151 Performing Islam Volume 4 Number 2 © 2015 Intellect Ltd Forum. English language. doi: 10.1386/pi.4.2.151_1 keywords spectacular human rights neoliberal feminism politics of pity Mukhtar Mai Malala Yousafzai Islamophobia Pakistan Forum fawzia afzal-khan montclair State university The politics of pity and the individual heroine syndrome: mukhtaran mai and malala yousafzai of Pakistan absTracT Using Lilie Chouliarki’s questions regarding the ethical responsibilities of spectators towards visual suffering in our mediatized age as a start-off point, wherein she states, ‘the mediation between spectator and sufferer is a crucial political space because the relationship between the two of them maps on to distinct geopolitical territories that reflect the global distribution of power’, this article looks at a recently staged operatic performance in NYC about the story of Mukhtar Mai’s rape called Thumbprint, as well as the performative memoir I am Malala (2013) by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb. This article raises the following questions: is Thumbprint a ‘spec- tacular performance’? Does it reproduce the image of the ‘third-world woman as monolith’ – or did it allow for the figure of Mukhtaran (as she is sometimes called) to speak to the audience assembled at Baruch Performing Arts Center in ways that brought forth the historical context of Pakistani and US politics? Does Malala’s self-representation in her memoir, her staging of herself as the ‘voice’ of a Pakistani young woman, similarly exemplify the competing motives animating the spectacle of being placed in the center of a supposedly ‘universalist’ human rights discursive