Paper short abstract:

Examines queer engagements with law and visibility since the Trans Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 in Pakistan. Part of a PhD thesis exploring entanglements of decolonial justice and colonial states, and ethnographic reversal of optics in photographic renderings of the transphobic gaze

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes the cultural emplacement of trans rights in the face of Jihad-e Loot, best translated as a religious war against trans persons, in Pakistan. In 2018, Pakistan introduced the Trans Persons (Protection of Rights) Act which granted citizenship to its trans communities, including the queer indigenous community of khwaja sira. Introducing the possibility of trans citizenship has put competing and multi faceted narratives of Pakistani identity and history in conversation. One such narrative portrays Pakistan as ‘land of the pure’ and enacts an Islamic conservatism which equates gender variance with “fitnah’ or social impurity. This conservatism is enshrined in the Pakistani legal system in the shape of the Shari’ah Court which positions itself in equivalence to the Supreme Court of Pakistan, holding the right to judicially review its decisions. It retains the legal power to question all and any law according to Shari’ah or Islamic jurisprudence.

In the face of sociolegal and political narrowing of possibilities for the enactment of rights, I follow the ethnographic use of a lomographic rendering of everyday faces by transpersons as they capture images of transphobia. As the community calls for the murders of trans persons to be tried in Anti-Terrorist Courts, I discuss the possibilities of visualizing intimate social micro-interactions as ethnographic and legal artifacts documenting the changing meaning of citizenship and the decolonization of justice. This paper looks at the intersection of ethnographic images, legal evidence and the demarcations of political legitimacy in a lawscape of Islamic ethics and trans activism.