Drawing on history, anthropology, literature, law, art, film, and performance studies, the contributors to Pakistan Desires invite reflection on what meanings adhere to queerness in Pakistan. They illustrate how amid conditions of straightness, desire can serve as a mode of queer future-making. Among other topics, the contributors analyze gender transgressive performances in Pakistani film, piety in the transgender rights movement, the use of Grindr among men, the exploration of homoerotic subject matter in contemporary Pakistani artist Anwar Saeed, and the story of a sixteenth-century Sufi saint who fell in love with a Brahmin boy. From Kashmir to the 1947 Partition to the resonances of South Asian gay subjectivity in the diaspora, the contributors attend to narrative and epistemological possibilities for queer lives and loves. By embracing forms of desire elsewhere, ones that cannot correlate to or often fall outside dominant Western theorizations of queerness, this volume gathers other ways of being queer in the world. Contributors. Ahmed Afzal, Asad Alvi, Anjali Arondekar, Vanja Hamzic, Omar Kasmani, Pasha M. Khan, Gwendolyn S. Kirk, Syeda Momina Masood, Nida Mehboob, Claire Pamment, Geeta Patel, Nael Quraishi, Abdullah Qureshi, Shayan Rajani, Jeffrey A. Redding, Gayatri Reddy, Syma Tariq
Omar Kasmani is Guest Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie UniversitAEt Berlin and author of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan, also published by Duke University Press.
Acknowledgments xi Introduction. *stan / Omar Kasmani 1 Mehfil 1. Of Girls, Desire, and Sacred Things / Syeda Momina Masood 23 2. Loving Men, Loving God / Shayan Rajani 31 3. Fixed Possibilities: The Threat of Transmasculinity in the Urdu Tale of Agar / Pasha M. Khan 49 4. Spaces of Critique, Spaces of Desire: Gender-Crossing in Pakistani Cinema / Gwendolyn S. Kirk 65 5. Partitioned Listening: Sonic Exercises Outside of Archival Time / Syma Tariq 83 6. Miraji's Poetics for Queering History / Geeta Patel 100 7. This Is Home after All / Nael Quraishi 118 After Heather Love, and Others / Asad Alvi 121 Mehfil 8. Temporal Nonconformity: Being There Together as Khwajasara in a Time of One's Own / Vanja Hamzic 125 9. On the Other Side of the Rainbow? Khwaja Sira Pieties, Politics, Performances, and the Tablighi Jama'at / Claire Pamment 146 10. A Queer History of Pakistani Art: Anwar Saeed and Other Ways of Love / Abdullah Qureshi 166 11. Beyond Hooking Up: Tales from Grindr in Pakistan / Ahmed Afzal 184 12. How I Like It / Nida Mehboob 203 13. Queer Desi Formations: Marking the Boundaries of Cultural Belonging in Chicago / Gayatri Reddy 216 14. Queer in a Time of Kashmir / Jeffrey A. Redding 236 Afterword. Everywhere Mehfil / Anjali Arondekar 251 Contributors 257 Index 263
"In this volume Pakistan emerges as a valuable site from which to think queer not only because it is forgotten in the scholarly and global imagination, but because it is richly complex in its gender and sexual politics. Pakistan Desires is an urgent re-narration of Pakistan as well as an important call to queer studies to more seriously engage the Muslim world, see the limits of the field's universal theorizations, and to ask how else queer can manifest elsewhere." - Kareem Khubchandani, author of (Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife) "This extraordinary collection of literary, aesthetic, ethno-historical, art-historical, and sociological writings on queer thought, lives, and politics in Pakistan captures the pulse of a defiant, restless, and fierce creativity: it is what makes Pakistan Desires such a pathbreaking collection." - Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, author of (The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories)
