. Uniformed policewomen, for example, are attacked, both physically and through caricatures in various media, for appearing disrespectful. A health worker on a polio mission is chased by men who see her as bringing unwanted American imperial influence. The book examines women entering the workforce in three publicly visible domains: policing, health care, and aviation. In taking on this work, they face a range of complex stigmatizing attacks. As the author asserts, these attacks are not spontaneous, accidental, or the result of a pathologized Muslim or Global South backwardness. The book studies the experiences of Pakistani women in these three frontline professions to offer a multiscalar framework to understand “how contemporary global policies build on colonial histories and local inequalities to shape women's experiences of stigma as well as their responses to it” (p. 5). Thus, this book joins an important and growing body of feminist scholarship that challenges gendered and racialized discourses. Such discourses typically pathologize Muslim states and societies, and construct brown women as subjects of neoliberal rescue and developmental intervention, exacerbating their interpersonal and structural vulnerabilities. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2015 to 2017 in Karachi, the author's hometown and site of extended networks. The book attends to not only the experience of stigma within each work context, but also to women's complicated efforts to navigate and circumvent stigma. Empirically and conceptually, Husain breathes new life into the well-worn topic of Muslim women's agency. In conversation with extensive feminist theorizing on this topic, Husain distinguishes between “symbolic agency,” which pertains to the performative mobilization of signs, and “relational agency,” which refers to the recruitment and delegation of someone else to act on a social actor's behalf. Using this distinction, Husain discusses the dynamic relationship between stigma and agency in each context (pp. 87–90), and explains what kinds of agentive acts are contextually legible, durable, and thereby relatively successful in managing stigma. Throughout the book, we meet women whose work experiences reveal such complexities—for example, Huda and Sana, whose macho swagger in leading a women's police station with curses, belches, and the liberal use of violence resulted in their dismissal from authority rather than being rewarded. Or Shiza, who chose health work because she understood it to be within neighborhoods and a form of “ladies’ work,” not transgressive of gender norms, but who must now negotiate the extended spatiality and notoriety that polio campaigns imposed on their female workforce, opening them up to harsh attacks and shaming from strangers and neighbors alike. Embedded in disciplinary training and debates in sociology, this ethnography's intervention is aimed primarily at challenging colonialist and Eurocentric biases in the sociology of globalization, gender, and work in accounts of women's lives in the Global South. As such, it has much to offer anthropologists interested in these topics, though it is not directly engaged with anthropological scholarship and debates on these topics. The first two chapters describe and analyze the multiple historical and political-economic threads—“global constituents” and the “meso level”—that constitute sexualized stigma for women in frontline work in contemporary Pakistan. Weaving together ethnographic vignettes, news reports, and popular culture, Husain argues that the colonial representation of purdah and the racial segregation of space deeply inform contemporary forms and norms of gendered difference, flourishing in the hegemonic discourses of Pakistani clerics and elites. Drawing on her interlocutors’ understandings of purdah and public space, Husain scrutinizes the neoliberal Pakistani state's role in gendering and segregating public space such that women's presence in it—without the mobile confines of the veil—constitutes transgression, even as a range of working-class women are forced to enter the workforce to meet the needs of social reproduction, as well as to pursue new socioeconomic aspirations. While the first two chapters bring this long colonial history to bear on the imperial present of global developmental interventions and neoliberal state reform, chapters 3–5 delve into the granularity of the different workplaces and their attendant ethos and relationships of agency and stigma. We learn from the trajectories of several policewomen who enter the job with ambitions and aspirations, and who think the inclusion of women in the police force is an eyewash, in which policewomen are tokenized to exhibit Pakistan's gender progressiveness to “Western agencies” and secure funds using global buzzwords like “development” and “capacity building.” Women working in the airline industry face considerably greater stigma than either policewomen or health workers, but they frequently referred to their higher pay and the transformative, liberatory dimensions of their work achieved through tourism and consumerism. Husain notes that such women affirm Pakistani class hierarchies and global racial and gendered scripts to counter the stigma they face and make their work meaningful in the workplace and beyond, even as she notes the fragility of these performances. There are some lingering questions. Curiously, the author's discussion of global processes and political economy does not touch on the global war on terror—which has framed so much of Euro-American engagement with Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan, from investments in policing and militarization to developmental interventions, such as in health and education, arguably under the rubric of “security.” While “security” is discussed in an appendix on “case selection,” it is framed as a methodological and contextual question rather than one germane to this entire project. I also wondered if a more fulsome account of the kinds of worlds these women come from would help substantiate not only the aspirations and ideals that draw them in, but also the kinds of capital and resources they are equipped with to confront structural issues. This would push beyond declarations of class position to a more complicated reckoning with material and sociocultural positionality as women and families consider avenues of work, mobility, and social reproduction. Instead, the women in the book—always portrayed with great care, respect, and sensitivity—appear somewhat fully formed and unchanging. This is an ambitious book in addressing three professions that are not obviously related, even though they are held together under the umbrella term “frontline.” The idea of “frontline” work itself is not interrogated or discussed. If it is taken at its broadest to mean those who interface with citizens, compatriots, and customers, why focus on these three and not those in service industries, such as retail or beauty, or other essential workers, like teachers? It could be a conceptual choice or an empirical one. Are the women portrayed in Karachi from similar urban backgrounds, or are they considering these three professions comparatively as they aspire or make decisions while balancing livelihood and household needs? Or perhaps women across these arenas present contrasts of class, education, and other vectors of social stratification? The choice of these three and therefore the relationality between them remains unspecified. “Security” and the gendered shapes it takes could be a thread in the conceptualization of “frontline,” but readers can only speculate. These questions notwithstanding, this is a compelling and necessary book. Written clearly without jargon and care even when critical, the book is a welcome contribution to studying women whose work brings them into public space and visibility in the majority world, situated at intersections of colonial legacies and a transnationally articulating imperial present. Husain's granular account deftly and sensitively engages and theorizes their experiences as they both desire visibility and recognition as workers but maneuver the attendant risks and harms in ways that are not always progressive.