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Maria Rashid

Maria Rashid

LSE Fellow in Gender Studies

Department of Gender Studies

Email
m.rashid4@lse.ac.uk
Room No
PAN.11.01
Languages
English, Urdu
Key Expertise
Gender, Militarism, Masculinities, Gender Training, Affect Theory

About me

Maria Rashid has completed her doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies in Politics and International Studies Her doctoral work explores service and death in the Pakistani Military and situates militarism as a set of gendered governing practices that not only control affective selves but also produce them by reworking affect and attachment through the concerns of the military.

Her monograph: Dying to Serve, Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army was published with Stanford University Press in 2020.  Winner of the Barnard S. Cohn Book prize 2022 and shortlisted for the 2021 IPS and 2022 BASAS book awards, her book is a political ethnography that questions the intimate ways militarization cultivates the forms and feelings of citizenship, including the nation state's ability to rationalise wars through its most poignant burden, the deaths of its soldiers. Her research interests lie in producing accounts of the micro politics of militarism as a discursive and material process in the global South in ways that implicate race, gender and nation, and the study of local conflict and violence as imperially constituted, and intrinsically linked to global structures of post coloniality and neo-liberalism.

In addition to teaching gender, peace and security at LSE, Dr Rashid is also involved with the Partition of Identity (POI) project, a cross-university initiative, led by UCL, that studies the 1971 war and the Pakistani Bengali community in Pakistan. 

A psychologist by training, Maria has worked with various national and international non-governmental organisations in Pakistan including heading a national women and child rights group for over 14 years. She continues to be involved in training and research around violence and masculinities and is associated with networks and collaboratives both in South Asia and the UK.

Expertise Details

Gender; Militarism; Masculinities; Gender Training; and Affect Theory.

Publications

Journal Articles:

  • Rashid, M. (2022). ‘Appropriate’ing grief: mothers, widows and the (un) grievability of military death. NORMA, 17(1), 52-66.
  • Rashid, M. (2022). Precarious attachments: soldiers and erasures of the feminine in the Pakistan military. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 24(4), 544-563.

Books: 

Rashid, M. (2020). Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army. In Stanford University Press. Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30930

The Pakistan Army is a uniquely powerful and influential institution, with vast landholdings and resources. It has deep roots in the colonial armed forces and relies heavily on certain regions to supply its soldiers, especially parts of rural Punjab, where men have served in the army for generations. These men, their wives and mothers, and the military culture surrounding them are the focus of Maria Rashid's Dying to Serve, which innovatively and sensitively addresses the question: how does the military thrive when so much of its work results in injury, debility, and death? Taking ritual commemorations of fallen soldiers as one critical site of study, Rashid argues that these "spectacles of mourning" are careful manipulations of affect, gendered and structured by the military to reinforce its omnipotence in the lives of its subjects. Grounding her study in the famed martial district of Chakwal, Rashid finds affect similarly deployed in recruitment and training practices, as well as management of death and compensation to families. She contends that understanding these affective technologies is crucial to challenging the appeal of the military institution globally.

The book has since been re-printed and has a Pakistani edition by Folio Books, Pakistan (2021) and a South Asian edition by Bloomsbury India (2023).

Awards:

  • Winner of the 2022 Bernard Cohn Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) - South Asia Council.
  • Shortlisted by the British Association for South Asian Studies Book Prize (BASAS) 2022.
  • Honorable Mention in the 2020 IPS Book Award, sponsored by the ISA International Political Sociology Section.

Book Reviews:

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