CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Zarlasht Halaimzai Desire as Resistance: Afghan Women and the Gendered End of the World
Afghan women offer a unique insight into subjectivity under collapse. Our bodies are sites of chronic apocalypse where the end of the world is the structure of everyday life. It is to live with grief, rage, and beauty in the ruins—without closure. We live inside collapse—again and again.
In this context, subjectivity is not stable but constantly re-formed through conditions of structural violence. Afghan women’s inner and outer worlds are shaped by regimes that seek to annihilate them, yet they remain generative, creative, and resistant. Their narratives, desires, and acts of care become what Saidiya Hartman calls "beautiful experiments"—gestures toward freedom enacted inside severe constraints. Inside this collapse, we survive. We resist. We narrate. We desire.
The CAPAS fellowship is an opportunity to examine how desire operates within this landscape. Desire—often pathologized or repressed in patriarchal and colonial logics—becomes a terrain of defiance, refusal, and possibility. Afghan women desire against erasure: to learn, to write, to exist publicly, to mother, to speak.
Through a series of narrative essays, this project explores subjectivity under siege, focusing on how war, gendered dislocation, and postcolonial trauma inscribe themselves into the interior life of individuals. Subjectivity is not imagined here as stable or even sovereign, but as something repeatedly fractured and reassembled through ongoing violence and survival.