From birth, you are waiting to get caught. The anxiety that comes with living mutates into your heart. Pump, beat, pump, beat. You are a brown woman on death row and, as the years pass, it becomes clearer. The matter is not of if, but when, when you get caught. You will inevitably be punished by a systemic culture that has always wanted you to suffer when they’re eventually disappointed with you.

This article explores the experience of the Western South Asian woman as both an unrecognised assimilator and initiator of change. In this balancing act of multicultural inheritance, brown women often carry a disproportionate burden of shame and hypervigilance, navigating expectations that aim to kill their desires and identity. To gain personhood, it often costs these women their communities. Yet, despite this difficult process of self-advocacy and resistance, their struggle is often overlooked by Western narratives of female liberation, which fail to recognise the cultural negotiations and compromises required to achieve autonomy.

The orientalist misconception of passivity

Survival is often rewritten as cowardice.

Scrolling Tiktok, a video of a creator came up where she described a full body cringe nightmare. Whilst she was out with her friend, her parents had rummaged through her drawers and found her vibrator which they threw out and shamed her for. Full of disgust and shock towards her, her mum couldn’t speak to her for weeks. Questions in the comments: “Why would you let her go through your stuff?”

Another South Asian creator comes up on my page. After making videos for a year on how her strict parents don’t let her wear jeans, or leave the house, at the age of 22, she finally built up the courage to move out for the first time. More questions: “Girl you’re 22, how did you not move out earlier?”

Since I was young, I’ve been watching, hearing and living these stories of young girls maneuvering in constant secrecy, hiding and criminalised movements behind closed doors. They’ll be at parties whilst sneaking a phone call to their mum apologising for being late, having cleaned the house before going out and leaving everything behind: untraceable, unnoticeable. The art of momentary living.

Yet, their ghostliness often labels them, according to orientalists, as pitiable and lacking agency. However, I argue, ‘brown girls’ are not helpless because they can’t stay out past 8pm. They aren’t culturally backwards because they hide the names of their boyfriends under feminine pseudonyms, nor are they subhuman women, or second-class feminists because they can sometimes only exist when no one is looking.

These behaviours are far from submission, but adaptation; agency expressed differently. These women survive constant pressures from surveillance, strict governance and double expectations. The fact they attempt to find themselves, regardless of the physical and emotional

threats to their lives for doing so, makes them autonomous in a way orientalist fetishism of their victimisation denies them.

Their labour for life, because it exists in another colour, is seen as washed out and dull, because it is not as loud or public — mistaking it for compliance. At home, she is disciplined for stepping outside prescribed boundaries. In the West, she is often judged as complicit in her own oppression. Whilst her experiences with misogyny are flattened into evidence of victimhood, ironically, the behaviours which often read as evidence of South Asian women’s lack of agency are frequently evidence of highly developed survival intelligence.

Our history of femicide — sati, honour killings and acid attacks

Is the cultural acceptance of violence the reason brown women are always hiding in secrecy, living in survival mode?

Mahnoor Syed explores this question through two powerful case studies: the death of Roop Kanwar in India and the honour killing of Qandeel Baloch in Pakistan. An honour killing is “the killing of a relative, especially a girl or woman, who is perceived to have brought dishonour on the family.” Sati is the Hindu practice “in which a widow burns alive on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre.”

“Baloch’s honour killing was sensationalized in the Western world by scholars and media; per an Orientalist approach, Baloch was recognized as a victim of injustice rather than an advocate for social justice and women’s rights in Pakistan” — Alam 2020.

Although these are extreme cases, I argue they have shaped the boundaries of how all brown women are treated.

When a man murders a woman in his family and parts of society justify or excuse it, another man can convince himself that slapping his wife or daughter is a comparatively moderate form of discipline. Then, another feels entitled to police her clothing. Another confines her to the house. Violence exists on a spectrum, and the normalisation of its most severe forms in South Asian households shifts perceptions of everything beneath them, so emotionally abusive behaviour becomes nothing in comparison to murder.

But brown women don’t face the same level of violence in the West. So how does honour-based abuse affect them? Firstly, whilst the number may be smaller in the West, the police still recorded 2,949 honour-based abuse (HBA) offences in England and Wales for the year ending March 2025. Secondly, for brown women growing up in Western societies, the control they experience can be more severe in some aspects. This is because there is more ‘choice’ in a Western society due to multiculturalism, and the ambit for deviance is larger, so her parents double down when opposed with this challenge, pre-emptively stop her living her life in fear they might have to find some way to end it.

In this sense, the parenting of brown women is universally shaped by HBA as a result of trickle-down sociology: the history and practice of extreme control legitimises the milder forms of coercion.

Honour and Hijab

“We’ve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we’ve been victims of the old fool’s game: each one will love the other sex. I’ll give you your body and you’ll give me mine.”

— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Using personal life stories in opinion articles is awkward, but recently I’ve made a quite public change of showing my hair after eight years of covering it.

Although I told myself I wore the hijab purely as a symbol of faith, I realised I had internalised the idea that showing my hair was somehow shameful or sexually provocative. I couldn’t honestly call myself a feminist while carrying that belief. The emphasis on modesty in my culture seemed less about spirituality and more about protecting family honour, to make daughters less attractive to outsiders, while Muslim men were rarely held to the same standards. Living abroad in Bangladesh gave me the space to challenge it without the fear of judgement. I wasn’t rejecting faith, but rejecting the idea that my worth, honour or morality should be tied to covering my hair, and that I was dishonourable if I didn’t want to confine myself to a certain image of womanhood. I needed space to pick spirituality that hadn’t been shaped by this social pressure.

Luck

I’m quite lucky, because my parents are liberal thinkers who believe in gender equality and empowerment. However, despite our British nationalities, we immigrated from Pakistan, and with that came clashing ideologies and compromised values.

Thanks to my parents, I became the first woman in my family to move out before marriage and travel alone. I was even the first whose dad would casually buy her period products, and probably the first to survive an embarrassing goth phase. Even so, those freedoms came after years of resistance. Until I was 19, parties, walks, even a trip to the corner shop required endless negotiation. I had to defend my clothes, justify having male friends and repeatedly prove that my fiery independence was not a reflection of a loose morality. Adopting an antagonising black sheep persona for a chance at personhood.

All of this dealt a psychological toll on my relationship with my family. Although they accept me as I am now, the damage was done. Because I had grown up feeling constantly restricted and so afraid of constraint, I had developed an unhealthy obsession with control and restrictions.

Even now, I refuse to share my location with friends, dislike anyone holding my phone and arrive everywhere early so I can control my surroundings. I can’t even let a guy pay for my meal on a date, without my heart pounding and my breathing shrinking away from my chest, thinking what if this transaction gives him power over me? What if it costs me my dominance?

To gain personhood, I learned I have to always be in control, and having been a South Asian woman who had to fight for her own recognition, philosophy and lifestyle, I would claw onto it, every bit, before I gave it up.

But I am still one of  the luckiest ones. Because at least I have been allowed to wrestle with this sentencing.