The fourth annual Aurat March, followed by an ever-growing digital debate in Pakistan, with many grassroots groups entering mainstream political exchanges, has shown that Pakistan can no longer ignore feminism.

Many misconceptions and much of the paranoia about feminism and gender studies in Pakistan stem from a lack of knowledge. It is almost as if an entire generation has found itself spelling words it does not understand, courtesy of the accessibility of social media platforms. The superficiality and absurdity of arguments against gender equality are enough to indicate the need for disciplinary intervention.

Most literate people now have a general idea of what economics is or what political science offers, or why sociology is essential; there is a need to make the basic premise of gender studies common knowledge.

So what is gender studies? It is all about power. And we all know what that is. We are all actively or inactively participating in the intricate web of power that is woven around us. Some people enjoy power over others. Those having certain means to monopolise power exercise it over those who lack it. That lack is not natural.

The lack is created by maintaining certain structures that cement the imbalance to make power exclusive, elusive and unattainable.

Gender studies focuses on one of those structures: the patriarchy. Patriarchy is an everyday lived experience that privileges men over women and other marginalised groups.

It is also a structure that sustains the abovementioned monopolisation of power as a thing that can be owned by those who have what is desired by the society; it leads to the over-valorisation of perceptively masculinised traits and practices at the expense of feminised traits and activities, entrapping everyone within a binary that has managed even to control our imagination.

At the end of the day, it is all about power. And most of us know what it means to be powerless.

Now that we have some idea about what gender studies is, it is time to turn to the original question: why do we need to teach gender studies in Pakistani academia? It is to make this knowledge available, accessible and usable.

Academia can be seen as a harbinger of the borderline unintelligible verbosity that one should desire to avoid. It can also be a platform to make a subject visible. Academia can provide a space for gender studies that can transcend the coded walls of digital media by positioning it into our discursive reality. It can provide a disciplined earnestness to gender studies that it currently lacks in Pakistan by virtue of feminism being pigeonholed as an extended limb of “top-tier activism.”

This does not mean that academia is the only answer to gender inequality in Pakistan since its doors are closed on many disadvantaged groups. Still, it is a medium available to a number of young students and researchers whose work can be profited from by investigating a vista of power that is right under our noses and yet is hard to call out.

By incorporating it as a medium of education and knowledge production, gender studies can provide us with the nuance to engage with a problem by first acknowledging that it is a problem.

Teaching gender studies in Pakistani academia would equip our youth with a language that can describe our specific problems, paving the way to finding solutions that can be most suitable to our struggles and shared turmoil. As one of my students opined about the course, A Brief History of Feminist Movements in Pakistan, taught at LUMS, “As a class, delving into theory, being able to situate ourselves in it, and ultimately finding ways to resist and overcome such structures is an intellectually and emotionally stimulating experience.”

Innovation and diversity are the need of the hour vis a vis education, and with the state struggling with this conundrum, now is the time to introduce this critical debate before it is too late. The debate needs to be formalised, reliant on rigorous research and theoretical perspectives to shift the ideological divide we are witnessing in 2021.

Despite its importance, only a few local universities teach gender studies, usually as an introductory course heavily reliant on Western theories. Almost all of them lack a much needed historical context necessary to situate the evolution of feminist movements in South Asia and Pakistan.

It is borderline lazy to decry feminism as a Western import when we are directly responsible for the purposeful erasure of a rich feminist history that vastly contributed to Pakistan’s creation.

When students exclaim that they had never heard of the Begums of Bhopal, or Fatima Sughra and Begum Shahnawaz, of Fatima Jinnah’s political campaign and Begum Rana Liaqat Ali Khan’s diplomatic accolades, or the activism of organisations like the APWA and the WAF, it brings me no joy in realising that our feminist role models have been written out of history books, surviving on the margins of local knowledge production.

It would be dangerous and even unfair to solely rely on the digital medium for an entire generation to learn not only about some of the most prolific philosophical voices but also of systemic inequalities that have shaped our identities.

It would be even more dangerous to let the loudest voices hijack a movement without them having any acquaintance with the vast body of rich material already available on the subject. With more than half of the population facing many disadvantages perpetuated by a regressive power structure, academia can provide sustainability to the issue, leading to credible research and recorded history, informing an equal future shared by all of us.

But only if we allow ourselves to read, think, critique, invent and reinvent, learn and unlearn and then learn again and anew. We should all know what that feels like.

The writer teaches Pakistan Studies and A Brief History of Feminist Movements in Pakistan at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS