TQ Salon

Queering Dalit | TQ Salon

Oct 2016

I don’t need to de-queer my Dalit-ness. I need to fuck my Dalit into my queerness.
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the way damaged people love | TQ Salon

Aug 2016

to be with someone we love is a heroic act of defiance, a grave dissidence to every single normativity of state, religion and society which tells everything about us is somehow wrong. all of a sudden you become a Luti (people of Lut), a mental condition, a pervert, or might be going through a...
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Queer Shuttling | TQ Salon

Jul 2016

I shuttle not only because I am always anxious of others appropriating my narrative, but also because I don’t really know how to process and narrate my queerness, how to come out politically through a narrative that is mine, that refuses to be globalized. Part of the reason for our collective shuttling is our...
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Translating Queerness | TQ Salon

It is important that we ask ourselves if we can do without the Western academic rhetoric that for all its usefulness can never understand the true scope and complexity of our identities, our stories and our traumas. Is it possible in Pakistan to speak about the right to love and live as we...
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Khwaja Siras and State (Dis)Belief | TQ SALON

If the state has been unwilling to fully regard penises and anuses, it has contemplated vaginas even less ably. In these social crevices then, a certain kind of space can flourish outside of the state’s harsh glare.
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Legibility as a Political Project | TQ SALON

Feb 2015

The efforts of the Pakistani state in making “Muhajirs” legible through preferential policies did not have the effect of compartmentalizing them into a new discrete identity. To the contrary, it enabled Muhajirs to portray an ethnically neutral “Pakistani” identity.
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How Ahmadis Became Non-Muslim | TQ SALON

Feb 2015

The modern state has a distinct way of "seeing." In this vein, the anti-Ahmadiyya legislations allowed the Pakistani state to penetrate society and fulfill its cultural project of creating a modern Muslim polity.
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