ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 Hamzić, 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

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Omar Kasmani is Guest Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin and author of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan, also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

“In this volume Pakistan emerges as a valuable site from which to think queer not only because it is forgotten in the scholarly and global imagination, but because it is richly complex in its gender and sexual politics. Pakistan Desires is an urgent re-narration of Pakistan as well as an important call to queer studies to more seriously engage the Muslim world, see the limits of the field’s universal theorizations, and to ask how else queer can manifest elsewhere.”

-- Kareem Khubchandani, author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife

“This extraordinary collection of literary, aesthetic, ethno-historical, art-historical, and sociological writings on queer thought, lives, and politics in Pakistan captures the pulse of a defiant, restless, and fierce creativity: it is what makes Pakistan Desires such a pathbreaking collection.”

-- Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, author of The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories

“Pakistan Desires, edited by Omar Kasmani, is an elegant anthology that takes up the impossible task of providing thick context to the imbrications of queerness and queer lives with theology, myth, temporalities, geohistories, and popular culture in Pakistan even as it also disrupts the desire for such contexts through framing devices that center mistranslations, failures, logjams, improvisations, and inventions.”

-- Sayan Bhattacharya Journal of Anthropological Research

"For readers engaged in queer theory, South Asian studies, or interested in the intersections of identity, culture, and religion, Pakistan Desires offers an essential exploration."
-- Apurva Das IIAS Review

"This joyous and ground-breaking book delivers lavishly on all of its promise."
-- Kaveri Qureshi Bloomsbury Pakistan

"The contributions tease out potentialities and push the thinkable, let alone effable, to critically challenge the occlusion of queerness in the obstinate narratives of Pakistan with plurality, complexity, and alternate imaginations. . . . . A necessary, affective contribution to queer queer studies."
-- Anna-Maria Walter Gender & Society

"An important, timely, necessary intervention into the field of queer studies—expanding, probing and thinking in intersection with studies of the Islamicate world, religion, postcolonial studies, global south theory, comparative literature, art history, curatorial practice, legal studies and sociology. As such, it is a generous volume, which productively contributes to all these fields."
-- Aziz Sohail Performance Research

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Khwajasara

Khwaja Sira

Desi

Mehfil

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.