Queer Performativities in Pakistan

Abstract

The essay that follows is part of a larger queer genealogy project that aims to fashion “the theoretical organization and methodological perspective of genealogy” into a tool for understanding how the discursive practices and processes of state and religion (which hinge on conceptions of majority/minority) have turned notions of sexuality and sexual categories (heterosexual, gay, lesbian, transgender), as well as all other “minority” positionalities including religious and sectarian ones (Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Shia, Sunni, Ahmedi), into performative objects of study, analysis, and disciplinary control in the postcolonial, modern Muslim state of Pakistan. A similarly twinning effect occurs via neo-imperial mechanisms mobilized in the so-called liberatory promises marshalled on behalf of formerly colonized queer-identified subjects. To cast a “queer eye” on the dominant landscape of citizenship within Pakistan, then, is to address not only the growing body of work by queer-identified creators, but also to develop a reading practice that allows for an “interrogation of … the limits of a politics of visibility and representation” conferred on unequal citizens of various nation-states. Reading “queerly”, I will, in this essay, situate three exemplary performatives of gendered and sexual citizenship within global circuits of power including social media platforms, reflecting on what constitutes not just Pakistani, but also Pakistani-diasporic identity and its cross-racial, sexual, and feminist transnational promise.