Paper Short Abstract:

This project looks at the importance of social gatekeeping and narrative around body agency in constructing borders within urban centers. In this project, intra-urban borders are looked upon as both physical and nonphysical spaces and to what extent mobility is accessible based on your body agency.

Paper Abstract:

This project looks at the importance of social gatekeeping and narrative around and about body agency in constructing borders within urban centers. In this project, intra-urban borders are looked upon as both physical and nonphysical spaces and to what extent mobility is accessible based on your body agency. This project looks at the borders that are constructed around transgender communities within the city of Lahore, leading them to formulate their own distinct culture, communities, and hierarchy system, formulating their own gatekeeping border as a counter-narrative. These borders entail limited access to education, livability, movement, and economic/social mobility. The case of Lahore is taken as it is one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the post-colonial state of Pakistan that is not only constructed by legal B/ordering but social as well. Another reason why Lahore has been selected is that historically the City had accepted multiple genders and for that matter is also one of the first states to accept a third gender as the legal entity, but has also suffered from a colonial modern binary narrative that is not highjacked by the clerical elite. Hence this study looks at the question as to how social narratives and agency over one's own body impact the structure of the city and the experience of within city spaces for subalterns and individuals. To collect data, I will be using in-depth interviews with three-step coding and self-ethnography to present two narratives and two separate borders existing around body agency.