Dance Like a ‘Trans’: Studying the Gender Narrative in Saim Akhtar’s Joyland (2022)

Since ‘his’tory has always consisted of the sanctioned truth of the power regime, it has often deliberately omitted the personal stories of people by pushing them to the margins. There are various narratives which deserve to be heard. But first, one needs to understand what is a ‘narrative’?

Narratologist David Herman defines narrative as “a structured time-course of particularized event which introduces disruption or disequilibrium into storytellers’ or interpreters’ mental model of the world evoked by the narrative (whether that world is presented as actual, imagined, dreamed, etc) conveying what it’s like to live through that disruption, that is, the “qualia” (or felt subjective experience) of real or imagined consciousness undergoing the disruptive experience”. (The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, 9)

Firstly, Herman states that all descriptions do not qualify as narratives. The chronological sequence of the events told is important. If these events are transposed, then it would completely change the narrative.

Secondly, by using Bulgarian structuralist Todorov’s ideas, Herman believes that a narrative from its state of balance must undergo a disruption for the imbalance created to be restored again. In other words, there should be a conflict which gets resolved in the end.

And lastly, “Human experientiality,” is a term used by the Austrian Professor Monica Fludernick’s (11) is possible only if there is emotional engagement of the characters in the story.

In view of the aforesaid meanings of the ‘narrative,’ the paper looks at transgenderism in South Asia by studying the Pakistani film Joyland (2022).