Table of Contents

Prologue: "If Only You Were Born a Boy"
Introduction: Carnival of (Post)War
PART I. PHANTOM STATE BUILDING
Chapter 1. Queen Soraya's Portrait
Chapter 2. National Women's Machinery: Coaching Lives in the Ministry of Women's Affairs #
Chapter 3. Public and Private Faces of Gender (In)Justice
PART II. BODIES OF RESISTANCE
Chapter 4. Moral Panics, Indian Soaps, and Cosmetics: Writing the Nation on Women's Bodies #
Chapter 5. Strategic Decoration: Dissimulation, Performance, and Agency in an Islamic Public Space
Chapter 6. Poetic Jihad: Narratives of Martyrdom, Suicide, and Suffering Among Afghan Women
Conclusion: The Carnival Continues
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Promotional Information

Offering one of the first long-term on-the-ground ethnographies of Afghanistan since the arrival of allied forces in 2001, Kabul Carnival explores the contradictions, ambiguities, and unintended effects of the emancipatory projects designed for Afghan women and imposed by the international community.

About the Author

Julie Billaud is a Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Reviews

"Kabul Carnival is a breeze of fresh air. Reading this well argued ethnographic book on women's gender politics in Afghanistan allows for a more sophisticated approach to how we view 'the other'- the gendered other (Afghan women), as well as the religious other (Muslim Afghans)."
*PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review*

"Kabul Carnival examines the contested and changing gender politics in Afghanistan, largely focusing on recent issues but locating them in a wider historical sweep, setting a context in which orientalism and debates about modernity are echoed in the contemporary international agenda to reconstruct Afghanistan."
*Patricia Jeffery, University of Edinburgh*