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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's work, 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 Hamzi¿, 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
List of contents
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 Hamzi¿ 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
About the author
Omar Kasmani, editor
Summary
The contributors to Pakistan Desires offer a multidisciplinary view on figures and forms of queerness in Pakistan, inviting reflection on queer’s myriad meanings in Pakistan and explore how desire can serve as a mode of queer future-making.
