Phenomenology of the stop: street-level bureaucracy and everyday citizenship of marginalized groups

Abstract

Limited access to public space for marginalized groups remains an understudied theme in citizenship research in public administration. To address this important research gap, using ethnographic research methods, this article investigates the influence of street-level policing on the everyday citizenship of the Khawaja Sira – a marginalized genderqueer group in Pakistan. Everyday citizenship is conceptualized as the inalienable, equal right of every citizen to be present, visible, and mobile in the public space of a polity. The discussion highlights that through selective implementation of law, hyper-surveillance and moral policing, frontline workers can contribute to curtailing the citizenship of marginalized social groups. Theoretical and practical implications that underscore the intersections of mobility, everyday spaces and administrator–citizen interactions are also discussed.

Points for practitioners

• Through selective implementation of law, hyper-surveillance and moral policing, frontline workers can contribute to curtailing the citizenship of marginalized social groups.

• Access to public space is often disproportionately denied to marginalized social groups like the members of the LGBT community.

• The frontline workers of various departments should be educated about the unique identity and requirements of marginalized groups to improve street-level service delivery.

Keywords

LGBT policing public space street-level bureaucracy

[I]f citizenship is to mean anything in an everyday sense it should mean the ability of individuals to occupy public spaces in a manner that does not compromise their self-identity, let alone obstruct, threaten or even harm them more materially. If people cannot be present in public spaces … without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’, then it must be questionable whether or not these people can be regarded as citizens at all. (Painter and Philo, 1995: 115)

Citizenship research represents one of the central lines of inquiry where the debate over the legitimacy of public administration (PA) and its relationship with the public has unfolded over the last four decades. While it has provided important insights, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Epp et al., 2014), PA research on citizenship has remained focused on public participation and/or bureaucratic behavior in formal institutional spaces. Little attention has so far been given to citizenship within everyday public spaces and its relation to administrative praxis.

While limited PA research has focused on this topic, scholars in other disciplines have shown that unequal access to space is both an important determinant, and a critical consequence of, social marginalization (Massey, 1994; Painter and Philo, 1995). Research has illustrated that marginalized groups face material and symbolic exclusion by the dominant social groups limiting their everyday citizenship – defined here as the inalienable, equal right of every citizen to be present, visible, and mobile in the public space of a polity. Understanding the experiences of such individuals, especially in relation to street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980) implementing urban and spatial laws is an important, yet understudied, aspect of citizenship research in PA.

To address this important gap in previous research, in this article I analyze the interactions between the Khawaja Sira – a group of genderqueer individuals in Pakistan – and street-level bureaucrats in everyday urban spaces of Pakistan. My approach in this article is loosely based on Ahmad’s (2006) queer phenomenology of ‘being stopped’. Ahmad (2006: 133) notes that a ‘phenomenology of “being stopped” might take us in a different direction than one that begins with motility, with a body that “can do” by flowing into space’. Such an analysis further requires an analysis of questions like ‘Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing?’ that are used as ‘stopping devices’ (Ahmad, 2006). With a few exceptions, we take this flow of bodies across public space for granted in PA research and pay limited attention to how public administration praxis contributes to curtailing the flow of bodies in public places and the ramifications of such restrictions for the everyday citizenship of marginalized groups.

In doing so, this article makes the following contributions: First, the concept of everyday citizenship contributes to PA research on citizenship by underscoring the intersections of mobility, everyday spaces and administrator–citizen interactions. This concept can be used in other contexts to investigate the relationship between administrative decision making and the citizenship of marginalized groups. Second, it contributes to the literature on street-level bureaucracy by highlighting how hyper-surveillance and archetypes of marginalized groups constructed by frontline workers contribute to increased social inequity. My findings suggest that the role of police frontline workers can go well beyond the traditional views of street-level bureaucrats as implementers of public policy. Instead, at least in this context, they play an active role in constructing and enforcing the normative social order which may not be in strict conformity with the written rules and regulations. Finally, through a theoretically informed empirical analysis of the interactions between a genderqueer group and the frontline workers of government in Pakistan, this article contributes to the limited PA research on LGBT issues and developing countries.

Citizenship and public administration

There has been a close relationship between legal citizenship, civic participation and public administration praxis since the inception of PA as an academic discipline. As noted by Frederickson (1982), two of the earliest public affairs schools in the USA (at Syracuse and the University of Southern California) were initially known as schools of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Citizenship research in PA can primarily be divided into two lines of inquiry. One line of inquiry focused on legal citizenship (Kalu, 2003) which is citizenship ‘formally codified in terms of qualifications, rights, and obligations by constitutions, charters, and laws’ (Cooper and Gulick, 1984: 144). In this line of inquiry, PA researchers have analyzed the ramifications of the legal categorization and status of social groups to illustrate the multiple ways in which inequity is sustained or influenced by law and public policy (e.g. Yanow, 2003).

The second line of inquiry focuses on ‘[t]he qualifications, rights, and obligations of citizenship … defined and prescribed by the values, norms, traditions, and culture of any given community or by consensus among members of the community in specific instances’ (Cooper and Gulick, 1984: 144). This research has been broadly labeled ethical citizenship since the idea of an active and committed citizen generally acts as the normative ideal in this line of inquiry (Dimock, 1990; Zanetti and Carr, 1999). Interestingly, both these lines of inquiry recognize that public administrators have an important role to play in creating, sustaining and nurturing various forms of citizenship (see, for example, Bryer and Cooper, 2012; Campbell, 2005; Cooper and Gulick, 1984). As Cook (1998: 226) argues,

In carrying out the law, administrative agencies often create particular categories or classes of citizenship and define the proper relationships among those classes … In doing all this, [a PA department] also shapes behavior, the perceptions that citizens hold of one another, and the experiences they have in particular contexts (for instance, between employer and employee).

Moreover, the idea of unequal citizenship status has also been present since the start of PA citizenship research (Cooper and Gulick, 1984; Flathman, 1989). While most researchers advocate high citizenship – where ‘citizens are free, equal, and engaged with one another in pursuing matters of high and distinctively human import’ (Flathman, 1989: 65) – as a normative ideal, it is recognized that low citizenship – characterized by hierarchical distribution of authority based on laws, customs, and consensus (Cooper and Gulick, 1984) – is still the norm due to socio-political inequalities in our societies. In other words, due to social biases, not all legally equal citizens are able to similarly participate in the public sphere.

Citizenship research has been influential in highlighting the relationship between public policy (design and implementation) and the overall situation of legal and ethical citizenship in society. However, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Epp et al., 2014), PA studies on citizenship have either been theoretical explorations about instrumental and normative dimensions of citizenship or limited to empirical analysis within formal institutional spaces of public organizations. Limited attention has so far been given to equitable access to public space which is an important aspect of citizenship, especially for marginalized groups.

Space, everyday citizenship and street-level bureaucrats

As noted in the quote at the start of this article, a fundamental right of citizenship is the ability to be present, visible and mobile in the public space of a polity.¹ Social scientists have highlighted that public places are not neutral spaces that equally accommodate all bodies (Casper and Moore, 2009), identities and/or behaviors (Fraser, 1990; Hubbard, 2001). Instead, while some modes of expression, identities and bodies are treated as normal – even ideal – others deemed deviant are marked for surveillance and subsequent marginalization and invisibility. For example, urban geographers have shown that social marginalization has an integral relationship to unequal access to urban spaces. Hence, dominant social groups deny marginalized groups access to urban spaces on the pretext of ‘purification of space’ which further casts such groups as impure and marginal (Sibley, 1995). Other geographers have also highlighted how spatial planning, gentrification and entry fees limit the access of marginalized groups to many urban spaces (Craddock, 2000; Hanson and Pratt, 1995; Trudeau and McMorran, 2011).

Researchers working on gender and sexual minorities have further refined these insights by showing how such groups are often disproportionately excluded from public spaces. For example, Massey (1994: 179) notes,

From the symbolic meaning of spaces/places and the clearly gendered messages which they transmit, to straightforward exclusion by violence, spaces and places are not only themselves gendered but, in their being so, they both reflect and affect the ways in which gender is constructed and understood.

Similarly, Elder (1998) argues that heterosexuality is created and sustained as a social norm through institutionalized regulatory apparatuses which manage access to public spaces. Perhaps more pertinently, Dwyer (2010: 417) notes that ‘policing is about policing heterosexual spaces’. Overall, these scholars have shown that the public sphere can be envisaged as a heterosexual (as well as patriarchal and racist) social construction (Hubbard, 2001, 2004) which is policed and managed in a way that makes entry into the public spaces very difficult for women (Massey, 1994; Phadke et al., 2011), queer groups (Namaste, 1996; Valentine, 1993), and racial minorities (Epp et al., 2014; Feagin, 1991).

The concept of everyday citizenship has proved helpful in further highlighting the relationship between spatial exclusions and social belonging. Although a relatively recent addition to citizenship research, it has been used in different contexts to understand the everyday experiences of different sections of society in the public places of different territories. From Muslim experiences in British public places (Hopkins and Blackwood, 2011) to youth’s citizenship in everyday life (Biesta et al., 2009; Wood, 2010) and challenges faced by disabled women in the public sphere of Eastern Europe (Zaviršek, 2006), the idea of everyday citizenship highlights the integral connection between social marginalization and access to public space (Dickinson et al., 2008).

A consistent finding of these different lines of inquiry is that maintaining unnatural spatial distinctions between social groups and their everyday citizenship requires continuous ‘work’ carried out through a combination of material and symbolic practices. While material practices – like border walls and physical prohibitions to enter certain spaces – are more visible, symbolic practices – like linguistic standards and dress codes – are equally effective in (re)producing marginalization (Sibley, 1995). Law and public policy often play a central role in enabling such material and symbolic spatial exclusions.

As implementers of laws governing access to public spaces, street-level bureaucrats – public servants who directly interact with citizens and have considerable discretion in their jobs (Lipsky, 1980) – influence the everyday citizenship of marginalized groups in important ways. For example, police, immigration, and welfare officials determine whether different individuals are allowed access to public, national and institutional spaces, respectively. Critically, research on street-level bureaucracy has highlighted that due to unpredictable job environment, high workload and considerable discretion, street-level bureaucrats often use heuristics to inform their decision making (Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003). Since such heuristics are informed by group norms, dominant social constructions and previous experience (Oberfield, 2014), street-level bureaucrats can incur disproportionate administrative burden on marginalized groups. For example, researchers have found that racial and gender minorities often experience discriminatory behavior by law enforcement agencies (Epp et al., 2014; Grant et al., 2011; Irvine, 2014). In fact, terms like ‘driving while black’ and ‘walking while trans’ capture the everyday excessive surveillance such individuals routinely experience from the criminal justice system (Daum, 2015).

This makes interactions between street-level bureaucrats and citizens in urban public spaces an important, yet understudied, site of investigation about everyday citizenship of marginalized groups. As discussed above, Ahmad’s conceptualization of ‘the stop’ as an analytical tool is helpful in this regard to highlight the underlying rationality and geographies of everyday exclusions faced by marginalized groups. As Ahmad (2006: 14) notes,

to stop involves many meanings; to cease, to end, and also to cut off, to arrest, to check, to prevent, to block, to obstruct, or to close … The ‘hey you’ is not here addressed to the body that can inherit the ego ideal of an organization, or who can be recruited to follow a given line, but to the body that cannot be recruited, to the body that is ‘out of place’ in this place. In other words, the ‘unrecruitable’ body must still be ‘recruited’ into this place, in part through the very repetition of the action of ‘being stopped’ as a mode of address.

A study of the experiences of marginalized individuals at officially mandated and discretionary stops in urban public spaces, therefore, allows us to investigate which identities and bodies are kept invisible from us and ‘what are the consequences of such selective blindness … How is visibility possible? For whom, by whom, and of whom? What remains invisible, to whom, and why?’ (Haraway, 1997: 202).

Research context and methodology

Khawaja Sira are a genderqueer group of individuals who are generally labeled as men at their birth but prefer feminine performative identity (Nisar, 2018). Owing to their non-conformity to the gender assigned at birth, the Khawaja Sira face social and familial stigmatization. Most Khawaja Sira end up leaving or being kicked out of their homes and schools in early adolescence, often after repeated physical and verbal abuse. A combination of illiteracy and social stigmatization ensures that the only way to carve a living for most Khawaja Sira is as a beggar, sex worker and/or a dancer (Nisar, 2016). Often accused of polluting society by the cis-gendered majority (individuals who ascribe to the gender assigned at their birth), the Khawaja Sira are forced to lead largely publicly invisible lives.

The data for this article come from a nine-month-long person-centered ethnography in Lahore, Pakistan. In addition to direct and participant observation, in-depth person-centered interviews were conducted with 50 Khawaja Sira at 11 different research sites to understand their everyday experiences of interacting with frontline workers. Table 1 provides summary of the age group and education level of the research participants.

Table 1.

Demographic characteristics of research participants.

Characteristic		No.
Age	19–30	7
	31–40	9
	41–50	16
	50–60	12
	>60	6
Education
	Illiterate	28
	Religious education	1
	Some schooling	15
	High school	2
	College	4

An important clarification about this research concerned my positionality as an adult cisgender male. Cisgender males generally engage in gender policing of the Khawaja Sira community more frequently compared to cisgender females (Nisar, 2016, 2018). Moreover, as most members of the Khawaja Sira community prefer males as sexual partners, they also attract many unwanted suitors. Here my positionality as a married individual with children was helpful. Being an adult unmarried male has a different cultural construction in Pakistan compared to someone who is married and has children. I felt that this aspect was helpful in dissuading some initial apprehensions my research participants had about a male researcher. Initially, there were also some concerns about privacy among a few research participants owing to their bad experiences with male journalists. I addressed these concerned by explaining my position as an academic and my primary research interest in understanding the intersections between the Khawaja Sira community and the law. Eventually, it was my long-term engagement with the community that helped me gain their trust. For further details of fieldwork and different checks for trustworthiness used during this research, see Nisar (2017).

Apart from informal conversations with multiple police officers, a group interview with 12 frontline police workers was conducted to understand their perspective on their encounters with the Khawaja Sira in everyday public spaces. The participants belonged to a rapid response group of police officers tasked with preventing street crimes and responding to emergency issues. Only those participants were selected who had interacted with the Khawaja Sira multiple times during their jobs. Eleven of the interviewees were riders in the rapid response group and were in their late 20s or early 30s. One police officer, who co-moderated the group interview, was in his 40s and had the rank of inspector.

The data collected from fieldwork were coded iteratively in MAXQDA using thematic content analysis scheme (Kuckartz, 2014). After listening to and reading the data multiple times, I coded the data along main categories. In the next phase, I listened to and read all the data in the main categories to identify major sub-categories. I then coded all the data in the main categories into sub-categories which were further subdivided if needed. In line with my interpretive methodology, my analysis is not based on the frequency of codes/themes but on the ones that were most relevant to my research questions and the qualitative nature of the information within the relevant codes. The major themes related to the interactions between police officers and the Khawaja Sira inform the discussion in the next section.

Phenomenology of the stop

What are you doing here?

I have had multiple encounters with the police. They misbehave a lot. They never talk in a respectable manner. First, they curse us and then ask, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ (Neelam²)

Most research participants reported being arbitrarily stopped by police in public places as a significant aspect of their everyday life. As Neelam’s experience indicates, often the first question asked by the police at these stops is, ‘what are you doing here?’ as if there were betraying the command that the Khawaja Sira should remain invisible unless they have a good reason to be present in the cis-gendered public places. As Bacchi and Beasley (2002) note, citizenship often involves constructing and maintaining boundaries between individuals along various axes. That is why the ‘stopping device’ (Ahmad, 2006) of ‘what are you doing here?’ should be interpreted as a boundary-sustaining mechanism of the police. Here, the concern is not just to know the actual reason for the Khawaja Sira’s presence in a public place but also to remind them that they are now present in the cis-gendered public sphere where, like an alien’s presence in a foreign land, their permission to use that alien space must be not only justified but can be rescinded at any point.

Many research participants further noted that this permission to use the cis-gendered public places occasionally comes at a literal financial cost. The Khawaja Sira are often forced to pay the Jagga Tax³ – a colloquial term signifying financial extortion based on the threat of violence by the powerful groups in society – to frontline police officials to not only be present in the public sphere but also to retain their nominal freedom. Consider the following statement by Shama who mentions the perils of the stop for the Khawaja Sira:

We were returning from a function when we were stopped by four policemen. They said, ‘As you can see we are four individuals. What good will 500 rupees do? At least [give us] 2000 rupees so that each of us gets at least 500 rupees … We could get rid of them only after we gave them 2000 rupees.

The Khawaja Sira are often stopped by the police simply because they know that Jagga Tax can easily be obtained from them due to their social marginalization. This Jagga Tax is often a perpetual threat for the Khawaja Sira, but hits those few the hardest who are unfortunate enough to encounter the police at the end of a payday at a local dance party or a full day of begging. Shazia, who makes ends meet through begging in public places such as major traffic signals, had precisely such an experience:

Sometimes we earn a thousand rupees [by begging] during the whole day and when it is evening, the police take that away from us. In these circumstances, how will we be able to afford anything to eat or wear or any place to live?

Sometimes, even when no money is exchanged, the threat of detention serves as a constant reminder for the Khawaja Sira that if not now, then next time the police could take their money away. This ever-present danger typifies the everyday citizenship of the Khawaja Sira; their money and dignity can be violated at any time without notice or probable cause. Rakhi, who works at a local NGO and was briefly detained by police for precisely this crime of ‘walking while trans’ noted the following:

One day I got off at the bus stop while going to work [in an NGO], the Police detained me [without providing any reason] and took me away. When I told them I didn’t have any money at all [to bribe them], they let me go.

What is he paying you?

Even if we are going somewhere with a family member such as a brother, they [policemen] will ask us, ‘Who is he? What is he paying you [allegedly for sexual favors]?’ They believe the only thing we can do is sex and nothing else. That is completely wrong. (Naima)

Once, I was begging near [the local neighborhood] Roundabout and a motorcycle rider stopped at the signal. I asked them to give me something in the name of Allah. The policemen quickly stopped both the rider and I. They asked me, ‘Who is he? Has he come to take you [for a sexual encounter]? He will violate you. Do you know that?’ I told them that I did not know the rider and I was simply asking for money. Then they tried to detain me and directed me to get in the [police] car. But I refused. They insisted again but I let them know that there was no way that I was going to get in the car. Then they said, ‘Give us whatever money you have on you.’ I had 200 rupees that I had collected by begging. I gave it to them and got rid of them. (Fozia)

Experienced policemen [in our area] know us and don’t disturb us … but whenever there is new staff … they are very strict and are always stopping us … They say, ‘You are destroying the society. You make [sexual] deals with men.’ (Shazia)

As some Khawaja Sira resort to sex work because of extreme poverty and because they are sexually attracted towards men, being spotted in the company of an adult male is another major reason for the Khawaja Sira being stopped by the police in a public space. As the quotes indicate, even when accompanied by family members or friends, the specter of the hyper-sexual morally polluting Khawaja Sira continues to dominate many frontline police officers. Many research participants reported being accused of being sex workers by the police, especially when accompanied by an adult male companion.

Consider the following narratives of police frontline workers which highlight the simultaneous ‘abomination and adoration’ that according to Fanon (1952: 8) characterizes the objects of racial violence.

Once I was on duty at night and was having tea at a stall near Jail road. Those days I did not use to have a beard. A Khawaja Sira (Khusra) came to me and asked me if I was interested [in having sex]. When I refused, he said, ‘I will kiss every part of your body from head to toe.’ I asked him (hath jorray) [in a sarcastic manner] to spare me and left that place.’

Have you ever seen their clothes when they are begging on traffic stops? They wear such sexy clothes that people find it hard to resist them.

There should be severe punishments for them [the Khawaja Sira]. There should be some legislation to this effect. They start doing their antics even in court. Judges become scared that they might curse them⁴ and let them go.

As a result, interactions at police stops between the Khawaja Sira and police officers begin with this assumption, and the onus of proving that nothing ‘fishy’ is going on falls on the side of the Khawaja Sira. In addition, as the above quotes indicate, these stops are also often the sites of moral policing by the police officials who, while enacting their patronizing patriarchal gaze, consider it their God (and state) given duty to protect and advise the Khawaja Sira without the latter seeking or requiring their help. It is important to note that this increased surveillance of the Khawaja Sira is not necessarily a result of anti-solicitation laws. Instead, it is the discretionary authority of police that leads to hypervisibility of the Khawaja Sira bodies as sex workers.

Policemen never behave

Occasionally, this patronizing patriarchal gaze converts to the shameless masculine gaze where the Khawaja Sira become a part of the voyeuristic urban spectacle – even objects of attraction – for the cis-gendered representatives of the state. In this position, the police officers reassert the socially constructed exclusive right of the men to engage in Flânerie – ‘the process by which urban space is consumed as a visual spectacle by voyeuristic and self-assured male observers’ (Hubbard, 2004: 680) – which implies an active ‘looking’ man and the passively ‘seen’ bodies of women or any other genderqueer individuals. These instances often reinforce the taken-for-granted assumption that the city space belongs to the man, for whom the others act as a passive visual spectacle. Consider the following interaction between Madhuri, a young educated Khawaja Sira who works at a local NGO, and a police official:

Today before I came to office, I took some money out of the bank. A police man stopped me and asked me, ‘Where did the money come from?’ I said, ‘Sir! I just withdrew it from the bank.’ He then asked me who had sent the money and where did I live. I told him my address and asked him to please let me go since I was getting late for the office. But he insisted that I first tell him about the money. I lost my cool and said, ‘Don’t you know the manners to talk to someone?’ Why should I be afraid of such people? We do not fear anyone anymore. He said, ‘Sorry! You have become angry … I just wanted to complement your eyes. They are beautiful. Can I get your number?’

While not violent, it is important not to see this interaction as an example of two equal peers because the voyeuristic pleasure in this stop was the exclusive right of the police officer. It would not be possible for this conversation to take place in the opposite direction, with the Khawaja Sira acting as the flaneur and the police officer the passive recipient of the voyeuristic gaze since that would create the impulsive urge in the police officer to reassert his social dominance (Hubbard, 2004).

Occasionally these indiscretions move beyond subtle invitations to forced sexual encounters as the archetype of the hyper-sexual Khawaja Sira is used for personal advantage. The idea that all the Khawaja Sira are sex workers is used as a pretext not only to invite the Khawaja Sira for sex but for forced illicit sexual encounters.

There are some policemen who are very cunning. They are generally the ones who have been around for a while. They will generally ask us to meet them somewhere [private], come to their flats [for sex]. Some misbehave a lot. We dance at the fairs [or other private functions]. Police often raid these places [especially when they run late]. If they find a [dancing] girl or a Khawaja Sira there, they will forcibly put them in their car. They use them [sexually] and only then let them go … Policemen can never behave. (Sanam)

Discussion

Street-level bureaucrats are critical actors in charge of managing the system of appearances in the everyday spaces of society. While the cis-gendered public also play an important role in minimizing the access and participation of the Khawaja Sira in the everyday life of society, the frontline workers are different. One can try to ignore the insults, passing remarks or visual surveillance of the cis-gendered public, but one can’t escape the same gestures of the frontline workers. That is why analyzing ‘the stop’ is so important. When a Khawaja Sira is stopped by frontline workers, especially by police, they cannot ignore it by keeping their head down, moving faster or covering their body with dupatta (a long scarf). When you are ordered by a police officer stop, you must stop. Moreover, the taken-for-granted nature of their hyper-sexuality implies that any adult male in conversation with them in everyday spaces is deemed a potential sex partner and, as noted above, this assumption is often communicated loud and clear by the frontline officials. Hence, these stops are a constant reminder for the Khawaja Sira of their socially perceived deviance and that they are not welcome in urban public spaces like other citizens.

An important consequence of their negative interactions with police officers is that most Khawaja Sira develop an adversarial relationship with police. Consequently, many Khawaja Sira do not report instances of sexual harassment and physical violence by the cis-gendered majority to the police. For example, many research participants reported being sexually harassed or raped but they never mentioned going to the police. Rubi, an employee of a local NGO, best captured the overall attitude of the Khawaja Sira towards police:

Others [cis-gendered individuals] have the police. If they have some problem, they can go to police where their problems are heard and investigated. If there is a big case, there are courts which can solve their problems. We should have some protection [by the police] also so that we can speak up. Only then will the society have some fear that if we cross them, they will go to court against us.

Another point of theoretical and practical significance is that while it is true that the hyper-visibility of the Khawaja Sira is because of their perceived deviance on gender and sexuality axes, their intersectional marginality on other axes like economic status, education and social class augments the curtailment of their everyday citizenship rights. When a police officer stops a Khawaja Sira in a public place, it is not just a stop by a cis-gendered representative of the state questioning a trans-gendered individual, but also a male talking to a non-male; a middle-class individual talking to a poor person; an educated person talking to an illiterate; an individual nurtured by the state and society as one of its own disciplining the human waste generated by the order-building actions of the state (Bauman, 2004). In other words, the frontline workers influence the everyday citizenship of the Khawaja Sira not just on the bases of being representatives of the state but also because of their patriarchal and cis-gendered privilege.

It is also pertinent to mention that not all police officials are the same. While many of them do limit the everyday citizenship of the Khawaja Sira, a few are more understanding and caring. I end this article with an account of two stops where the police officers stopped the Khawaja Sira not to judge but to help them. To move towards a better citizen–administrator relationship, it is critical that we appreciate those officers who go against dominant social and institutional norms and help marginalized individuals:

Some of them are so good. Once we were returning from a function and waiting for a rickshaw when a police car stopped near us … After we told them we were returning home from a function, they asked us to get in the police car. We were so afraid but they were so good. One of them said to drop them where they want to go. They changed their route just to drop us at the appropriate spot, and arranged a rickshaw for us. (Chandni)

Some experienced policemen are quite nice. They know that we don’t cause any trouble. Some of them even ask us to sit down and have a cup of tea and ask if there is a problem that they can help us with. We tell them that this [begging] has become an unavoidable reality for us, otherwise who would want to beg on purpose. (Kousar)

Conclusion

As Butler (2004: xx) notes, ‘[t]he public sphere is constituted in part by what can appear, and the regulation of the sphere of appearance is one way to establish what will count as reality, and what will not’. In the context of everyday citizenship of the Khawaja Sira, this regulation of appearances happens in multiple ways by street-level bureaucrats limiting their mobility and access to public places. Perhaps more importantly, whenever the Khawaja Sira come into public places, their hyper-visible bodies are marked by a gaze of surveillance and mockery that stays with them until they retreat to their private abodes. This bureaucratic gaze, combined with the micro-aggressions enacted by the cis-gendered majority, means that the Khawaja Sira can never truly ‘be’ in the public sphere.

The theoretical construct of everyday citizenship developed in this article offers a valuable conceptual framework to explore questions related to access to urban public space that are relevant to PA practice. Future research can investigate how unequal access to public transport influences the everyday citizenship of marginalized public groups. More importantly, cross-cultural research can refine the conceptual and theoretical understanding of everyday citizenship developed here. Such cross-cultural work can also highlight whether there is a possibility of developing a more universal conceptualization of everyday citizenship as compared to the more context-specific conceptualization in this dissertation.

Fox (2003: 63) famously argued that PA researchers are often guilty of trying to ‘legitimize the administrative state’ by discussing those administrator–citizen interactions that reaffirm our affinity to the role of public administration as a productive discipline while ‘downplaying abhorrent ones’ (Fox, 2003: 63). The discussion in this article shows that as Fox (2003) argued, the paradigm case of administrator–citizen encounter (at least in this research context) is indeed that of a police officer acting as an agent of behavioral coercion to ensure implementation of the dominant social norms by the marginalized individuals. The moral policing and hyper-surveillance of the Khawaja Sira are constructions of the frontline workers not inscribed in law. While the law plays a part in their marginalization, ultimately it is the attitude and discretion of the frontline workers that often ends up being more important for the Khawaja Sira than their formal legal marginalization. But as the last two quotes from my research participants indicate, co-production or meaning-making administrator–citizen interactions do happen, albeit infrequently. However, to make such helpful interactions the norm, meaningful changes in the training and monitoring of frontline workers’ attitude towards marginalized groups are needed. That is why it is important that the frontline workers of various departments be educated about the unique identity and requirements of the Khawaja Sira and other marginalized groups. Until that happens, Khawaja Sira will continue to suffer at the hands of the disciplining agents of the state.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Mary Feeney, Spiro Maroulis, Thomas Catlaw, and Ayesha Masood for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and GPSA at Arizona State University for funding this research.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Muhamad Azfar Nisar is Assistant Professor at the Suleman Dawood School of Business, Lahore University of Management Sciences. His research focuses on social marginalization, street-level bureaucracy, and administrative burden.

References

Ahmed

(2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bacchi

Beasley

(2002) Citizen bodies: Is embodied citizenship a contradiction in terms? Critical Social Policy 22(2): 324–352.

Bauman

(2004) Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Oxford: Polity.

Biesta

Lawy

Kelly

(2009) Understanding young people’s citizenship learning in everyday life: The role of contexts, relationships and dispositions. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 4(1): 5–24.

Bryer

Cooper

(2012) H. George Frederickson and the dialogue on citizenship in public administration. Public Administration Review 72(s1): S108–S116.

Butler

(2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Campbell

(2005) Theorizing the authentic: Identity, engagement, and public space. Administration & Society 36(6): 688–705.

Casper

Moore

(2009) Missing Bodies the Politics of Visibility. New York: New York University Press.

Cook

(1998) Politics, political leadership, and public management. Public Administration Review 58: 225–230.

10.

Cooper

Gulick

(1984) Citizenship and professionalism in public administration. Public Administration Review 44: 143–151.

11.

Craddock

(2000) City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

12.

Daum

(2015) The war on solicitation and intersectional subjection: Quality-of-life policing as a tool to control transgender populations. New Political Science 37(4): 562–581.

13.

Dickinson

Andrucki

Rawlins

Hale

Cook

(2008) Introduction: Geographies of everyday citizenship. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 7(2): 100–112.

14.

Dimock

(1990) The restorative qualities of citizenship. Public Administration Review 50(1): 21–25.

15.

Dwyer

(2010) Policing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people: A gap in the research literature. Current Issues in Criminal Justice 22(3): 415–433.

16.

Elder

(1998) Space, race and heterosexuality. In: Nast

Pile

(eds) Places through the Body. New York: Routledge, pp. 153–164.

17.

Epp

Maynard-Moody

Haider-Markel

(2014) Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press.

18.

Fanon

(1952) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

19.

Feagin

(1991) The continuing significance of race: Anti-black discrimination in public places. American Sociological Review 56(1): 101–116.

20.

Flathman

(1989) Toward a Liberalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

21.

Fox

(2003) Dialogue: The prosecutorial state. Administrative Theory & Praxis 25(1): 63–90.

22.

Fraser

(1990) Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text 25/26: 56–80.

23.

Frederickson

(1982) The recovery of civism in public administration. Public Administration Review 42(6): 501–508.

24.

Grant

Mottet

Tanis

Harrison

Herman

Keisling

(2011) Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality.

25.

Hanson

Pratt

(1995) Gender, Work, and Space. London: Routledge.

26.

Haraway

(1997) Modest−witness@ second−millennium. FemaleMan−meets−OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Abingdon, UK: Psychology Press.

27.

Hopkins

Blackwood

(2011) Everyday citizenship: Identity and recognition. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21(3): 215–227.

28.

Hubbard

(2001) Sex zones: Intimacy, citizenship and public space. Sexualities 4(1): 51–71.

29.

Hubbard

(2004) Revenge and injustice in the neoliberal city: Uncovering masculinist agendas. Antipode 36(4): 665–686.

30.

Irvine

(2014) You can't run from the police: Developing a feminist criminology that incorporates black transgender women. Southwestern Law Review 44(3): 101–109.

31.

Kalu

(2003) Of citizenship, virtue, and the administrative imperative: Deconstructing Aristotelian civic republicanism. Public Administration Review 63(4): 418–427.

32.

Kuckartz

(2014) Qualitative Text Analysis: A Guide to Methods, Practice and Using Software. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

33.

Lipsky

(1980) Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

34.

Massey

(1994) Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

35.

Maynard-Moody

Musheno

(2003) Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

36.

Namaste

(1996) Genderbashing: Sexuality, gender, and the regulation of public space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14(2): 221–240.

37.

Nisar

(2016) Managing the Margins: Intersections of the State and the Khawaja Sira in Lahore, Pakistan. Doctoral dissertation. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University.

38.

Nisar

(2017) Children of a lesser god: Social equity and administrative burden in citizen–state interactions. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 28(1): 104–119.

39.

Nisar

(2018) (Un)becoming a Man: Legal consciousness of the third gender category in Pakistan. Gender & Society 32(1): 59–81.

40.

Oberfield

(2014) Becoming Bureaucrats: Socialization at the Front Lines of Government Service. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

41.

Painter

Philo

(1995) Spaces of citizenship: An introduction. Political Geography 14(2): 107–120.

42.

Phadke

Khan

Ranade

(2011) Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

43.

Sibley

(1995) Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. London: Routledge.

44.

Trudeau

McMorran

(2011) The geographies of marginalization. In: Del Casino

, et al. (eds) A Companion to Social and Cultural Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 437–453.

45.

Valentine

(1993) ( Hetero)sexing space: Lesbian perceptions and experiences of everyday spaces. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11(4): 395–413.

46.

Wood

(2010) Youth participation in Society: Everyday citizenship perspectives from young people in New Zealand. New Zealand Sociology 25(2): 103–124.

47.

Yanow

(2003) Constructing ‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’ in America: Category-making in Public Policy and Administration. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

48.

Zanetti

Carr

(1999) Exaggerating the dialectic: Postmodernism’s ‘new individualism’ and the detrimental effects on citizenship. Administrative Theory & Praxis 21(2): 205–217.

49.

Zaviršek

(2006) Disabled women’s everyday citizenship rights in East Europe: Examples from Slovenia. In: Lukić

Regulska

Zaviršek

(eds) Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 62–87.