Powerlessness of Marginalised Women in the Dialectics of Violence in Pakistan

SouthAsia is encumbered by cultural conflicts and violence in the countries it has and the size of their populations. Four of the ten South Asian nations have the highest rate of violent cultural conflicts. Around the entire South Asian countries, Pakistan gives an impression of unsure growth towards women empowerment and gender discrimination, and remains lower in ranking than others The reason is clear that Pakistani society has patriarchal setup that little recognizes the capabilities of marginalized women, rather make persistent problems in their way towards liberation. Marginalized women often face physical and mental violence as a result of numerous innate psychological and behavioral encounters and appear powerless. Powerlessness of marginalized women dwindles in a synthesis of opposing terms of ‘violence’ and ‘non-violence’, and as Battaile thinks about the same type of two antagonistic concepts, these are ‘mutually constitutive and there is synthesis of opposing terms each lending its power of signification to the other’. In Sadean dialectic, ‘opposing terms are united in synthesis which structures their initial emergence into the discursive arena’. The emphasis on violence as a synthesizing force is just one of the ways in which Sade’s dialectical system differs from Hegelian dialectic which is essentially historical and operates chronologically through times. The binary oppositions become supportive and constitutive. The dialectics of violence is the central theme in this paper. Keeping this viewpoint, this paper will be based on an empirical research conducted by different government agencies in Pakistan with a sample of 3,687 women about domestic violence that revealed that marginalized women suffered from physical abuse as “hitting, kicking, biting, shoving, restraining, slapping, or throwing objects” and other “sexual and emotional abuse, controlling or domineering behaviours, intimidation, stalking, and passive or covert abuse.”