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- Convenors:
-
Stefan Binder
(University of Zurich)
Kumud Rana (Lancaster University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel interrogates the conceptual and political work of temporal figures of "crisis" from the perspective of queer and trans* positionalities, for which the need to undo social life—or do it differently—is part of the texture of everyday life rather than only extraordinary times of emergency.
Long Abstract:
Conflict, crisis, or emergency are temporal figures that suggest decisive turning points and conditions of heightened uncertainty and require “new” or “other” ways of living. This panel critically examines the conceptual, political, and ethical work of such temporal figures from the perspective of queer and trans* positionalities, for which the need to “undo” social life—or “do it differently”—appears as the ordinary texture of everyday life rather than only an effect of emergencies like the AIDS or COVID-19 pandemics or the backlash against ‘gender ideology’. Queer and trans* communities have themselves been cast as crises for hegemonic sex-gender systems in academic, medical, and political discourses.
This panel gathers research on how queer and trans* communities in South Asia sustain forms of living, sociality, or embodiment in and beyond temporal figures of crisis. We invite papers that consider how intersections beyond gender/sexuality, e.g. religion, caste, ethnicity, class, or age, shape how queer and trans* communities cope with systematic denials of their existence in shrouded pasts, embattled presents, or denied futures. Papers may also consider the role of queer diasporas and queer activisms in shaping the pathways through which ideas and practices circulate across geographic and social borders. These include not only colonial or racialized ideas of difference but also decolonial aspirations for radical change or assertions of queer indigeneity. The emphasis is on understanding how anthropologists can avoid treating queer and trans* lives as mere ‘material’ for their theories of crisis and their own desires for ‘different’ futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -Erin Kelso (Freie Universität Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores both the religious agency and ambiguities surrounding the formation of the First Eunuch Church, a worship space for transgender Christians in Karachi.
Paper long abstract:
Last year Pakistan’s khwajasira (transgender) community found its legal status in crisis after the Federal Shariat Court struck down the Transgender Protection Act, declaring it incompatible with Islamic law. This followed a moral outrage campaign by right-wing actors to frame transgender rights as a Western conspiracy undermining Pakistani culture.
As these crises unfolded on the national stage, members of Karachi’s little-known Christian transgender community were quietly organizing a space of their own— the First Eunuch Church under the direction of Pakistan’s first (cis) female pastor. As members of both a gender minority and religious minority, Pakistani Christian transgenders face intersectional forms of discrimination—including exclusion by the country’s mainstream Christian churches. The First Eunuch Church’s formation was a response to this everyday intra-community exclusion rather than any political crisis.
In this paper, I argue that the First Eunuch Church represents an expansion of religious agency for the pastor and her transgender parishioners, serving as a spiritual home where transgender Christians find community, respite from discrimination, and full inclusion in the act of worship—often for the first time in their lives.
I explore tensions and ambiguities in what is ultimately an evangelical revivalist project, arguing that the church’s attempts to instill a Christian moral consciousness in transgender parishioners creates cracks in the internal solidarity of a queer community historically undivided along communal lines. These efforts also align with broader state attempts to (re)form transgender people into respectable subjects that can be successfully integrated into mainstream mechanisms of biopolitical control.
Kumud Rana (Lancaster University)
Paper short abstract:
My paper reflects on queer indigeneity and how the indigenous is made queer within the dominant Hindu state of Nepal by tracing historical shifts within the gender-crossing jhumra dance. It centers indigenous activism in Nepal to offer a critical rethinking of queer activism in South Asia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores heritage-making practices of indigenous and queer activists in Nepal with a particular focus on the incorporation of vernacular queer subjectivities under what has come to be a South Asian legal category of the third gender. I inquire into queer indigeneity and simultaneously reflect on how the indigenous is made queer within the dominant Hindu state of Nepal. My study draws primarily from observations of and interviews with one group of elderly Tharu male dancers who have traditionally cross-dressed to perform the jhumra nach (dance), and one group of young Tharu women who have started dancing the jhumra in recent years. I show what is lost in cosmopolitan articulations of what it means to be queer by taking a closer look at the two groups. At the same time, drawing from the archives of Tharu cultural and political resurgence as well as the genealogy of the ‘third gender’ since the 1990s, I show how the indigenous queer continues to navigate simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion vis-a-vis the Nepali state, indigenous activism and queer activism. Speaking from the margins of South Asia, this paper centers ethnic activism within Nepal to offer a critical rethinking of queer activism in the subcontinent.
Themal Ellawala (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how everyday queer & trans lived experience in Sri Lanka intervene in theorisations of crisis, commenting on the absence of attention to categories of joy and pleasure, which bears implications for the ontology of crisis and the limits of its epistemological project.
Paper long abstract:
Sri Lanka experiences the most widespread socio-political crisis of its postcolonial history and its trans men discuss buying strap ons. Leftist feminists who led the popular uprising of 2022 preach of ceaseless struggle to some of the most marginalised queer women on the island, who listen bemused. What does it mean to inhabit crisis and to survive its crisis-ness? Thinking through these two vignettes, culled from fifteen months of dissertation fieldwork, I explore the textures, intensities, and orientations of daily queer and trans life enduring crisis in Sri Lanka. I suggest that the quotidian experience of crisis is one that cannot be fully represented by the dominance-resistance paradigm, and that queer and trans subjects insist on feeling and desiring in ways that betray the complexities of structural conditions and those suspended within them. Queerness and transness demonstrate that joy and pleasure are not incommensurable with crisis, that in fact crisis may serve as the very conditions of possibility for joy and pleasure. Centring queerness and transness also allows us to interrogate the temporality of crisis, to critically assay its telos and how life is imagined in and post-crisis. Lastly, I argue that queerness and transness enable a critique of the epistemology of crisis, challenging the dominant mode of knowing that disregard the polyvalent, plural nature of crisis. Such an approach traces how marginalised figures seek to inhabit a fullness of being despite, or precisely because, of crisis, which in turn illuminates the ontic and categorical limits of crisis itself.
Stefan Binder (University of Zurich)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how notions of ‘futurity’ in current scholarship on queer and trans communities in South Asia impose unacknowledged forms of epistemic and ethical labor on those communities by casting them as ‘crises’ for dominant conceptual frameworks of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the current focus on notions of «emergence» and «futurity» in scholarship on queer and trans sex/gender formations in South Asia. It critically revisits important postcolonial approaches, which critique processes and devices of ‘temporal distancing’ in queer anthropology and ethnographic scholarship more generally. Drawing on my ongoing ethnographic research with queer and trans communities in Hyderabad, the paper seeks to complicate the role of temporal regimes in the ways those communities engage with changing conceptual frameworks of gender and sexuality. I build on recent critical approaches to temporality and futurity in Trans and Intersex Studies to interrogate how certain queer and trans people are made to perform unacknowledged forms of epistemic and ethical labor by being cast as crises for dominant and supposedly ‘Western’ conceptual frameworks of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Lauren Ruhnke (Temple University)
Paper short abstract:
Through an ethnographic account of a pan-India conference for queer mobilization, this paper analyzes how queer/trans practices of joyful intimacy disrupt hegemonic state narratives of failure and foreclosed futurity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides an ethnographic interpretation of conversations and proceedings at a pan-India conference for queer mobilization held in Hyderabad in December 2022. Over the course of the two-day event, representatives from each Indian state discussed the status of queer/trans activism across the country, revealing widespread state failures to implement government schemes and legal provisions supporting queer and trans welfare. Despite such official conditions of “crisis,” the two-day event was animated by affects of joyful, celebratory fun. As participants gathered for post-conference performances, dancing and fabulating along with drag kings and queens, they engaged in a politics of pleasure that did not require state legitimation.
This paper examines such affective communing as a practice of mazaa, a Hindi-Urdu term for sensuous, fun, playful pleasure. I propose that queer/trans mazaa may be understood as a political practice oriented toward experiential indeterminacy in the face of hegemonic disavowal, operating as an expression of and conduit for the subversive capacities of joyful intimacy. Juxtaposing formal conference commentary with event affects, I analyze how this space of queer/trans communing became a site of insurgent solidarity and strength for a political movement officially marked by failure. In doing so, I suggest that the sociality of queer mobilizing may occasionally supersede the capacities of formal state recognition to foster lived experiences of queer liberation. While broader conditions of foreclosure engendered this site of collectivization, participants' practices of sociality belied state-led trajectories of hopeless futurity to foster a regenerative, pleasureful celebration of queer/trans abundance.