Sana Naeem

Through an ethnographic focus on practices of waiting, making other wait, and narratives of waiting, I study how Pashtun women litigating divorce in the Peshawar family courts constitute themselves, and are constituted as, gendered citizens through their relationship with time. A focus on time highlights the nature of the encounter between multiple temporal orders and litigants’ strategic manipulations of time’s speed and tempo, within the legal process. This encounter is materialized in speech practices, material artifacts, and ethical orientations towards the spending of time. I engage the Peshawar family courts as a site where the domains of religion, culture, and state interact—in and through time—to produce socio-historically particular conceptions of gendered citizenship in postcolonial Pakistan.