This dissertation is a political history of Afghan elite women within ruling families and educated upper or middle class urban families. This is about their indirect access to power and how they shaped the politics of the time and interacted with Afghan regimes and foreign empires. The British, Soviet, and American empires defined themselves in Afghanistan through the rhetoric of liberation and modernization. Each imperial formation enacted its own gendered projects, which created the conditions in which Afghanistan’s leaders and women operated.

I locate and read women in the margins of Afghan history and trace how stories/ histories of their lives were told and imagined long after their deaths. I also show how feminist movements emerged and went underground during different periods. This research identifies eight distinct women’s emancipation periods or feminist movements in Afghanistan spanning 102 years from 1919-2021 and engaging the three large empires of the 20th and 21st centuries. This is a history that reveals that many of these negotiations and strategies were played out on gendered ground and that elite women within the monarchy intentionally attempted to maneuver power and position for themselves. These include conceptions of appropriate, modern, nationalistic femininity. In doing so, this research pieces together a narrative about elite gendered agency that negotiated with patriarchal, monarchical and colonial forms of power. The narrative reveals the ways in which elite and colonial interests intersected around questions of modernity and the woman question.

I used archival texts, newspapers, myths, and poetry in Farsi, Pashto, and English to draw out details of these women’s lives and stitch them together. I conducted interviews and oral histories to create unique accounts of these women’s lives. This kind of stitching of Afghan and western sources in multiple languages tell the stories of a range of Afghan women who were political players and significant in Afghan history. This research makes critical connections between the women and the maleleaders they were related to. This shows a more comprehensive view of the leader and of Afghan historical periods.

This dissertation, located at the crossroads of Continental political philosophy, feminist theory, critical theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies, provides a critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought in its various constellations and assemblages, while using diffractive theorizing to examine two Continental terror(ist) events. It is argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism), are in need of a Zeitgeist-adjusted conceptual framework, and, thus, a revitalization of philosophizing as such, that could lead to an analysis of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, the actual terror they produce, and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender.

Using the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this project’s first part explores what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist manner, while furthermore offering a situated critical cartography of new materialist thought. Within the contours of this Deleuzoguattarian mapping exercise, new materialist thought is shown to be grounded in foregoing materialist philosophies, transversal and trans(/)disciplinary, and, moreover, a revitalizing ever-evolving philosophical strand of thought with crisscrossing, transcontinental roots and a strong foundation in (post-)Foucauldian poststructuralist thought. Particular attention is paid to what in this project are called “critical” new materialisms, or those new materialist philosophies that take the necessity of critical power analyses seriously, and could be said to be “eco-ethico-political” in nature. This cartography is furthermore accompanied by a digital critical cartography that can be utilized for pedagogical means.

The second and final part of this dissertation, preceded by an excursus that accentuates the importance of Harawayan ecophilosophical thought for critical new materialist philosophies, consists of one chapter that puts the idea of diffractive theorizing into practice; subsequently exploring theorizing on terror(ism), the Habermas-Derrida dialogues with regard to 9/11, and the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks as affect-inducing events of “feeling-thinking-through.” This chapter ends with a diffractive rereading of Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, and also partially Levinas, on the subject of the contemporary democratic state, terrorism, and the legitimacy of lockdowns and emergency state declarations. By doing so, this final chapter anticipates on this dissertation’s epilogue, in which the need for an up-to-date critical new materialist eco-ethico-political model of justice and responsiveness-as-response-ability, is highlighted.