PROJECTS
MONOGRAPH
QUEER COMPANIONS
My first monograph (Duke University Press, 2022) takes the view that coming close to deceased Islamic saints bears public and world-making ramifications in contemporary Pakistan. The book regards Islamic saints as intimate lovers and queer companions. It argues that saintly affections mobilize futures in excess to ascribed lines of the social just as much individuals in more-than-living companies of saints overcome conditions of the present or are afforded historically expansive modes of being social. As an ethnography of a pilgrimage town, across five chapters and through several fakir lifestories, the book develops the insight that saintly affects imbricate individuals, society and the state in a public architecture of intimacy. Its intellectual labors animate a distinct desiring between historically disinclined analytical objects, religion and queer, and so doing define the terms and shapes of a critical meeting ground. Queer Companions was awarded the 2023 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Single-Authored Monograph by the Association of Queer Anthropology (AQA).
BOOK-MANUSCRIPT
THIN ATTACHMENTS
My current book-project is a rumination on migrant be/longing, best read across cultural anthropology, affect theory and queer-of-color critique. Envisioned as a series of non-linear fragments, it brings migrant feeling to bear on the material-affective geography of Berlin. A work of auto theory and written in the third person register, it illustrates how migrants struggle to attach themselves to a sense of the historical, or how racialized Others long and belong in shared unfamiliarity. The project’s key contention is that in the face of European history’s suffocatingly thick mastery, its still-colonial refrains of the present, migrant affect is marked by a sense of thinness. By thinking across diasporic Islam and queer migrant memoir, secular assumptions of (Western) theory are abandoned. In the ethnography, Berlin’s queers and Sufis, lovers and research-partners cross paths in streets, cafes, mosques, online, and in bed: sex and saints constitute continuums and delicacies of religious ritual echo precarities of queer love.
EDITED VOLUME
PAKISTAN DESIRES
Pakistan Desires (Duke University Press, 2023) invites reflection on what meanings adhere to queerness in Pakistan. It illustrates how amid conditions of straightness, desire can serve as a mode of queer future-making. Among other topics, the contributors analyze gender transgressive performances in Pakistani film, piety in the transgender rights movement, the use of Grindr among men, the exploration of homoerotic subject matter in contemporary Pakistani artist Anwar Saeed's work, and the story of a sixteenth-century Sufi saint who fell in love with a Brahmin boy. From Kashmir to the 1947 Partition to the resonances of South Asian gay subjectivity in the diaspora, the contributors attend to narrative and epistemological possibilities for queer lives and loves. By embracing forms of desire elsewhere, ones that cannot correlate to or often fall outside dominant Western theorizations of queerness, this volume gathers other ways of being queer in the world.