A Woman Like Her
The Story Behind the Honor Killing of a Social Media Star
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020
"An exemplary work of investigative journalism." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
The murder of a Pakistani social media star exposes a culture divided between accelerating modernity and imposed traditional values—and the tragedy of those caught in the middle.
In 2016, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Her death quickly became a media sensation. It was both devastatingly routine and breathtakingly brutal, and in a new media landscape, it couldn’t be ignored.
Qandeel had courted attention and outrage with a talent for self-promotion that earned her comparisons to Kim Kardashian—and made her the constant victim of harassment and death threats. Social media and reality television exist uneasily alongside honor killings and forced marriages in a rapidly, if unevenly, modernizing Pakistan, and Qandeel Baloch’s story became emblematic of the cultural divide.
In this definitive and up-to-date account, Sanam Maher reconstructs the story of Qandeel’s life and explores the depth and range of her legacy from her impoverished hometown rankled by her infamy, to the aspiring fashion models who follow her footsteps, to the Internet activists resisting the same vicious online misogyny she faced. Maher depicts a society at a crossroads, where women serve as an easy scapegoat for its anxieties and dislocations, and teases apart the intrigue and myth-making of the Qandeel Baloch story to restore the humanity of the woman at its center.
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Journalist Maher debuts with an immersive and eye-opening account of the 2016 "honor killing" of Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani social media celebrity. Raised in a small village in the province of Punjab, Baloch ran away from an abusive marriage in 2009 at the age of 19 and eventually found work as a model and actress. Her social media posts, many of which were considered risqu by the standards of Pakistani culture, garnered Baloch hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers. In March 2016, she received death threats for uploading a video promising to do "a strip dance for the whole nation" if Pakistan's cricket team beat India; a few months later, she sparked further controversy by filming herself in a hotel room with a prominent cleric. On July 16, she was found murdered in her home. After Baloch's brother Waseem confessed to drugging and strangling her, international news outlets hailed her as a feminist martyr. Maher enriches the narrative with accounts of other Pakistani women confronting misogyny, including a digital rights activist who teaches women how to guard against cyberharassment and the investigator assigned to Baloch's case. Creatively piecing her story together from TV transcripts, social media posts, and interviews, Maher succeeds in exposing the hypocrisies of Pakistan's globalized yet repressive society. Though Baloch herself remains somewhat inscrutable, this deeply researched account illuminates the qualities that made her so galvanizing in life as well as death.
