Queer performativities in contemporary Pakistan

Abstract

This chapter aims to outline a genealogy of queer performance and performativity in Pakistan that challenges normative frames of reference that construct and constrain non-normative bodies and desires, while simultaneously casting a critical gaze at mechanisms of queer self-representation and self-policing in different spatio-temporalities. One of the fundamental questions to pose in such a project, therefore, is the degree to which the archive of the queer performative in Pakistan rests on the cusp between “minor” and “minority”. “Minority discourse” as a performative becomes an iterative practice that “acknowledges the status of national culture—and the people—as a contentious, performative, space” by relying on a conception of identity that utilizes biographical circumstances to mount claims on behalf of an often beleaguered, representative minority. Queer performativity may, thus, also have been a contributing reason for the blanket shut down against the female actors/dancers of the commercial stage of this period.