This thesis explores the lives of a group of young, middle-class women living in a privately-run girls’ hostel in Lahore. The key question that this thesis seeks to address is the meaning of this stage in the lives of young women. A temporary period of accommodation in an urban hostel while studying is increasingly conceptualised as part of the life course for middle-class young women, bracketed by childhood in the natal household and married, virilocal adulthood. What does it mean to move to the city alone as a young Pakistani woman, and how do these women understand the experience of being a ‘hostellite’?
Based on nearly nine months of close-range participant observation, I tell the stories of some of the women who lived alongside me in the hostel. I describe how the journeys they make from rural areas to the city become conceptualised as journeys from asynchronous cultural ‘backwardness’ to a distinctively gendered and classed modernity, embodied in bodily techniques, cultural competencies and practices of consumption. Against global narratives celebrating the liberatory potential of education and work for supposedly constrained and oppressed Muslim women in the Global South, my thesis shows the pressure placed upon these subjects in the process of becoming groomed, as they experience hardship, humiliation and loneliness and learn to cultivate endurance (bardasht) and patience (sabr) as key attributes of hostellite life.
In this thesis I reflect critically upon the ethical and methodological decisions that have influenced my research practice, particularly in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. I seek to show how these issues have influenced my research and writing, and how questions of absence, incompleteness and ethical refusal have shaped my thesis
