Pashtun Women and Folk Literature: Intersections of Labor, Affect, and Oppression

Abstract This paper argues that Pashto folk literature, especially tapa (pl. tapey ) —an anonymous, predominantly oral couplet, often attributed to women—provides Pashtun women, an invaluable literary space for resistance against oppressive apparatuses prevalent in the rural communities of Pak-Afghan borderlands. Focusing on a collection of tapey surrounding the notion of labor, this paper draws on and expands Sylvia Federici’s insights on domestic labor as a means of social reproduction but also explores labor as a form of resistance and subversion. Moving beyond Marxist-Feminist frameworks of domestic labor as oppressive, this collection of tapey shows how Pashtun women reclaim labor as a field of expression in their feminine literary space. Additionally, these poems centralize labor to contest the region’s culturally oppressive ideals of (dis)honorable death. Retrieving the popular work of Pashtun subaltern women (Spivak), this paper foregrounds alternative voices from the margin of today’s capitalist mode of production.