Schools, Sex & Silence: A Comparative Ethnography of the Pedagogies of Gendered Shame in Lahore, Pakistan

Farah Basit

​​In Pakistan, discussions of gender, sexuality, and the female body are frequently framed through the cultural logics of sharam(shame) and izzat(honor). These constructs shape family and community life and schools. Silence, euphemisms, and avoidance often replace open discussion of bodies, puberty, or safety. Global research has highlighted the importance of comprehensive gender/sexuality education for youth wellbeing, and its absence in places like Lahore. Few studies, however, have examined schools as sites that actively produce knowledge about gender/sexuality through the (re)production and (re)inforcement of shame. My dissertation investigates how teachers and students in Lahore's stratified school system — public, low-cost private, elite-private — describe and experience the official, hidden, and missing curricula of gender/sexuality. Building on a pilot study with nineteen teachers, I am conducting a comparative ethnography that includes participant observation, interviews, affective/emotion diaries, focus groups, and analysis of curricular/policy materials. By centering teachers' and students' perspectives, I aim to capture how shame is transmitted, embodied, and resisted in school practices, from textbooks and dressing to disciplinary encounters. This study makes three contributions. First, it theorizes shame as a pedagogical practice, analyzing silence and avoidance as forms of instruction. Second, it illuminates how class and institutional type mediate the production and policing of shame. Finally, it identifies realistic leverage points for reform, offering insights for policymakers and educators seeking to create safer, more supportive environments for girls. In doing so, the project advances feminist and anthropological understandings of education while informing equity-oriented practice.

About Farah Basit

Farah Basit is a doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in Comparative and International Education. Originally from Lahore, Pakistan, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Sociology from Lahore University of Management Sciences. Her research sits at the intersection of education, gender, sexuality, and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), with a particular focus on how schools shape young women’s understandings of the body, morality, safety, and belonging. Building on her earlier work on menstrual hygiene management and sex education in Pakistan, her scholarship examines how shame, silence, and institutional regulation structure girls’ educational experiences. Through ethnographic and feminist approaches, she explores how schools reproduce and negotiate sociocultural ideas surrounding gender, sexuality, and respectability, particularly within Pakistan’s class-stratified education system. Her current dissertation research investigates the pedagogies of gendered shame in girls’ secondary schools in Lahore, focusing on the official, hidden, and missing curricula of gender and sexuality across public, low-cost private, and elite-private schools. Her work contributes to feminist, anthropological, and comparative education scholarship by theorizing shame not simply as an emotion, but as a pedagogical and institutional practice that shapes what girls can know, ask, and imagine. More broadly, she is interested in questions of educational inequality, gender justice, moral regulation, and the politics of knowledge in schools. Her dissertation research is supported by the Arvil Barr Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.