Julie Billaud

Suicidal Performances: Voicing Discontent in a Girls’ Dormitory in Kabul

Female suicide in Afghanistan has generally been given economic and psychological explanations. More rarely has its social dimension been analysed. In this paper, I underline the communicative potential of Afghan women’s suicide in the ‘post-war/reconstruction’ context. I highlight its ambiguous symbolic power and its anchorage in the subversive imaginary universe of women’s poetic expression. I argue that while reproducing certain cultural ideas about women’s inherent emotional fragility, women’s suicide also challenges the honour system in powerful ways and opens possibilities for voicing discontent. I qualify female suicide as the ‘art of the weak’ (De Certeau 1980, 6), a covert form of protest, a performance—in the sense of Bauman (2004)—that builds upon traditional popular ‘knowledge’ about gender in order to manage the impression of an audience and make women’s claims audible.

Between learning and schooling: the politics of human rights monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review

This paper explores the politics of monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a new United Nations human rights monitoring mechanism which aims to promote a universal approach and equal treatment when reviewing each country’s human rights situation. To what extent are these laudable aims realised, and realisable, given entrenched representations of the West and the Rest as well as geopolitical and economic inequalities both historically and in the present? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the UN in 2010–11, the final year of the UPR’s first cycle, we explore how these aims were both pursued and subverted, paying attention to two distinct ways of talking about the UPR: first, as a learning culture in which UN member states ‘share best practice’ and engage in constructive criticism; and second, as an exam which UN member states face as students with vastly differing attitudes and competences. Accounts and experiences of diplomats from states that are not placed in the ‘good students’ category offer valuable insights into the inherent contradictions of de-historicised and de-contextualised approaches to human rights.

Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule was widely publicized in the United States as one of the humanitarian issues justifying intervention. Kabul Carnival explores the contradictions, ambiguities, and unintended effects of the emancipatory projects for Afghan women designed and imposed by external organizations. Building on embodiment and performance theory, this evocative ethnography describes Afghan womens responses to social anxieties about identity that have emerged as a result of the military occupation. Offering one of the first long-term on-the-ground studies since the arrival of allied forces in 2001, Julie Billaud introduces readers to daily life in Afghanistan through portraits of women targeted by international aid policies. Examining encounters between international experts in gender and transitional justice, Afghan civil servants and NGO staff, and women unaffiliated with these organizations, Billaud unpacks some of the paradoxes that arise from competing understandings of democracy and rights practices. Kabul Carnival reveals the ways in which the international communitys concern with the visibility of women in public has ultimately created tensions and constrained womens capacity to find a culturally legitimate voice.

Snapshots of British Islam Exploring Self, Identity, and the Good Ethical Life in the Global Megalopolis

This article seeks to capture the reconfigurations of Islamic morality in England through a collection of snapshots depicting the new actors who have made their apparition in public in the post 9/11 and 7/7 context. While underlying the unintended and paradoxical effects of neoliberalism and of state interventions in the domain of “race relations,” it displaces current debates on “Islamism” from a focus on organized religious movements to one that is sensitive to everyday social practices, embodied performances, and cultural assemblages. Islam in England is envisioned as a “framework,” in the sense of Charles Taylor (1989), for exploring the Self and identity and for promoting the “good ethical life.” Building on Lambek’s (2010) notion of “ordinary ethics,” I argue that Islamic morality does not automatically derive from norms promoted by religious institutions but is rather shaped by everyday practices and interactions. These dynamics are apprehended through snapshots collected during ethnographic “flâneries” in various British cities. The processes of differentiation and assimilation they reveal provide a basis for the phenomenological interpretation of Islam as it is enmeshed in the everyday world of “multiple modernities.”