Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere is a fascinating book. It is an edited collection extending out of at a conference held at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2019. This conference became quite famous. Anjali Arondekar (2020; 2023), who also has an afterword in Pakistan Desires, made it a point of inspiration for an article, and later a book seeking to interrogate the hegemonic geopolitics of queer theory. Laying the ground for Pakistan Desires, Arondekar problematises how work on sexualities from the majority world gets relegated to area studies and is not treated as queer theory proper. Is it possible to break out of habits in queer thought wherein what happens in places like India and Pakistan is only seen as a confirmation of, or a variation upon the global – global meaning Western, Northern? Given these ways in which geopolitics hangs over any narration of sexuality, any fantasy of shared liberation becomes complicated. Can we think of histories of regions as histories of sexuality? For Arondekar, the LUMS conference, that’s to say the conference that became Pakistan Desires, invites us “to think of queer futures in locations where they ostensibly have no collective pull. After all, are queer rights Pakistani rights?” (2020, p.209).

Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere provides a fleshed out, indeed sometimes fleshy interrogation of these questions. In the introduction, Omar Kasmani problematises how Pakistan has been ignored by queer scholarship, thought of if at all as an abject elsewhere characterised by still unchallenged colonial laws criminalising homosexuality. Kasmani offers us an orthographic challenge, writing of Pakistan, to draw out how the purpose of the book is not to show that “look, Pakistan is also queer!” but rather, to stretch and pluralise the official rendition of the country as land-of the pure. He opens up a reading of “Pakistan as an unusual gathering of affective geopolitics, or a hard-to-pin-down postcolonial and geopolitical form that by virtue of its orientation to vibrant Islamic cultures of West and Central Asia cannot be neatly folded into a straight history of South Asia” (p.3-4). In curating this book, Kasmani seeks to stymie any secure, stable characterisation of Pakistan as a place, or of its history, holding space for narratives that do not always linearly return to Partition in 1947 but instead look wayward and sideways. As Kasmani puts it so beautifully, “with queer ancestors, we go astray; through queer histories, we seek other origin stories” (p.4).

For Kasmani, not only queer activists – especially given the limited nature of activist frames of sexual identity and lifestyle, and their frequent reliance on global categories that only partly relate to “polyglot” and “half-languages” articulations of queerness in Pakistan (p.1, 9) – but also, wider queer Pakistani “lives and loves [can] serve as not only the object but the very ground for queer theorisation” (p.6). As well as looking left and right, then, the book looks backwards and forwards to gesture at the ways in which in the “not-yet-here of queerness”, notwithstanding historic and present-day repression and violence, can be a site of critical imagination (p.8). Kasmani describes the book as series of mehfils or gatherings. It offers a lively, jostling, sometimes audacious coming-together of different scholarly perspectives – history, anthropology, sociology, law, literature, art, film and performance studies – curated alongside aesthetic interventions in forms such as poetry, photography, and stills from documentary film. The different textual and visual forms wink to one another across the book and collectively conjure up variegated queer affordances and possibilities.

Returning to the LUMS conference, in anticipating Kasmani’s arguments, Arondekar (2020) draws much from a seemingly throwaway comment from a student encountered on LUMS’ campus:

Map in hand, I step outside my guesthouse, hail a “woke”-looking student, and ask him if he can direct me to the venue. Nodding confidently, he says, “You are going to the musafir sex conference? Yes, I can show you where that is.” I turn to him again, slightly bemused, and say, “No, I am going to the queer conference.” Without missing a beat, he rolls his eyes, and says, “Musafir sex, queer conference. Same thing, na?” (p.208)

For Arondekar, musafir sex is a provocative figuration, across many languages (Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Urdu, Romanian, Turkish and more) encompassing traveller, guest, visitor, itinerant, and “coupled with the cruising, moving body of sex, more precisely, queer sex, it summoned a geo/epistemology” (ibid. 208). The inspiration Arondekar takes from the student’s comment is seemingly about taking different languages of sexuality seriously, and embracing the wayward and non-linear, but Arondekar leaves the full implications of this term open-ended, suggestive and probably deliberately, a bit opaque. In Pakistan Desires, the chapter by Abdullah Qureshi returns to the student’s throwaway comment and offers some important further layers. Qureshi writes of how the musafir, having no home or place, is an enablingly liminal figure in the way that a queer figure is also unplaceable. But if we think of the term musafir as meaning a visitor, this begins to connect with less liberatory discourses; those about queerness as a foreign import. “Could it be”, Qureshi asks, “that the comment musafir sex conference had a dual meaning and was also intended as a tongue-in-cheek critique of a congregation of international (including diasporic) folks coming in to flirt with the local – people, ideas, and terrain – and then moving on? We may honestly never know” (p.169).

Qureshi’s chapter comes in the second part/mehfil in the book, which features a cluster of often anthropological, sociological contributions about present-day Pakistan. Jeffrey Redding speaks to the unbounded Pak*stan by asking what would happen if we tried to tell the history of gender and sexuality through a history of Kashmir. For Redding there are affinities of some kind, insofar as borders and demarcations between members and non-members are implicated in both. Arguably, there is something inherently queer about the “moth-eatenness” of Pakistan’s map (p.239). His legal analysis warns that the profound legislative declarations of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 may be undone in the courts where for example, court orders being given to NADRA are overriding the individual’s choice over their own gender identity. Redding cautions that “theorisations of queerness remiss to historically constructed and contested sovereignties in South Asia are likely to not only exaggerate what is ‘new’ in gender in South Asia, but also overstate what is possible in this queer region” (p.246). Speaking to the question of what is possible, and extending the unbounded Pak*stan transnationally, Gayatri Reddy troubles the notion of queer community via an ethnography of a queer desi group in Chicago in the 1990s in which the central organiser, Pakistan-born Ifti Nasim’s “vulgar” “over-the-top” “drag-wag stuff” (p.220) chafes with the respectability politics of Chicago’s upwardly-oriented model desi minority. Ahmed Afzal’s ethnography of Grindr users in Islamabad shows how users negotiate societal heteronorms alongside their desire to imagine and experience same-sex sexual intimacies, appreciating how Grindr provides unique opportunities for same-sex sociality amid the ongoing criminalisation of homosexuality but also, the scope for violence, danger, risk and vulnerability. Claire Pamment documents how khwaja sira persons in the Tablighi Jama’at, sometimes clad in full Tablighi beard and attire, manage to dodge the demand that they repent their dance, feminine appearance and guru-chela relationships, as well as dodge the secular-liberal projects of transgender rights NGOs in Pakistan who want to divert khwaja siras from begging and sex work. While eschewing respectability politics, such khwaja siras negotiate piety as a matter between themselves and the divine. Like Pamment, and again on the question of what is possible, Vanja Hamzić also captures khwaja siras’ careful negotiations of rights projects masking respectability politics, assessing activist Neeli Rana’s re-directing of the #ChangeTheClap campaign which seeks to modernise the idiosyncratic tali clap into conventional applause. Neeli Rana resists such “chromonormative” demands, arguing that those who need to reconsider their behaviour are, rather, the mocking audiences who misappropriate tali to abuse khwaja sira. Hamzić offers an analytic of “distemporalisation” – “a project of denial of time” (p.127) in khwaja siras’ accounts of their community’s past, seeing khwaja sira connecting with noble stories; a move his own historical analysis endorses, as he evidences suggestive links between the seemingly-disappeared courtly Mughal khwaja sira which may survive in the hijra communities so derided by the colonial sources as well as by postcolonial publics.

Hamzić’s chapter is important as a bridge to the earlier part/mehfil on the book, which offers an equally fascinating cluster of chapters addressing history, film and performance. Highlights here include Shayan Rajani’s beautiful retelling of biographies of the Sufi saint Madho Lal Hussain, Pasha Khan on gender- (and species)-instability and transgression in the early nineteenth century Urdu qissah tale of Agar, Gwendolyn Kirk on gender-crossing in Pakistani cinema from the 1950s-70s, Syma Tariq on queering how we listen to Partition histories, and Geeta Patel on Urdu modernist poet Miraji’s efforts to translate Sappho’s life and lyric. An important consistent strand across the chapters of the first part/mehfil is to problematise the queer impulse to find a useable past and supportive politics in precolonial history. Rajani asks to centre “not the desires of moderns, but… the wishes of the people who went before us” and see “the acts of past people as one with their time and tradition” (p.42-3). Patel writes too of queering the desires we invest in queer archives, taking inspiration from how Miraji sought to extract “an alterior archival kinship of broken ties” with those he translated (p.108). Tariq’s account queering the narrativisation of Partition draws looping lines through to the takeup of Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge by Indian feminist movements today. On Agar, Khan asks: who should seek ancestry in a narrated past that explicitly did not occur, “from a past that is a lie?” (p.61). What would happen if we pursue “not ancestors whose legacies are effortlessly inherited, but teachers whose lessons one must labour to claim out of a nonpast” (p.62)?

Alongside these academic contributions, the more aesthetic, artistic contributions by Syeda Momina Masood, Nael Quraishi and Nida Mehboob offer a swirl of potentialities, possibilities left open, not pinned down. Here, the form of the book importantly echoes its substance, as a final key intervention across the book feels to be about opacity. Abdullah Qureshi’s chapter is again special here to my mind, because uniquely in the collection – and returning to the enigma of the LUMS student’s throwaway musafir sex conference comment – this chapter layers in what it’s like to teach queerly within Pakistan; that too at a federally-chartered institute. Taking the class to an exhibition to view art work by Anwar Saeed – whose beautiful homoerotic paintings of men in intimate same-sex pleasures and queer pains are reproduced within the book –, the students sniggered and moralised. In contrast with the now institutionalised position of queer studies in the Western academy – where most of the contributors to this book are based – Qureshi describes having to very carefully engage students in a way that held space for tolerance and acceptance, but without taking an outright pro-LGBTIQ+ stance. Qureshi relates this pedagogic experience to Saeed’s own careful ways of talking about his art. Where critics have sometimes described Anwar’s work as a vulgar Western import, Saeed’s approach – shaped by a milieu of repression going forcibly back to Zia – communicates in hidden symbols. Though Saeed does not want his personal life to be discussed, Qureshi’s oral histories with Saeed’s contemporaries reveal a creative process pinned on connecting with “a decolonised sexuality rooted in working class experience” (p.173). Saeed’s early sketches, stripped of the symbolism of his later paintings, offer “further insight to Saeed’s process”, “revealing of his gaze, which more than anything, seems to crave contact and intimacy” (p.179). Qureshi respectfully protects Saeed’s “deliberate elusiveness” (p.174). Hamzić also writes of the “haziness” of how khwaja sira politics sometimes seems to make itself intelligible to a wider public “only to quickly retreat to its own separate domain” (p.136). Returning to where we began, this stance is surely apposite to the enigma of the musafir sex conference – defending the position of not making everything transparent for a privileged visiting readership/audience that may want to parachute in.

At the close of the introduction, Kasmani expresses hope that the book will spark interest among Pakistani readers as well as for others connected to queer studies, and doubles down on the necessity of the book in amplifying a conversation that goes against the geopolitics of knowledge production, in the face of precarious institutional support for such work and indeed vulnerability and risks for the scholars engaged in this work. Kasmani takes joy in the fact that “this queer volume is a first for Pakistan” (p.17). This joyous and ground-breaking book delivers lavishly on all of its promise.

References:
Arondekar, A. (2020). The sex of history, or object/matters. History Workshop Journal, 89:207-213.
Arondekar, A. (2023). Abundance: sexuality’s history. Duke University Press.

© Bloomsbury Pakistan 2025