Boy Cuts: Female Masculinity and Queer Aesthetics in Karachi, Pakistan

ABSTRACT

In Pakistan, compared with the long-established category of khwaja sira, which can be analogous to trans femininity in English, little attention has yet been paid to trans and female masculinities. For trans men, butch women, and nonbinary people assigned female at birth (AFAB), their navigation of public spaces, negotiation of identity and aesthetic expression of gender, and balancing of globalizing LGBTQ+ discourses with pre-existing South Asian forms of queerness has meant that they see their struggles as unique from other types of queer identification and community in Pakistan. This article examines how masculine-presenting AFAB queer and trans young adults in Karachi express themselves through embodied aesthetic forms, such as hair styles and clothing, and negotiate these aesthetic choices with family and community insistences on presenting as proper women. While providing an optic into understanding the complexities of choice and agency that AFAB individuals face in displaying their masculinity, aesthetics is often also a determining factor in how they are treated and seen by others in the various kinds of public spaces that they move between. Their aesthetic choices not only help to better understand marginalized masculinities in Pakistan, but also challenge and disrupt an idealized feminine aesthetic in Pakistan that is related to marriageability and conformity

KEYWORDS:

• trans masculinity
• South Asia
• queer globalizations
• Pakistan
• trans masculine aesthetics

Acknowledgments

I am thankful for the feedback I received on this work by Nancy Smith-Hefner, Tulasi Srinivas, Jayita Sarkar, and Sarah Lamb. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Gender Studies for their invaluable comments. A special thank you to friends who discussed this work with me and provided crucial feedback: Anu, Firdous, Jessica, Salwa, and Spike. This research was supported by Boston University’s Pardee School Global Decolonization Fellowship and Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. One such case is that of Mani HQ, a trans man who gained media attention and public backlash for changing his identity card prior to filing a petition to marry his female partner. See Ikra Javed, ‘A Tale of a Trans Man in Pakistan’, The Huffington Post, September 15, 2016, https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/tale-trans-man-pakistan.

2. As Shahnaz Khan notes, third gender communities who are made up of individuals assigned male at birth can trace their lineages to as far back as the Mughal Empire. The term khwaja sira comes from a Mughal-era practice of a third gender individual who, after going through physical castration, can move between the male-only court and the female-only zenana (2016). Pakistani third gender communities have chosen to harken back to this time before British colonialism to highlight Muslim South Asia by separating themselves from the term hijra, which is still used in India and now considered a slur in Pakistan. As Khan argues, this is done to reiterate the Muslim-ness of their gender nonconformity in order to legitimate their communities within the religiously nationalistic framework of Pakistani citizenship and belonging.

3. Studies across cultures have shown that queerly coded ways of speech are ways to hide in plain sight (Provencher 2007; Leap and Boellstorff 2004; Milani, 2013). Across Pakistan, the most established queer language is Hijra Farsi (Sheeraz & Afsar, 2011). This has been used by khwaja sira as well as many queer and trans people who have built close ties to khwaja sira communities.

4. Farha self-identifies as a trans man after being made aware of the term trans one year before our interview in 2021. She utilizes she/her pronouns in English and the feminine verb case in Urdu to refer to herself. She stated that, despite identifying as a trans man, she does not fully identify with the ways that trans men operate in other parts of the world with a complete rejection of femininity.

5. This research on human subjects has been approved through the Institutional Review Board at Boston University, Protocol #6120E.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hafsa Arain

Hafsa Arain is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Boston University. Her research focuses on the development of middle-class queer social and activist networks in Karachi, Pakistan. Looking primarily at queer people assigned female at birth, Hafsa’s work seeks to expand upon previous knowledge of South Asian queerness, which has often been centered on third gender populations, in an effort to understand how globalization of English-language social media relates to emerging queer ways of being, and how that speaks to shifting gender and class landscapes in a rapidly developing urban city.