FARIS A. KHAN

My book project is an ethnography of the culture, politics and activism of non-normatively gendered people in Pakistan. For this project, I conducted fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi among gender ambiguous individuals known as khwaja sira (also khwajasara and hijra). In my writing, I conceive khwaja sira politics as performances of resistance and self-preservation that were meant to perpetuate uncertainties about the gendered desires, practices and embodiment of khwaja siras in mainstream society. I argue that the performances in which this minority population engaged were responses to the stigma they experienced in everyday life, and that these schemes both facilitated and constrained their activism.

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