SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter engages the temporality of khwajasara communal experience by examining a variety of ways in which this Pakistani gender nonconforming subjectivity has shared in the larger South Asian and/or Muslim memories and performance of gender and sexuality, whilst forging alongside a space and a time of their own. First, I turn to khwājasarāʾ and hijṛā historical subjectivities to account for the distemporalizing effects as well as some potentially productive tensions between present-day khwajasara and hijra views of the(ir) past and those of the(ir) historians. Second, I briefly examine a site of khwajasara’s present/future-making. At this site, khwajasara are literally made part of another, virtual world, but find ways to disrupt or “rewire” such transformation. Third, based on divergent khwajasara experiences of temporality and distemporalization as well as a range of decolonial queer, Black and trans/feminist timely studies, I ask how time matters differently in the postcolony.