“They Praise the Man, and the Woman Just Doesn’t Exist”: the (Re)Construction of Gendered Expectations among Diasporic Afghans in Canada

Ferdouse Asefi, University of Toronto

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 marked the return of another Taliban regime. The Taliban regime have imposed ongoing gendered restrictions for women, including banning schools for women and girls’ grade seven and up and restricting opportunities for employment. This paper investigates the transnational racialized and gendered consequences of the Taliban regime on the Afghan diaspora in Canada. In adopting a racialized and gendered lens, and drawing on semi-structured interviews with Afghans in Ontario, I examine how participants come to experience the gendered restrictions imposed on Afghan women and girls in Afghanistan. In doing so, I also illustrate the strategies that participants employ to contest gendered expectations and patriarchal ideologies that shape identity, trauma, and (re)settlement experiences in Canada. Overall, this paper demonstrates how Afghan men and women are autonomous social actors who reconstruct and renegotiate gendered cultural practices.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 73. Gender Representations. Law, Politics, Education