April 20, 2022 3:30pm-4:30pm | Queer Performance and Performativities of Pakistan and its Diaspora: A Genealogical Approach

Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Department of English, MSU
https://zoom.us/j/7905968690?pwd=ZE02TGJhbTNPWkEyTE1mdGdqbXdWUT09

This project aims to trace a genealogy of queer performance and performativity in Pakistan 1947-present. Such an archival project utilizes a “queer optics”[1] to engage with the problematic of nation, gender, class and secularization as these heuristic analytic categories reveal and engage the contradictions at the heart of a postcolonial modernity, in which many types of border crossings and resistances are important to acknowledge and analyze. Recognizing with Partha Chatterjee (and others), that “democratic theory” in western nations seems confounded by having to “re-examine some of its most fundamental assumptions regarding the universality of rights and citizenship in the modern state” because of demands for social and political recognition by “minority groups” — which in Chatterjee’s view has led to a crisis in liberal democratic theory’s understanding of itself— I apply these questions to the postcolonial, and in principle, democratic, modern Pakistani nation-state. Here, the emergence of a minority rights discourse from its queer communities, represented primarily at this point in time by Khusras ( referred to since 2011 at their insistence by the less derogatory term Khwaja Saras), serves as an umbrella platform for discussion of other sexual minorities such as gays and lesbians as well, as these groups negotiate the paradox of political recognition and rights as citizens of Pakistan, whilst inhabiting the critical liminality of antinormative performativities.

[1] This neologism has been coined by Gayatri Gopinath in her recent book, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018).