Panel
8. Negotiating Margins: Representations, Resistances, Agencies
This paper explores khwaja sira-trans shifting, increasingly fraught, yet persistent Sufi entanglements, in the backdrop of unfolding contestations around Pakistan’s Transgender Persons Protection of Rights Act (2018), which in May 2023 was declared by the Federal Shariat Court to be unIslamic.
I move through three khwaja sira-led protest actions to unfold the possibilities and precarities of Sufi attachments in this period of khwaja sira-trans contested religious legibility. These include sanitized Sufi social media videos in appeal to the community’s religious legitimacy (2021), Alina Khan’s solo dance with Bulleh Shah’s poetry contesting violence upon women's bodies in the feminist space of Aurat March (2021), and hundreds of khwaja sira bodies performing the dhammal in Moorat March’s appeal for community uprising (2021 and 2023).
Thinking alongside Kasmani’s queer analysis of Sufi experiences as creating “elsewheres” at “this- and other-worldly intersections” (2020, 96), I suggest that these very different Sufi mobilizations offer critical sites for materializing a plurality of khwaja sira worldmaking projects, desires and fabulations, in and beyond rights.
Claire Pamment
William & Mary, United States