Lazim, a capsule collection, Studio Meru x Mehrunissa Khan

By Andrea Salerno J.

What does it mean to be a woman in a country where violence against women is a naturalized practice and assimilated as part of a cultural system?

Human Rights Watch reported that in the Punjab Province alone, from January to May 2023, 10,365 cases of violence against women were reported, violence that is also suffered by the Khawaja Sira community (a term for people of the third gender or non-conforming gender), especially the institutional one, since, in May 2023, in a ruling, the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan declared that the Law for the Protection of the Rights of Transgender Persons, approved in 2018, was incompatible with Islamic principles.

Pakistan, so far from Latin America, confirms what virtually goes through all women and dissidents in the world: that fear is intentionally constructed and that it is a mechanism of sociocultural asphyxiation sustained over time.

Perhaps this is a consequence of what Emerita Professor Rosa-Linda Fregoso calls “the cultural elaboration of fear.”

Using this as a basis for reflection on the space women occupy in Pakistan, I created the campaign for the “Lazim” collection by Studio Meru in Lahore, in response to a creative call from designer Mehrunissa Khan during Ramadan 2022. 

Developed over eight days and with a production team almost entirely made up of Muslim women, in a city that escapes the collective imagination of Latin America, it materialized after positioning the female body - of the models and the photographic and production crew - in a public and vertical way in a city where the space itself excludes women and dissidents.

Using clothing as a pretext, this project is an exercise of the female gaze with other women, illustrating the difficulties they experience when trying to occupy a public space without being interrupted or harassed by the masculinized masses of the city, finding themselves in a specific situation: the women convinced that they must occupy a role in the public sphere but confronted by the risk that doing so presupposes, thus being an exercise of consultation on what potential emerges from the claim for the right to occupy a space without asking for forgiveness or asking for permission.