Personal Statement

Salaam, Sheikh Sahib!

An officer greeted my father in Karachi. My father facetiously whispered to me that this was the
difference between America and Pakistan: Here the police salute me, and in America they chase me.
He often criticized the racist violence he suffered while living in the U.S. As he stopped for a cup of tea, he
handed me the newspaper to peruse while I waited for him. When he returned, I asked him to clarify a
column about the Karo-Kari (honor killing) of a local Sindhi girl, and he brushed it off as an unimportant
news story. I was disturbed to find that my fathers anger towards racial violence and inequality did not
extend to gender violence against women in his native country. Experiences like this cultivated in me an
awareness of the complex nature of repression and intolerance functioning within and between cultures.
I was forced to consider how my human value was subject to not only matters of faith, custom, and
finances, but to geography as well.
As a second-generation Pakistani-Indian student with experiences of living in Pakistan, I have
practiced Burqa and Niqab, negotiated different spaces in the U.S. wearing the hijab, and later navigated
through the loss of my Muslim faith. Throughout the years, I found myself disillusioned with notions of
western equality and feminism. Despite my feeling a sense of autonomy in the U.S., I saw myself shifting
between social spaces that in covert ways negate ethnic and female subjectivities. I also observed the
ways that ethnic subjects are gendered female. This made me question how gender operates in creating
perceptions of otherness and in the structuring of power in the U.S. I sought to address these concerns
in my interdisciplinary study of English, Psychology, and Media and Culture Studies at the University of
California, Riverside. In my undergraduate studies, I interrogated the interrelations of race, class, and
gender, and traced how they impacted the bifurcated identity of those like myself who live on the
hyphen. The critical knowledge I acquired in taking a broad range of coursework at UC Riverside as well
as my experience as a religious, racialized, and gendered minority have well prepared me to pursue a
Ph.D. in Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. My intellectual trajectory has been
shaped by postcolonial and feminist theory upon which I draw to investigate the politics of
contemporary minority experiences in the U.S. I worked extensively with film and new media while
honing my skills of literary analysis. I have developed a multifaceted approach to interrogating the
structures and psychologies of oppression, which I would like to expand on in my graduate work.
An important theorist who has influenced my research inquiries as well as my knowledge of
decolonizing methodologies and countering state violence is Frantz Fanon. Based on Fanons work, I
composed a research paper, A Fanonian Epistemology for Decolonization, that dismantled the
epistemologies of colonial ideology and explored anticolonial consciousness. My essay analyzed both
filmic and literary texts, Gillo Pontecorvos film, The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Jamaica Kincaids book,
A Small Place, and sought to study how the colonized subject may be imbued with self-determination
an idea of central importance to liberation movements. Fanons exploration of colonialism and
psychoanalysis resonated with my courses in psychology, which dealt with the neurochemical effects of
stress and violence within the body. For me, the neurological understanding of how violence disrupts
brain development and the immune system and even triggers premature illness and death illuminated
Fanons critique of colonial violence as an existential violence. At the same time, I found that while
Fanons nationalist discourse and anticolonial strategies adequately addressed aspects of colonial
imperialism, they failed to address patriarchal imperialism and, thus, perpetuated gendered oppression.
Writing this essay evoked the disheartening experience I had with my father and moved my attention to
intersectional gender studies. It has been through this lens of analysis that I began to challenge
discourses that reinforce matrices of oppression in my own research and filmmaking.
Studying gender in media and culture, I produced original visual texts that demonstrated my
commitment to an intersectional mode of analysis. In a feminist reimagining of Ridley Scotts Thelma
and Louise (1991), as writer, actor and director, I created a space for female agency by letting the female

Personal Statement
leads live on after usurping male authority, an ending that the Hollywood film foreclosed. Using bell
hooks theories of women of color feminism, I cast mixed-race Hispanic and Indian women as the leads,
a gesture that allowed for the interrogation of white feminist subjectivity. In revising patriarchal
narratives and deconstructing constructs of femininity, I exposed the mechanics of masculinity,
femininity, their dialectic relations, and constructed nature. In my second film production, a raperevenge horror film, I related my discussion of gender and ethnicity to the nation. Employing the
Japanese motif of the onryou, an avenging female spirit, and drawing on Edward Saids critique of
Orientalism, my film examined notions of Otherness and monstrosity. Further, this film spoke to the
gendered nature of social and state violence that links the body of the female to the body politic. My
final film project was a short documentary that looked at independent news media, interviews, and
blogs through the lens of critical race theory to unmask the hypocrisy of mainstream liberal politics.
Specifically I critiqued the Human Rights Commission, for its lack of intersectionality when it comes to
disenfranchised groups. For example, I focused on the Commissions agenda of marriage equality that
seeks to bring LGBTQ groups into the fold of white-supremacist and gender normative structures. In
exploring alternative media, I learned how modes of disseminating news and entertainment are central
to decolonization and resisting hegemony.
The gendered nature of violence, masculinist nature of imperial ideology, and contested trope
of the nation were key concepts of my thesis, Rewriting Gendered Spaces within the Nation which
examined the novels, A Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai and No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff.
This paper analyzed how female postcolonial authors textually subverted male-centered narratives and
nationalisms. In disputing patriarchal nationalism and the imperial ideology of which it is emblematic,
my discussion sought to recuperate the problematic gendered aspects of national consciousness that
Fanons scholarship brought to light. Analyzing postcolonial literature in conjunction with critical theory
was crucial in developing my interdisciplinary, intersectional approach to the study of cultural
production. I realized that abstract knowledge of psychology and theory are inadequate for
understanding the human pain of exploitation and abuse. This thesis is an entry point for the ideas I
hope to continue exploring in graduate school.
As a graduate student, my dissertation will implement a women of color analytic to contribute
to new theorizations about nationalism and feminism with regard to South Asian subjectivities. I will
analyze and critique the circulation of contemporary texts, media, and global events such as the recent
embrace of Malala Yousafzai (Nobel Prize co-recipient) for the ways they propagate Western notions of
liberalism and feminism and ultimately work to consolidate western hegemony. I am interested in
studying western representations as well as globalized imaginaries of South Asian women in a post9/11 context. By deconstructing neoliberal (mis)representations that confine Third world subjects into
essentialist and exotisized ideas of personhood, I seek to produce counter-hegemonic work that
maintains the cultural integrity and oft-elided humanity of marginalized groups.
Among the faculty at UCLA with whom I would most like to work are Michelle Erai, Grace Hong,
Purnima Mankekar, and Sarah Haley. Dr. Erais work on discourses of postcolonial violence bears
directly on my interest in narratives like those of Malala Yousafzai. Dr. Hongs book, The Ruptures of
American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor dialogs with my thesis
as it deals with globalization and the exoticization of the Other. I am especially interested in Dr. Hongs
intersectional feminist analysis and her discussion of different modes of resistance in her book Strange
Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. My abiding interest in visual
cultures, and their importance to my scholarship would also be greatly enhanced by working with Dr.
Mankekar, whose important book on mass media and identity/nation formation dovetails with my focus
on gender and nation. Finally, Dr. Haleys historical focus on women and social movements will be
indispensable in thinking through the mobilization of social movements in my work. These esteemed

Personal Statement
scholars have greatly influenced my decision to begin my graduate education at UCLA. Once I obtain my
PhD, my goal is to continue to conduct research, make films, and teach at a research institute.