From mandarin to mendicant: violence and transgender bodies in urban Pakistan

Abstract

Transgender bodies very effectively undermine social norms of gender binaries. We use a case study of transgender people in the twin cities of Rawalpindi/Islamabad in Pakistan to understand how social violence, middle class morality and relations to the state are embodied in transgender bodies. While in pre-colonial times the transgender people in South Asia were mandarins of the empire, during colonial and post-colonial times they have been reduced to the role of mendicants. We find that the research participants’ notions of a transgender identity are contradictory, in that they draw upon the idea of a feminine soul in a male body, but simultaneously they also consider it a constant process of becoming through deed. In urban Pakistan, it is through violent encounters with transgender bodies that toxic masculinities are relationally enacted. We argue, however, that transgender bodies also hold an emancipatory promise to bodies imprisoned in toxic masculinity.

Keywords:

• Transgender
• Pakistan
• body
• masculinity
• violence
• heteronormativity

Introduction

In transgender bodies, the notion of natural pre-representational bodies meets its most convincing and visible rebuttal. A rich vein of Marxist inspired literature not only points to how social processes actuate through the human body, but also how capital accumulation, and enabling social processes are, in fact, embodied (Harvey 1998; Orzeck 2007; Andueza, Davies and Loftus 2020). Attention to the body, as Callard (1998) reminded us earlier on is a call for the ‘fluidity of subjectivity, for the instability of the sexual difference’ among a host of other social categories in urgent need of dismantling. The process through which bodies get classified as masculine, feminine or transgender, throws the imbrications of the social in that process into sharp focus. We use the case study of transgender people in the twin cities of Rawalpindi/Islamabad in northern Pakistan to understand how social violence, middle class morality and relations to the state are embodied in transgender identities? In a non-western context like Pakistan, engagement with transgender populations has been in a somewhat particularistic, fetishized, transgender as ‘socially abnormal’ register, e.g. see Sultana and Kalyani (2012). We are however, concerned with ‘normalizing’ the supposedly ‘abnormal’ transgender identities, at the interface of a non-western society and a modernizing globalist urban landscape in Pakistan. Through our case study we have been able to understand how transgender bodies in urban Pakistan, although systematically excluded from traditional labour for capital accumulation are nevertheless a manifestation of the production of difference under the capitalist mode of production (Orzeck, 2007). We argue that violence, psychological and physical is productive of the intersectional transgender experience of urban Pakistan, and embodied transgender identities, therein.

Scholarship on violence has been enriched by conceptual developments that have taken its understanding beyond the simplistic notion of physical force applied upon other humans or non-humans. Conversations around issues of structural (Galtung, 1969), infrastructural (Ferguson 2012; Rodgers and O’Neill 2012), or epistemic violence (Ayotte and Husain 2005; Radcliffe 2017), to name a few, have significantly nuanced understanding of violence and its spatiality. We are nevertheless focusing on the physical and psychological violence—understood as teasing, humiliation, and ridicule, as they were egregious enough in the context of transgender population in urban Pakistan, to merit an engagement in of themselves. In the urban Pakistani context, even the conceptually narrow physical violence, understood as application of physical force to cause harm or threat thereof (Mitchell, 1996) too, can pay rich analytical dividends to unpack the politics of the body. Following Arendt (1970) we maintain that violence in its physical sense is an outcome of a loss of power. Power in its power/knowledge sense (Foucault, 1980) that ensures compliance with consent is in fact, the highest form of power. It is when the consent disappears, that the powerful have to resort of violence to ensure compliance. The import of this argument will become clearer as we delve deeper into the relational production of transgender, masculine, and feminine bodies, through violence in urban Pakistan.

The field study was part of a larger project on gender and violence, where our explicit focus on transgender residents of the cities opened new conceptual venues for understanding the drivers and effects of everyday gendered violence. The larger project entailed investigating gendered access to services and infrastructure for enactment of masculinities and femininities. The genus of the project was in gendered performativity, drawing upon Arendt (2009). But as we move towards unpacking the interface between gender, bodies, and performativity, we find ourselves also drawing upon Judith Butler’s (1990; 1993) notions of gender performativity and the analytical insights that they have to offer to our enterprise.

We take to heart Callard’s (1998) exhortation to explore how transgender bodies may be a key site of subverting dominant gendered norms, as well as a site in which politics and ‘the political are centred’. Bodies subjected to violence, left out, and imprinted with legal exclusions, are an emergent concern that we hope to address (Mountz 2018). We are keen to read the everyday patterns of living, livelihoods, and access to services as performative politics staking out spaces for destabilizing heteronormative sexing of the bodies and gendering norms. How is violence imbricated in those mundane performances? And how has Pakistani legal regime helped produce transgender bodies as citizens? These are the questions that animate our analyses.

Transgender bodies through space and time

‘Gender is always a doing’ argues Butler (1990, 25), but ‘not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed’. To Butler (1990) the physical body is not a tabula rasa to be inscribed with an identity through the discursive and material social practices of gendering into a normative binary of woman and man. Rather, if sexuality–the essential attribute of sex, is constructed by power relations in a cultural context, then the question of pre-existent, beyond, and before normative sexuality outside of power, is a cultural impossibility (30). The prevalent binary between sex and gender is therefore a regulatory fiction and a norm that by implication holds up the masculine as the norm and the female as an indisposition, in comparison to the norm (Butler 1993; Bauhardt 2013). Harvey (1998) drawing upon Butler as well as Haraway (1991), argues that the body, beyond a conduit for questioning the imbrication of power relations with sexuality and desire, is also an outcome of and for capital accumulation. ‘Body is a relational thing’, he argues ‘that is created, bounded, sustained, and ultimately dissolved in a spatio-temporal flux of multiple processes’ (402). The relational nature of human bodies and how they are pressed into the service of capital accumulation as variable capital (Harvey 1998) is a framework built upon by many other Marxist geographers subsequently. Callard (1998) while equating the call to understand the body with the call for recognizing the instability of binary sexuality argues, that the concern with sexuality nevertheless has to recentre on specificities of the production process that ‘inform and inflect the uptake of sexual identity’ (392). Taking this idea further Orzeck (2007) argues that capitalism doesn’t just produce bodies but also difference, because every social formation, like capitalism, produces bodies particular to it. It is not just that bodies are produced through material processes of production and social reproduction, but equally those relations are embodied (Andueza, Davies and Loftus 2020). The relational production of male, female, transgender, or inter-sex bodies to name a few, is a core insight that we will leverage to understand how transgender or Hijra (transgender women) bodies are often, violently produced in urban Pakistan.

As mentioned before, we are primarily interested in how transgender bodies are produced and made differentially efficacious in the texture of urban spaces through physical and psychological violence. Violence is the loss of power, in an Arendtian sense (Arendt 1970; 2009). Violence can, nevertheless, constrict the spaces for political action, or spaces of appearance, where transgender, masculine, feminine or any other identities can be enacted, performed and negotiated in any politically meaningful way (Mustafa, Anwar, and Sawas 2019). The gender performativity as per Butler (1990 and 1993) also has to take place somewhere, and our concern is with the texture and context of that urban ‘where’ in Pakistan.

Historically in northern India transgender people were viewed as sacred, almost mythological beings in the popular syncretic tradition. Among the pre-colonial, mostly Muslim empires of India, they were an integral part of the court bureaucracy (Vanita and Kidwai 2000). Transgender in imperial employment were referred to with the honorific title of Khawajasara which literally means an officer of the [imperial] household (Gichki 2020; Hinchy 2019). As imperial mandarins they assumed roles as statesmen, generals, landowners, teachers and of course custodians of the harem. The pre-colonial harem in the western imaginary is exclusively associated with sensual pleasures of the ‘oriental’ monarchs and despots. But the harem was also a space for political negotiations, power plays and decision making, in which women were often more involved than the Victorian patriarchal imaginaries could acknowledge, or countenance in their historiography of the oriental other. In the context of the harem the Khawajasara enjoyed proximity to imperial power and received land revenue which was transferrable to their other transgender disciples. These material advantages were among the many reasons that the Islamic tradition became particularly influential among even the non-Muslim transgender people (Khan 2017; Reddy 2010; Hossain 2012). Transgender people not in imperial employment were engaged in socially important ritualistic roles for blessing, performing and receiving alms, that were considered suitable and honourable livelihoods (Pamment 2010; Hinchy 2019). The tradition of transgender patronage networks constituting guru (master) and chela (disciple), continues to be relevant to this day, and features prominently in the lives of contemporary transgender women in Pakistan.

What were often imperial mandarins, suffered a decline in status and fortunes with the advent of European colonialism in India. On the one hand the Khawajasaras presented a very vexing problem by virtue of their pre-colonial access to social networks, and in particular, rights to collect land revenue, which to the mercantile colonialists was anathema (Hussain 2019). On the other hand, European masculinity in contrast to the effeminate or weak masculinity of the ‘native’ was one of the foundational tropes on which the colonial project was foisted. The transgender Khawajasara challenged the scientised sex binaries and presented a profound challenge, as Gannon (2011, 20) argues:

The notion of a ‘third gender’ challenged the sex binarism of the day… Eunuchs were among those categories of person who slipped uncomfortably between the binary. In fact, in Britain during the nineteenth century there was a movement to understanding the dualism of sex in physiological and reproductive terms, a situation that defined the eunuch as outside of the naturalness of sex.….However, since eunuchs existed formerly on the male side of the sex binary, they represented a particular type of abomination in the European imagination ‘failure of masculinity’.

Masculinity was central to the colonial project and perpetuation of sexual binaries was integral to the civilizing mission at the heart of colonial governmentality (Foucault 1977; Wilson 2011).The mission to purify the empire and expunge obscenity that seemed to be imprinted upon transgender bodies, as well as those of openly homosexual ones, demanded at first their delegitimation as ‘un-natural’ and then criminalization. The Criminal Tribes Act (1870) (CTA) specifically classified transgender population as criminal tribes to be subjected to the full malice of the colonial legal and coercive power, e.g., by requiring them to register their presence with the police wherever they went (Gannon 2011; Khan 2017; Hinchy 2019). From there on the transgender Khawajasara community was to be hounded by colonial law enforcement on the pretext of preventing child abduction, castration, and even sex addiction as manifested by their dress or mannerisms (Hinchy 2019). The transgender people were also to be further declared as frauds and unnatural abominations engaged in moral turpitude by their legal classification as men. Sadly, the epistemic violence of delegitimizing transgender bodies continues in some scholarly literature produced in Pakistan, e.g., see (Abbas et al. 2014; Sultana and Kalyani 2012). Physical violence too continues to define the transgender peoples’ experience, especially in urban Pakistan.

Geographers and sociologists have been increasingly attentive to the question of everyday violence in developmental (McIlwaine 1999; Sawas et al. 2020; Anwar, Sawas, and Mustafa 2020), post-conflict and reconstruction (Fluri 2011), juridical (Das 1996), urban and affective (Kirmani 2015) contexts, and most insightfully in a feminist geopolitics register (Pain and Staeheli 2014; Pain 2015; Fluri and Piedalue 2017). Sawas et al. (2020) and Anwar, Sawas and Mustafa (2020) point to violence as an outcome of differential access to water and exclusion from infrastructural amenities. Mustafa, Anwar and Sawas (2019) point to the DNA like relationality between the global geopolitics and everyday violence in Pakistan. We, however, as mentioned above, are interested in the relational production of transgender bodies and the embodiment of gender politics in transgender identities.

Since the 1990s, Pakistan has been synonymous with religious and ethnic violence in the international and domestic imagination, described by Verkaaik (2013) as in somewhat ‘Orientalizing and self-Orientalizing’ registers (also see (Verkaaik 2016; Gayer 2007)). Pakistan is also one of the fastest urbanizing countries in Asia (Mustafa and Sawas 2013). The global war on terror (GWOT) has largely provided the framing of engagement with the questions of violence in Pakistan, e.g., from drone warfare (Shaw and Akhter 2012; Shaw and Akhter 2014), to surveillance (Ahmad and Mehmood 2017), to post-colonial sovereignty, social movements and law (Feyyaz 2019; Hayat 2020; Mallick 2020). Equally, the question of ethnic based violence and its intersections with the security state and its imperatives have received attention, especially in the context of Pakistan’s biggest city Karachi (Anwar 2013; Kirmani 2015). Relatively recently, there’s also attention to how lack of access to infrastructure, especially water (Anwar, et al., 2017; 2020) perpetuates gender based infrastructural and terrorist violence. Taking a feminist intersectionality perspective Sawas et al. (2020) argue for a coproduction of knowledge in researching violence to make visible the silenced voices and to avoid simplistic, often militarist solutions to urban violence. This article analyses and reports the results of such attempted coproduced research, undertaken with the transgender people of the twin cities of Rawalpindi/Islamabad.

Note on methodology

The field research for this manuscript was part of a larger project on gender and violence in urban Pakistan. The project targeted 12 working class neighbourhoods in Karachi and Rawalpindi/Islamabad. The field research for the larger project constituted administering of 2462 questionnaires. Although, the larger project had an even balance of adult men and women, there was only one transgender participant in the larger project. Recognizing that the highly marginalised transgender population in Pakistan presented specific experiences of violence and access to services, a supplementary sub-project of the larger project undertook 17 detailed interviews with the transgender population in the twin cities of Rawalpindi/Islamabad, drawing upon some additional research funding that was made available. The interviews lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, and the RAs kept detailed notes about the surroundings, mannerisms, and tenor of the conservations.

The research team was mindful of the issues of power differentials and questions about social positionality of the research assistants (RAs) and the mostly working class transgender, gay and bi-sexual research participants. The approach throughout the course of larger project, as well as for this project, was about continuous reflexivity on issues of power and positionality. The interviews conducted were not merely extractive questions answer sessions; rather the conversations were carried out in a relational way of knowing. This method (Akinson 1998) encouraged an insightful narrative style conversation where the interviewee set the pace and RAs were listening, clarifying, and probing the issues of everyday violence to enactment of trans-femininities in urban spaces. We could not include any trans-men into the research, largely because of lack of access to any networks through which such participants could be approached confidentially.

One of the RAs for the project was a middle class transgender woman and the other one a female graduate student. The RA’s positionality helped with conversations around co-production of knowledge, research ethics, confidentiality, and informed consent in non-positivist qualitative research, as detailed for the larger project by Sawas et al. (2020). They RAs were not stagnant actors, rather their subjectivities with regard to the research kept evolving in a reflexive manner. They typically appended their reflections and analysis to the transcripts and those discussed collectively. In the following sections we present an analysis were the interview data that emerged from the research process.

Producing bodies, gendering identities

In the early morning hours of January 24th, 2009, acting upon ‘secret’ intelligence, about suspicious activity at a marriage ceremony, a Rawalpindi Police contingent entered a building in a semi-rural suburb of the city, where according to the police report, they discovered that, ‘a large number of persons were enjoying themselves by dance of women and castrated men in a vulgar manner’. Furthermore, ‘some persons besides the dancing place were busy in gambling through playing cards’, apparently all in a marriage ceremony (Redding 2015, 265). The police raid was most likely a result of some local enmity, where it is not unusual for antagonists to use the police to humiliate and blackmail rivals. The raid, and arrests of transgender performers, however set off a public protest by the transgender community in Rawalpindi, and a petition to the city police chief. The public outcry further led to the activist Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan taking up a sumo moto notice of the raid. He passed a series of orders instructing the state to create a third category for transgender people in the all-important national identity cards (NIC) and facilitate their access to jobs and state services (Redding 2015; Nisar 2018). The process set in motion by the raid was to culminate in the passing of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 [The Act from here on].

Pakistan has become something of a global leader in legislating and publicly discussing transgender rights as a result of the process, precipitated by an early morning raid on a wedding party. The Transgender Act (2018) quite clearly recognises self-identification of gender as a legal right, and in that respect its semantics are most salutary (Redding 2019). Even the title of the Act uses the term ‘transgender’, which entered the politico-legal vocabulary in the United States only in the early 1990s. Despite its progressive tenor however, the Act defines almost all the transgender rights, especially inheritance rights with reference to the man/woman binary and Muslim normativity in the country (National Assembly of Pakistan 2018). Laws are reflective of the politico-cultural and geographical imaginaries of the times and spaces in which they are framed (Mustafa 2001). The Act is, therefore, a remarkable piece of progressive legislation, emerging from a society deemed to be exceptionally retrogressive when it comes to gender equality and legal rights (Hadi 2017; Zia 2019). The Act despite its welcome strengths is inevitably anchored in the societal milieu from which it has emerged. And that socio-cultural milieu is characterised by perpetual negotiation and enactment of gender and gendered identities through acts of everyday living. The Act frames the context from which it emerged and to which it must become relevant.

As mentioned earlier, transgender people have had a rich history of distinguished service in diverse fields during the pre-colonial times. In the colonial times however, they came to be identified as a criminal tribe as per the CTA. Although the CTA was repealed, many of its clauses remained in force through the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC). Those clauses were then enforced under military dictatorships in the 1960s to ban transgender peoples’ activities in Pakistan (Naqvi and Mujtaba 1997; Pamment 2010). Contemporaneously in urban Pakistan most working-class transgender are limited to dance performances at weddings, begging and sex work as primary modes of livelihood under the tutelage and protection of their gurus (Naqvi and Mujtaba 1997). Of the 17 transgender people we interviewed, except for the four who had college education, everyone else was engaged in begging and dancing at various social functions for their livelihoods. Most of them also hinted at engaging in sex work, but few openly admitted to it. The dancing and performing at weddings, birthdays or social gatherings could be deemed comparable to the elaborate performance of gender and sexual alterity in drag shows in the Western parlance. Butler (1993) discussed drag shows in considerable detail to argue that the hyper-feminization in the performances excludes feminine as an object of love, and thereby enacts and stabilizes a certain heteronormative white fantasy, e.g.

The drag balls themselves at times produce high femininity as a function of whiteness and deflect homosexuality through a transgendering that reidealizes certain bourgeois forms of heterosexual exchange. (240)

Pakistani transgender performances as displayed in many videos on YouTube exude hyper femininity imitating the coquettish feminine charms and subservience to the male desire, as in Pakistani and Indian movies (Bhutto 2019). Indeed, the aspirations and fantasies expressed by many of our interview subjects were consonant with the middle-class male fantasies of what an ideal woman should be like, e.g., when asked what did she aspire to be as a child, the transgender woman’s response was

Not much really. I was just interested in dancing, cooking, and wished to live like a woman, doing household chores, and stuff like that (Kaisra 11/02/2017).

While Kaisra played up domesticity and joyous performance as her feminine ambition, others played up to the desexualized feminine in the Pakistani society, where for women it should be an un-enjoyable imposition, rather than a desire, e.g.,

Girya (boyfriend or a ritually married husband) should be caring and loving, who loves me and not [just?] has sex with me. He should love me so much that my mind may not even go towards sex. He should be my friend. It is [only?] if someone makes us have sex, that we have sex. We [transgender women] feel like women and we have that desire to be loved (Kashoon, 15/02/2017).

As the above quote speaks of a human desire for an emotional connection, it equally also gives a nod to a state sanctioned discourse that puts a premium upon feminine chastity (Anjum 2020; Khan and Kirmani 2018). The view is also consonant with the notions of izzat (dignity) in the South Asian context where, subscribing to middle class morality is a mark of social distinction and respect (Hussain 2019). Sex is a compulsion, forced upon the transwomen by the circumstances–which it often is–but the ambition is to fit into the socially accepted virtuous woman mode, as also documented by (Khan 2014). The socially conservative gendering of the transgender is, however, also a reiteration of the regulatory power of gender norms on transgender bodies (Butler 1993).

Transgender bodies needless to say, are repositories of desire, as well objects of it. In dance performances, as well as in everyday traffic light panhandling, the masculine desire is imprinted upon the transgender body through flashy clothing, make up, and hyper effeminate body movements, e.g.

In our field whoever is prettier, has more silicon, has had [hormone] injections, or has had laser [facial hair removal], or has a thick long head of hair, are liked better. I mean they get more functions [invites to perform at social functions] (Kashoon 15/02/2017).

The desire expressed by all the research participants was of a heteronormative kind, where in the words of Butler (1993: 232), ‘subject-formation is dependent on the prior operation of legitimating gender norms’. Those gender norms also foreclose the possibility of any deviation from heteronormativity, in the Pakistani context. Unsurprisingly, the transgender women of Rawalpindi/Islamabad not unlike their western counterparts embody and perform that heteronormative sexuality, e.g.,

I feel more comfortable and secure when I am surrounded by girls. I feel threatened and insecure in the presence of stranger boys. I am sexually oriented towards boys, but I am equally afraid of exploitation from their side as most girls are (Alia 2/03/2017).

As much as the production of transgender bodies and consciousness is defined by dominant socio-cultural rules governing sexuality and behaviour, there were nevertheless emancipatory strands within the research participants’ cosmology and creation myths. It is a foundational belief among almost all transgender people in Pakistan, including our research subjects, that bodies have souls. Hence, the term moorat (idol or statue) that the transgender people use to refer to their embodied selves. In the Islamic tradition, which as discussed before, became canonical among non-Muslim transgender in South Asia, God is supposed to have made humans out of clay and then blown the soul into that empty receptacle. In the transgender mythology, God blew a feminine soul in their apparently masculine bodies.

The biggest question raised about us is that we are physically male. But no one understands that we may have male body parts, but our feelings, our walking and talking, and what is inside of us [is feminine]. Like when you build a clay statue, you can put in a soul of a man or a woman. That is what God has done to us–made our bodies male with a woman’s soul. It is not our doing (Kashoon 15/02/2017).

The upshot, however, is that instead of maintaining that firewall between soul and body, some of our research participants adopt a more catholic attitude towards the naturalness of the sexual capacities that their allegedly male bodies may have e.g.:

[To engage in] sex is not a biological [capacity]. In a moorat there is this process [of desire] going on, but the [ability to have] sex is related to the mind (Narmeen 11/03/2017).

Equally, many of the transgender participants talked about how their apparently male bodies were subjected to ridicule and accusations of inauthenticity.

My brothers say don’t do this, don’t do that; why do you talk like that, why do you walk like that. Now we can’t stop the woman hiding in us. They say become a man. Can anyone force someone to be a man? (Sabo, 11/03/2017)

But the transgender response in one instance instead, ended up challenging the very naturalistic premise of those asking them to be manly:

In our society people say that you are men, and you are pretending to be women on purpose. I ask them, are you men? They say of course, we are men. I say then can you do what I do, or behave the way I do? They say why should we? I say then, that’s the difference between mine and yours thinking, that we can do what we do. We have a woman’s soul. We are not ashamed of being woman like or doing womanly things. You feel embarrassed [in being effeminate] because you are really men (Kashoon 15/02/2017).

The issue of performing one’s gender takes a central role in the above formulation. Men become men by doing what they do, as equally women become women, and are not pre-existent as the normative masculine ethos would dictate. The sexual or gender being is also perpetually becoming, not unlike Hossain (2012) findings in Bangladesh. The contradictory consciousness seemed to be internalised by many of our respondents. The embodied performance of our research participants was not just constitutive of their transgender selves and their bodies, but we argue also, of normative masculinities. We focus on masculinities, in urban Pakistan. It is to the discussion of how masculinities are relationally and violently enacted through transgender bodies in Rawalpindi/Islamabad, that we turn in the following section.

Social reproduction in violent geographies

Bodies are not just inducted into the process of production and capital accumulation but into the equally, if not more important process of social reproduction, that sustains the material relations of capitalist production. Andueza, Davies and Loftus (2020: 12) helpfully remind us that:

‘Ignoring reproduction is to occlude the concrete, lived reality of difference and the uneven violence inflicted on socially differentiated bodies’ (Andueza, Davies and Loftus 2020: 12).

Masculine, feminine, transgender bodies to name a few, are indeed socially differentiated, and acknowledged as such. Among the many tropes through which difference is established and perpetuated is violence. Masculinity premised upon a violent logic of domination, conquest and penetration of a feminized human and non-human world, we think of as toxic masculinity. And toxic masculinity is something that the heavily militarised Pakistani state has gone to considerable lengths to construct, valorise, perpetuate and ultimately normalise as the state of being in a masculinist developmental state (Mustafa and Ginn 2020; Mustafa, Anwar and Sawas 2019; Rashid 2020). The Pakistani state’s obsession with conflict against India over Kashmir, and its leveraging of Islamic militant elements has been covered elsewhere (Nawaz 2019; Abbas 2005; Amoore and De Goede 2008; Zahoor and Rumi 2019; Mallick 2020) and doesn’t need rehearsing here. Suffice it to say that the military fetish, as shown by the billboard in Figure 1, is illustrative of how uniformed men bearing an AK-47 assault rifle is somehow deemed a peace message by the Pakistani state, without even a hint of irony. This banner for a Pakistan day national holiday and military parade is emblematic of how catalytic violence (violent metaphors and images used to catalyse larger ideological and political processes) is pressed into the service of nation building and international relations. We argue that the same catalytic violence underlying the Pakistani statehood, is also used to enact toxic masculinities, and is also visited upon transgender bodies to relationally produce masculine bodies at the local scale of the city.

Figure 1. A street hoarding on 23rd March, 2018, in Rawalpindi.

Andueza, Davies and Loftus (2020) conceptualise the body as an infrastructure, which nevertheless cannot be abstracted from personhood, and which needs forms and elements of social reproduction, e.g., love, sociality, and nurturing to be sustainable. The contradiction and tension between body as a factor of production and body as a locus of lifeworld is illustrated starkly in the circulation of transgender bodies within the urban metabolism of Pakistan. On the one hand transgender bodies represent potential labour to be pressed in the service of production. In pre-colonial times that labour was prized for its efficacy in negotiating the gendered spaces of courts and imperial bureaucracy. In colonial times, the same labour got banished to the world of entertainment, the burlesque, and the kitsch and curio of the circus, e.g.:

See in [Rawal]Pindi there are so many she-males [sic] (transgender women) that I just can’t imagine where all of them are coming from. I suspect that ever since they have started shutting down mela (country fairs) and circus–… all of the she-males [sic] from there have come on the roads to panhandle. In the past, the mela would employ many of them, but now all of them are out of a job. In the past we could sing and dance [at melas], but now only [private] functions are left. And now even functions are being shut down. They just keep shutting down everything [that could/would give us livelihood]. What are we supposed to do? Obviously beg. Now they will ban that too soon enough. Then what will we do? Where will we go? If suicide weren’t haram [illegal by Islamic law] we would do it (Khusboo 13/03/2017).

The closure of folk spaces of dancing and performance arts is partially a consequence of the ongoing process of military led Islamization of the Pakistani society since the 1980s (Zahoor and Rumi 2019; Daechsel 1997), and partially because of cultural and technological changes resulting in greater penetration of electronic media in rural spaces and different entertainment choices. The mainstream choices as factory and office workers are closed off to almost all transgender. This is partially because of their alienation from the Pakistani educational system, which is often physically abusive in the best of circumstances, but particularly so towards transgender children in working class rural and urban settings. It was repeatedly mentioned by many transgender people from rural backgrounds how they left school early on because of bullying, or were simply not allowed to go to school because of their trans identity, e.g.,

No, I did not get an education. My brothers’ problem was that they won’t let me out of the house [for fear of social embarrassment] (Sabo, 11/03/2017).

Even the ones from the more middle class backgrounds had to discontinue education, after high school because of bullying, e.g.:

[I stopped going to college] because my heart was broken. People would tease me too much. See our walking style is such and our talking style is such that everyone would call us sheilas [pejoratively] (Sanaa 28/02/2017).

And even the ones who do make it into more mainstream productive jobs nevertheless find their bodies subjected to violence, where working class masculinities preyed upon transgender bodies in their midst e.g.,

In Faisalabad I used to work in a factory. My co-workers would make my life miserable. Sometimes, I had to work late night shifts and people would take advantage of me. I reckoned that all I get is Rs. 6 to7,000 and I have no respect either. I might as well set out on the roads [to beg] (Kaifa 13/03/2017).

The above factors are further compounded by lack of familial support where many, at least working class transgender women, have to run away from abusive homes early in their lives. Others, simply have to live apart pretending to live a heteronormative life at least when visiting estranged families, to maintain personal stakes in family affairs e.g.,

[When visiting family] I sometimes go in firqah (women’s dress), but mostly in khotki (men’s dress), because one has to be mindful of neighbours and appearances … I will tell you the truth, I left my home because I didn’t want their [my family’s] honour to be compromised (Kaifa 13/03/2017).

But for Kaifa while compromising on her embodied identity is reasonable for family honour, it is non-negotiable in a professional context, e.g.:

Yes, if anyone accepts me in the form of a Khawajasara I can always sit on the cash counter, make bills and do accounting (Kaifa 13/03/2017).

With few exceptions, we did not find any transgender women in our sample who engaged in gainful employment outside of begging and performing at private functions and possibly sex work. And the ones who were, for example the one working at a college canteen, or our own RA who was a visiting lecturer at a local university, were of lower to upper middle class backgrounds. The intersectionality of the transgender experience was quite stark in our experience.

For some middle-class gay and bi-sexual men in our research, public transport was a place for finding romantic partners and dates in a public place. Pakistan does not have any dedicated places for gay sociability. But for most transgender women, public transport and streets are also imprinted with violence and harassment and often not so subtle forms of humiliation, e.g.,

Travelling on a Metro (bus) I was asked to sit on the women’s side of the bus. But then was moved by the conductor to the men’s side, where I was ogled at and faced hostile looks by the passengers. I was quite offended, and I complained to the driver and the conductor–whereupon I was directed to the disabled seats, where I could sit unmolested (Narmeen 11/03/2017).

Pakistani masculinity is quite clearly threatened by transgender women bodies in their midst, especially, if those bodies have all the biological features of manliness but yet not be behaviourally masculine. In a culture where anxieties about masculinity, impotence and effeminacy were particularly amplified by British colonialism, advertisements for cures of impotence and erectile dysfunctions had an early start in the 20th century (Haynes 2012). Today, the walls in urban Pakistan are peppered with advertisements for enhancing male sexual performance as noted in a The Nation on April 16th, 2016. In such a context of hyper-masculinity, the notion of an otherwise biological male acting effeminate or opting for castration is met with extremely hostile anxiety bordering on violent horror. Violence has been documented to be a key conduit for enacting masculinities in other contexts as well (Achilli 2015; Fluri and Piedalue 2017). The anxiety, therefore, unsurprisingly manifests itself in teasing, hyper-displays of masculinity to accentuate the contrast between the masculine self, and the effeminate other embodied in the transgender subject. But the horror plays out in sexual assaults, violent attacks and even murder.

The dance performances at private parties, the Pakistani equivalent of drag shows often result in physical and sexual assaults. Stories of sexual assault by drunk clients were related by many of the research participants. Furthermore, extortion and even sexual exploitation by the police is not unusual as our earlier vignette illustrates. The true horror of male insecurity vis-a-vis the transgender women is however, illustrated by, what Verkaaik (2013) calls sublime violence, i.e., where overwhelmed by desire and resentment thereof, intense violence is perpetrated upon the object of that desire. Violence itself becomes more aestheticized than instrumental—it becomes sublime e.g.,

[speaking of violent encounters] It’s not a single, but one after the other events, how many shall I recount? Once Pathans (Pashtun) abducted me and shaved my head … another time someone [not Pashtun] picked me and my friend up on gun point in a car from Murree road (a busy thoroughfare of Rawalpindi)… . They kept slapping us in the car and we kept asking what we have done wrong. And they would respond, ‘We will tell you what you’ve done wrong!!!’ [your existence is wrong]. We eventually jumped out of the running car when it slowed down around a turn (Khushboo 13/03/2017).

What I don’t like particularly are Pathans. They really harass us too much. They just think that our work/field is just something perverse (Sonia 11/07/2017).

Without questioning the authenticity of the experiences, we do not agree with the association of those experiences with an ethnicity, being that Pashtun masculinities are as varied and variegated as of any other ethnicity, and certainly more than the dominant Pakistani stereotyping would allow, for example see Mustafa, Anwar and Sawas (2019) and Mallick, (2020). Nevertheless, the above quotes are illustrative of the sublime violence borne of insecure masculinity that the transgender have to suffer.

It is with tragic frequency that one reads about dead bodies of transgender women found in suspicious circumstances all over the twin cities of Rawalpindi-Islamabad, e.g. as reported the daily Dawn on August 20th, 2020 for one such instance. Judith Butler (1990) reminds us that the mimetic function of gender to biological sex is a fallacy. However, that mimetic function is foundational to the phallocentric masculinity, which the transgender body subverts so egregiously and successfully. Transgender bodies equally also undermine the capitalist imperative of engaging masculine bodies in productive labour, and grudgingly allowing feminine bodies to do the dual task of material production and biological reproduction. The colonial history and contemporary neo-liberal urbanization has rendered the transgender bodies culturally and productively unintelligible (Butler 1990), except as residual bodies lurking in the interstices of the binary heteronormative fabric of the Pakistani society. From within those interstices however, these bodies issue forth into the dominant masculine fields of vision as beggars on traffic intersections, or in the liminal spaces of nocturnal revelries. Therein they serve as an existential challenge to dominant narratives of gender binaries engaged in socially beneficial division of labour. The exclusions and harassments of the workplace go some way towards reinforcing the ramparts of masculine work fortresses. The marginalization of the transgender bodies into begging and sex work too, plays up on toxic masculine fantasies of possession and domination. After all, the biggest source of violence for transgender women, is an outcome of what many research subjects said, they desire the most–a man’s love and devotion:

Now if we were to start doing pakki (steady relationships), we could not sustain ourselves. No man is landlord enough to bear our expenses (Sabo 11/03/2017).

In our field one goes to functions, one is sociable. Our boyfriends can’t bear that [sociability]. They start asking, who are you talking to? Where did you go? Who called? … We worry that they will become our mortal enemies (Sarah 28/02/2017).

[The boyfriends say] If you were to leave us, I will do this. I will do that! Don’t go to functions! Just only be mine–things like that. But the thing is, we defy our blood relatives–who the hell are they to control us? (Khushboo 13/03/2017)

Gender based violence by jilted lovers and jealous boyfriends is a familiar story globally and particularly in the context of Pakistan (Hadi 2017; Aliyah, Dara and Farrukh Shaikh 2019; Zia 2019). The point here is that transgender again represent a subversive presence, through their relative social control over their bodies and their mobilities, in defiance of kinship norms, across the urban landscape. The social reproductive function of the apparently feminine body is undermined by the disruptive mobility and independence of the transgender body–and hence the violence and its political futility. The Pakistani urban masculinity almost needs the violence upon transgender to produce itself in the mode of a differentiated antipode of the feminine. An entente cordiale is negotiable with the compliant feminine but not with the defiant feminine challenging the foundational sexing of the self.

The post-colonial Pakistani state drawing upon its colonial antecedents promotes legally sanctioned sexual binaries and militarist masculinity as the norm. Transgender bodies become threatening earlier on to heteronormativity and are excluded from schooling and opportunities that could lead to diversified livelihoods. The livelihoods that do remain for the working-class transgender leave them more vulnerable to violence. But that violence is not just gratuitous but borne of toxic masculinities, matrices of desire mimicking heteronormative sexuality, and transgender defiance of feminine and masculine norms of mobility, dependence and spatial presence. Transgender bodies relationally and recursively get produced in this context as objects of desire, subjects of violence and cause for anxiety. It is in the last aspect of male anxieties that emancipatory possibilities lie, precisely because the transgender embody possibilities of becoming different variants of given masculine or feminine archetypes.

Conclusion: residual bodies

On July 14th, 2020, the Rawalpindi bench of the Punjab (provincial) High Court, ordered the medical examination of a transgender man bridegroom, who had contracted marriage with a local woman, to ascertain his sex (24News 2020). The order was passed despite the protests of the groom that he was a man, and as per the Transgender Persons Act (2018), he had every legal right to self-determine his sex. As reported in The Dawn of 8th August 2020, the judge nevertheless proceeded to put the absconding bridegroom on the Exit Control List (ECL) to prevent him from leaving the country. The ruling speaks of the delay between legislation and its application in litigation, and that too by a conservative judge. But more than that it speaks to the medicalization of the question of sex/gender—a popular attitude amongst the ‘educated’ Pakistanis and an insidious carryover from colonial legislations (Khan 2014).

The contemporary self-production of transgender bodies may be illustrative of some trenchant critiques by Butler (1990, 1993) of how transgender desire is reflective of heteronormative desire. But in our sample, the lived identity politics of gender and sexuality are more complex and contradictory. While the regulatory power of dominant gender norms seems to be operative on transgender bodies, the cosmology and self-image, nevertheless holds the process of gendering, as independent of the body and instead in the realm of the spiritual and most importantly of deed. To the research subjects, their transgender identity was emergent from their doing what they did, instead of a necessary function of their physical bodies. They were contradictorily eternally being and perpetually becoming trans-sexual/gender, through their deeds.

What were mandarins in pre-colonial times, were criminalised and then turned to mendicants through modernity and urbanization. A people whose nomenclature speaks of their exalted rank as officers of the [imperial] bureaucracy, may carry that honorific title, but the colonial state’s official English language took them on a labelling tour from 2009-2018, starting from castrated men to She-male, to Unix, to Khawajasara to finally settle on transgender in the 2018 Act (Redding 2015). Most of our interviewees however, self-identified with the Punjabi term ‘khusra’ or the more modern ‘she-male’. The material reality of the transgender body, is however, overwhelmingly that of a mendicant–desired, violated, abused and too often simply relieved of life. But it is through those bodies, we have argued, that the dominant masculinities embody themselves. The contradictory attributes of bodies as concurrent conduits for productive labour, social reproduction and sentient personhood mean that in urban Pakistan they challenge the foundational practices of sexing and what Butler (1990) calls ‘regulatory fictions’ underlying gender binaries, or even the binary between sex and gender. The gender binary is productive of the antipodal production of masculine from the feminine. Transgender bodies however, pose a visible challenge to that fiction and hence are persecuted such as they are. In another time, society was not only at peace with non-normative bodies and their sexuality, but even celebrated the absence of gender normativity. But, in a modern post-colonial urban landscape, transgender bodies are perhaps the most potent threat and an emancipatory promise to bodies imprisoned in toxic masculinity.

Acknowledgments

The research presented in this manuscript was jointly supported by International Development Research Institute (IDRC) and Department for International Development (DFID), programme on Safe and Inclusive Cities, through grant no: 107363. The research ethics application number SSHL/13/14.4 was approved by the ‘Social Sciences, Humanities and Law Research Ethics Subcommittees (SSHL RESC)’ of the Research Ethics Office (REC) at King’s College, London. We thank Giovanna Gioli for the many conversations through which she helped us see how question of sexuality and gender identity are so central to understanding society and its seemingly unrelated injustices. Johan Anderson very kindly read through earlier drafts of the paper and provided very good feedback to our benefit. Also, a note of thanks is due to Nausheen Anwar, the PI for the larger project, for her financial and moral support for this sub-project on transgender population of Rawalpindi/Islamabad. The research participants must also be acknowledged for reposing their trust in us, and opening up their homes and hearts to the research team. We hope we have done justice to their stories in this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)

Funding

This study was supported by International Development Research Centre.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by International Development Research Centre.

Notes on contributors

Daanish Mustafa

Daanish Mustafa, Professor in Critical Geography, Department of Geography, King’s College, London. He obtained his BA, MA and PhD all in geography from Middlebury College, VT, University of Hawai’i, Manoa, and University of Colorado, Boulder, respectively. He has taught at George Mason University, University of South Florida and King’s College, London. His research interests have been in water resources, hazards and development geography. He also has a corpus of research and publications on critical geographies of violence and terror. Daanish’s research has been funded by US National Science Foundation, Natural and Environmental Research Council (NERC), the Belmont Forum, International Development Research Council (IDRC), and the British Academy among others.

Abdul Rehman

Abdul Rehman has an undergrad degree in Political Science and History from Government College University, Lahore. During his Masters’ degree in Pakistan Studies from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, he worked as a Research Associate in Safe and Inclusive Cities Project ‘Gender and Violence in Urban Pakistan’ and ‘Climate Adaptation, Land Acquisition and Security: the Gendered Politics of Dispossession in Pakistan’ funded by IDRC and AHRC, respectively. Currently working as Assistant Director in the National Assembly of Pakistan, he is part of the research team of Karachi Urban Lab as well. His research interests include colonial and anti-colonial epistemologies, inquisition about decolonization as a spatial question and exploration of the spatio-temporal organization of inequality and violence in urban spaces.

Komal Raja

Komal Raja is a PhD scholar in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Institut für Ethnologie, Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, Germany. She obtained her B.Sc.(hon) and M.Phil. degrees in Psychology from Government College University Lahore, Pakistan. Her ongoing doctoral work is about investigating the ‘Identity Construction of People of Azad Kashmir: How everyday life in Azad Kashmir is politicised?’ Her doctoral research is funded by a collaborative scholarship program of German Academic Exchange Service/Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC). Besides academia, Komal is a poet, and her (ethnographic)poetry work is published in different literary magazines of Urdu Language issued from India and Pakistan, including Rekhta, Ravi, Adabi Duniya, Tasteer, Barahmah and Humsub among others.

Aisha Mughal

Aisha Mughal is a transgender woman, activist, qualified researcher and educational trainer. Aisha has served as the UNDP Expert Consultant to the Ministry of Human Rights, Government of Pakistan from May 2019 to February 2021. Aisha has served as a focal person for transgender rights at National commission for Human Rights (NCHR), Government of Pakistan and is a co-founder of Trans led organization ‘Wajood Society’. In 2020, Aisha became the worlds’ first transgender women to represent her government as part of the official state delegation at the UN (CEDAW Committee) in Geneva, Switzerland. Aisha also has the honor of becoming Pakistan’s first Transgender lecturer and first Transgender person to serve as a consultant in any Federal Ministry of Pakistan. She has earned her MPhil and BBA degrees from COMSATS Islamabad. She has also served as lecturer (visiting faculty) at the prestigious Quaid e Azam University, Fatima Jinnah Women University and Allama Iqbal University. She was the member of National Task Force on Transgender Bill and that helped pass the Transgender Persons Act (2018).