Khwaja sara, hijra, and the Struggle for Rights in Pakistan

Abstract

AbstractDrawing upon interviews with individuals in Pakistan who cannot be identified as heterosexual or be contained by the gender binary, I argue that in recent years post-colonial legacies of colonial laws have been challenged in Pakistan in ways that suggest a complicated relationship among sexuality, gender, and modernity. I draw upon Partha Chatterjee's notion of political society to situate this relationship. As such, I seek to strengthen prior discussions located in India and Pakistan. Further, this article challenges the problematic assumptions in mainstream queer politics that Muslim societies are static and ahistorical assumptions that appear to assume progress and struggle for sexual rights to be a Western attribute. In so doing, I extend earlier critiques arguing for a more complex understanding of the rule of non-normative sexualities in Muslim societies and suggest that colonial policies that regulated and criminalized the more fluid forms of sexuality in Muslim societies were incorporated in the imperial project of civilizing non-European cultures. The stability of colonial policies regarding sexuality was challenged in 2009 when the Pakistani state gave political recognition to trans* communities, identifying them as citizens of a modern state. These changes, I argue, pave the way for a potential shift from the fluid sexuality and irreverence that khwaja sara are usually associated with middle-class norms of respectability and encouragement towards assimilation into the social order.