Abstract
This article examines the discourse of non-normative sexuality and gender variance in Pakistan produced through commissioned transnational documentaries. While the documentary apparatus is mobilized to make visible gender and sexual minorities in Pakistan, they deploy self-othering schema within which the other is defined in comparison to the Euro-American center and its politics of normative citizenship. Sexual practices and gender embodiments that do not match up to the normative ideals are deemed aberrant and rendered abject, while simultaneously Muslim cultures are metonymically linked with homophobia and oppression. I demonstrate through a close reading of three documentaries that the optics and modalities that they employ do not make intelligible the other and their relationalities but rather circumscribe them. I argue that the discourse is not constituted to empower but instead functions to subordinate, impoverish, and incapacitate the other.
In the last 10 years, issues of non-normative sexuality and gender variant practices in Pakistan became the subject matter of multiple transnational documentaries. Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret (Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, 2011), How Gay is Pakistan? (Masood Khan, 2015), and Being LGBT in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Vice News, 1 2016) are a few examples of documentaries produced for and commissioned by US- and UK-based organizations and meant for consumption by western audiences. 2 Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret was made for More4 (a subsidiary of Channel 4) by Clover Films and Pakistan-based SOC Films, 3 How Gay is Pakistan? for BBC Three (now an online-only channel of BBC), and Being LGBT in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan for Vice News in collaboration with Jigsaw, Google’s technology incubator. These documentaries were eventually distributed on video streaming platforms such as YouTube and Netflix where they gained widespread visibility. 4 Since the production and distribution of these documentaries crisscross national and international geographies and global communication and media infrastructures while their commissioning authorities are based in the UK or USA, I employ the term transnational for them.
While these documentaries seem to be about Pakistan and sexual and gender minority subjects who reside there, a close reading of the three commissioned documentaries shows that they consider predominantly white Euro-American sexual culture as normative. When experiences of white Euro-American culture are taken as normative, it secures a central yet invisible position (Nakayama and Krizek, 1995). Thus for these documentaries, the search for gay and transgender subjects in Pakistan is also a search for normative ideals associated with these cultures as standardized in the Euro-American center. 5 These distant subjects are imagined with the conditions that make the possibility of their being in the center, and so others are constructed by their lack, lagging behind in developing these subject positions. Critics have cautioned that if queer discourses worldwide are evaluated by the standards in western countries they can function imperialistically (Chávez, 2013). These documentaries deploy similar optics that make it impossible for claims other than those that align with the center. Pre-eminence of the center forecloses possibilities of other ways of being, and consequently demotes others as objects who are defined by their lack, or relegated to the scale of the local, or denigrated as aberrant.
I situate these documentaries within the broader scope of what Chouliaraki (2013: 2) calls the “humanitarian imaginary,” a humanitarian communicative structure that places “the West into a specific kind of public actor – the ironic spectator of vulnerable others.” The humanitarian communicative project of the West remains invested in representing and speaking for others (Spivak, 1993). 6 This West-centric communicative and representational structure raises questions of power that remain obscured behind the smokescreen of its own humanitarianism. Raka Shome (1995: 507) contends that “the relation between the object/culture being looked at and the subject/culture engaged in the looking are enmeshed in conditions of power, national and international.” The power to look at, gaze, scrutinize, and speak for the other through media apparatus for its own consumption is a potent strategy of the West. Pooja Rangan (2017: 8) argues that documentary as a media form “especially in its most benevolent, humanitarian guise, is thoroughly implicated in the work of regulating what does and does not count as human.”
Critical scholars have been at the forefront of highlighting the colonizing impulse of some of the documentary ventures. For instance, Pooja Rangan (2011) and Svati Shah (2013) critique the Oscar winning documentary Born into Brothels (2004) for its brand of child media advocacy and for deploying a white savior trope to rescue children of sex workers in Calcutta, India. Nicola Mai (2018) employs the term “sexual humanitarianism” for this particular mode of imaginary to rescue victims of sex trade. The critiques of documentaries on LGBTQ communities in different parts of the world, such as Uganda and Turkey, underscore similar sexual humanitarian imaginary (Cakrilar, 2017; Hart and Dillwood, 2015). I draw from these and other critical/cultural inquiries, women of color feminism, queer of color critique, postcolonial theory, colonial histories, and transnational approaches in gender and sexuality studies to ground the critique of the three documentaries. I read these documentaries from the position of solidarity with gender and sexual minorities in Pakistan (my home country) and elsewhere in the Global South to highlight hegemonic structures and protocols that obfuscate the emergence of marginal voices.
Self/other and subject/object in documentaries
Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret, How Gay is Pakistan?, and Being LGBT in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan are similar in that they are commissioned by or produced for established international organizations. Commissioned projects differ from other documentary genres in that they are outsourced to production crews by a parent organization to produce a documentary within limited time and budget constraints. They usually follow an expository documentary style that sutures vignettes, snippets, sound bites, interviews, and other visual/aural evidence or a lack thereof by an authorial voice. Bill Nichols (1991: 37) explains that the exposition accommodates various documentary elements but “these tend to be subordinated to an argument offered by the film itself, often via an unseen ‘voice-of-God’ or an on-camera voice of authority who speaks on behalf of the text.” The authorial role functions through voice-of-God narration in Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret and Being LGBT in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and an on-camera presenter in the case of How Gay is Pakistan? However, voice of authority is not the only element employed in the construction of “a sense of a text’s social point of view” that Nichols (1983) calls “voice of documentary.” A documentary constructs its voice through its organizational style of various textual elements as “that intangible, moiré-like pattern formed by the unique interaction of all a film’s codes” (1983: 18).
In the construction of a documentary’s voice through its textual elements, the positioning of the self plays a significant part when the subject is the other. In documentaries, dialectic between self and other is often mediated by self-reflexivity (Nichols, 1983). In the absence of any self-reflexivity, which is generally the case with expository style and/or commissioned documentaries, the dialectic relation of constructing others as subjects in relation to the self or dominant culture may collapse and reduce the other to an object status. Thus, self/other and subject/object are the dynamics within which discourses about others are often mediated. This subject–object dynamic is particularly evident when the filmmakers are western, activating various tropes of ethnographic filmmaking. Ethnography and ethnographic filmmaking have been criticized for employing a self-othering trope by which “Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others” (Mary Louise Pratt quoted in Rangan, 2011: 148). In ethnographic texts, a reflexive turn functioned to address this criticism. In films, the conundrum of the ethnographic gaze of a foreigner is often addressed by reflexivity or the employment of diasporic and/or local filmmakers as “insiders,” as in the case of local production crews for these documentaries (Arora, 1994: 300). 7 However, having “insiders” does not guarantee access to “intimacy, interiority, or ordinariness” (Ouellette, 2016: 117) if they remain invested in dominant worldviews of the intended audience or vision of the commissioning authority and funding agency. The critiques of documentaries on LGBTQ discourses in non-western geographies indicate issues of insufficient reflexivity, inadequate research, and ethnographic modes that often fail to address contextual complexities (Cakrilar, 2017; Hart and Dillwood, 2015). My analysis of the three documentaries points to similar issues and builds on the existing critiques. In the next three sections, I analyze the three documentaries and outline various modes and tropes embedded in their structure with the help of which they constitute others for their own consumption.
Disciplinary voice and voyeuristic gaze
The documentary Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret (hereafter: Open Secret) is focused on the struggles of the gender-variant female-identifying community of hijra/khawaja sira, 8 but addresses them with the terminology of “transgender.” “Transgender” has become a term of currency, especially in English-language national and international media and statist legal discourses. Some hijras have embraced this term for intelligibility outside the community, while they address each other through everyday subcultural terms such as hijra, khusra, and moorat (Mokhtar, 2020). Hijras have a long history of social formation in pre-colonial South Asia that precedes their persecution under British colonial rule, which continued into the postcolonial era. Most national and international media accounts on hijras/khawaja siras in Pakistan efface this history. The media also often deride hijras because they are associated with begging, dancing, and sex work, the means of livelihood considered undesirable. Open Secret also centers on the stories of three hijras, each associated with the three disparaged modes of earning.
Abandoned by their families, hijras have survived in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh by building their own communal support network in which senior hijras take on juniors and act as their mentors and guides, thus building fictive guru–chela (teacher–disciple) kinship with each other. Open Secret records the initiation ceremony of such a guru–chela relationship at a local hijra household in Karachi, Pakistan. A senior guru performs various rituals including placing a nose ring on her chela (disciple) while other hijras sing and rejoice at the ceremony. The authorial voice-over interrupts the apparent festive ambiance with the statement, “A new nose ring and Miss M is now owned by B (emphasis mine).” This declarative speech counters the ceremonial visual evidence to frame guru–chela relationships as suspect by using terms that preordain a master–slave relationship instead of a widely recognized teacher–disciple kinship formation. While the guru explains various aspects of the relationship equating it to that of a mother and daughter, the voice-over keeps on making counter claims throughout the documentary. “It’s not quite that simple … New recruits must often work the streets for their guru,” informs the voice-over referring to the economic relationship that builds between a guru and chela.
As part of the initiation rituals, gurus make monetary payment to chelas as a symbolic debt. Chelas repay the debt over a period of time in return for the special bond, mentorship, and network of support that gurus provide to them in the face of familial rejection and societal sanctions. Tracing the story of another hijra who begs the streets to make a living, the documentary informs the viewers, “Twelve years ago she was bought for the equivalent of $300 and has begged the streets everyday since then earning money for her guru (emphasis mine).” An unidentified crew member prods her guru with a loaded question, “That’s like buying someone?” Flabbergasted at the idea, the guru becomes defensive, “… It’s not slavery … It’s our custom … There’s no slavery.” As opposed to the claims in the documentary, none of the research evidence indicates elements of slavery in guru–chela relationships. While acknowledging “hierarchy and a strong economic component,” Nanda (1990: 45) defines the guru–chela relationship as “reciprocal, multidimensional, and mutually satisfying.” Pamment (2010: 31) likens a guru to a mother and defines guru–chela relationship as “a protective realm” for young hijra initiates. These dimensions remain invisible to the gaze of the documentary that marks the guru–chela relationship as flawed. Benedicto (2008: 318) terms these modes of addressing the other as “strategies of invisibilization and discipline.” The documentary through its disciplinary mechanism presents “the local as the site of tradition, fixity, and parochialism” (Hossain, 2018: 237).
While western sexuality is conceived as socially constructed and historically constituted, the other is relegated to sexual essentialism. Essentialism delimits sex and sexuality to the realm of the corporeal detached from the mind and outside of the social. Gayle Rubin (1999: 149) terms essentialist conceptions of sex as “unchanging, asocial, and transhistorical.” Documentary films that focus on gender and sexuality of the other, often resort to those essentialist notions of sex as an element of appeal. Gender variant individuals in the third world have particularly been on the receiving end of sensationalism, objectification, and voyeurism reducing them to bodies and their relationships to the matters of sex. Open Secret, for instance, frames the relationship of a hijra/khawaja sira with a cisgender man in a reductive manner to suit its single-track focus on the illegitimacy of anal sex in Pakistan. The voice-over sets up the introduction of the sequence of the couple’s interview as follows: “Transgenders may be recognized as a separate gender in Pakistan but anal sex is prohibited and is punishable by life imprisonment but S who lives openly with transgender (hijra/khawaja sira) T isn’t frightened of the repercussions.” The interview that ensues seeks evidence of anal sex from the couple. While the hijra explains her relationship with her partner in terms of romantic love, the unidentified behind-the-camera interviewer pursues her line of questioning: Interviewer: Do you have sex? Man: We have a sexual relationship that I can’t have with a woman. Interviewer: There’s something special about her. Man: Yes, there’s something special about her. Interviewer: What’s special … What’s special about her? Man: The special thing about transgenders (hijras//khawaja siras) … is something I can’t talk about.
This mode of presenting hijra lives becomes more voyeuristic as the documentary presents the story of a hijra sex worker. Open Secret deploys hidden camera operation to record the minutest and racy details of transactions between the hijra sex worker and her clients. Open Secret ascribes its moral authority of secret filming to the will of the hijra sex worker, “She wanted to show us why she believes such outwardly respectable men like her clients are hypocrites in their private lives.” Devoid of any self-reflexivity, filmmakers dispose of their own ethical responsibilities and burden the subjects of the film with the justification of the use of the secret filming device. With filmmakers unable to explain the urgency of hidden operation except laying bare the “hypocrisy of clients,” the camera becomes neither an investigative tool nor an observational device. I argue that in the absence of a strong reason, the camera becomes a voyeuristic tool, deployed to sensationalize sex work and present others through the tropes of “unrestrained libidinousness” and “animalization” long associated with exotic cultures (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 137). To support my argument, I will now illustrate how the film and its secretive filming device enable various tropes about sex work, sex workers, and their clients.
The camera records a hijra sex worker and her friend at night from a distance as they wait in public for clients driving by. Viewers are told that the hijra sex worker has brought a friend for her protection as she has been sexually assaulted and gang raped before. Once they are able to get into the privacy of a car, visuals become blurry, grainy, and shaky showing the front of the car and back of the front seats. The sex transaction transpires between the client and the sex worker with the friend sitting in the back seat. In the absence of sharp visuals, aural evidence is brought into play. As opposed to the grainy video, impeccably clear audio of the sex worker guides the client and viewers: “I’ll start sucking now … You drive and keep looking straight.” Within a few seconds of this aural cue, the film cuts to another sound bite, “You came in my mouth. You are not supposed to … I could get infected.” The sex worker negotiates for more money leading to the end of the transaction. In another sequence, viewers only hear negotiation of the sex worker with another client as she graphically explains the kind of services she can offer. Viewers are spared further details of sex the second time, as the sequence abruptly cuts to the car parking back at the spot where the principle camera was apparently positioned. The purpose of presenting this second sequence is also not clear except for apparent voyeurism. In the absence of reflexivity, the subjects are at the mercy of a voyeuristic artifice that produce them as sexed bodies and place sex workers and their clients in the roles of victims and perpetrators respectively.
The deployment of disciplinary voice and voyeuristic gaze renders the documentary apparatus as regulatory. The genealogies of similar regulations can be traced to colonial histories. The British deployed regulatory mechanisms in undivided India for its colonial rule. For instance, the Criminal Tribes Act (1871) was promulgated to particularly regulate and police gender variant people, criminalizing and marking hijras as habitual sodomites, gender deviants, beggars, cross-dressers, and unnatural prostitutes (Hinchy, 2019). On the basis of individual cases of crimes, “colonial officials extrapolated an account of hijras as a criminal and sexually immoral collective” (Hinchy, 2019: 7). The colonial technologies of discipline and dispossession were deployed for the purpose of keeping dominance and hegemony of colonizers over colonized (McClintock, 1995). The documentary grammar, codes, and modalities bear stark similarities to the histories of colonial subjection and discipline. However, the disciplinary mandate of this documentary functions ambivalently with the fetishization of sexual practices. Sexuality becomes a source of viewing pleasure, functioning paradoxically with the notion that others can be redeemed and salvaged if disciplined. Homi Bhabha (1983) points out that the ambivalent discourse of recognition as well as disavowal is central to the process of subjectification. The simultaneous production of victimhood and fetishization of sexuality also indicates a neo-colonial order of subjection.
Homonormative morality
Since BBC Three is strategically geared toward the youth market (Woods, 2017), How Gay is Pakistan? (hereafter How Gay) employs a young YouTube comedian and vlogger as its on-camera voice of authority. The documentary derives the authority of the presenter from his background – born in Pakistan, brought up in Essex, identifies as gay, and can joke about everything. The Independent praises the choice of the goofy presenter for “injecting humor” into the issue calling him “easy to relate to” (Wyatt, 2015). The selection of the presenter and the significance of his relatability to the intended audience of the documentary become the first articulation and foregrounding of the Eurocentric self. How Gay begins with the self-introduction of the presenter. He looks into the camera, and speaks to his audience in a typical mode of direct address associated with vlogging on YouTube. He informs the audience that he has come out to his parents of Pakistani origin. As a diasporic brown man who has come out of closet, he signifies notions of sexual evolution, progress, development, and modernity (Ross, 2005). The act of coming-out takes one off the “ground zero in the project of articulating an epistemology of sexuality” and in the direction of normative citizenship (Ross, 2005: 161). Same-sex sexual practices that follow monogamy, marriage, privacy, and a depoliticized culture of consumption define ideals of homonormative citizenship (Duggan, 2003). Having articulated “self” in the sexual hierarchy, the presenter shows curiosity about gay others who reside in an embryonic sexual culture of his country of origin. With these articulations, the documentary sets out terms of the narrative for those viewers who might have similar benchmarks available to them for a quick comparative analysis that would most likely reinforce their prejudices about “others” while strengthening the pre-eminence of their own sexual freedom. It also sets up participants of the documentary to present themselves within these hegemonic frameworks.
Thus, aligned with the center and demonstrating no concern for differences in historical, economic, political, and socio-cultural circumstances and global distribution of wealth and resources, the presenter sets out on his investigative journey of what he calls “lifting the lid.” Similar traditions of voyages of discovery are well documented. Perez (2005: 176) traces “a white, urban, leisure-class gay male whose desire was cast materially onto the globe at the close of the nineteenth century.” Eguchi (2014: 10) locates the contemporary transnational flow of sexual politics in “homonormative distributions of power that normalize U.S. American, middle/upper class, ability, White, gay, and man in various localities.” How Gay also operationalizes a cosmopolitan gay male lens to make visible secretive, unknown, and hidden “gay” subjects/objects, who are waiting to be found and saved, albeit by a diasporic man with closeness to and identification with the center. López (2005: 17) defines the position of postcolonial nonwhites as “not looking white but nevertheless believing they are white claiming superiority by virtue of their whiteness and establishing economic and cultural hegemony over other less privileged groups on racial grounds.” Eguchi (2019: 36) uses the term “almost white” and defines this “as an ambiguous domain for non-whites in which economic and cultural capital enables them to visualize their proximity to the center maintained by whiteness.” Representing “the white gay male clone” (Munoz, 2009: 60), the presenter thus sets out to regulate what Roderick Ferguson (2005: 16) calls “homosexual difference.” “Regulating homosexual difference in order to claim coherence as a public citizen is part of the homonormative subject’s entrance into racial privilege,” Ferguson explains.
The homosexual difference is articulated by constructing others as primitive, inferior, tribal, and undeveloped. Thus, How Gay begins by establishing primitiveness of the other in the “sights and sounds” of the city of Karachi: spices, pickles, hens, goats, butchers, and men who wear traditional clothes. In a cosmopolitan city, the documentary’s choice of highlighting only traditional men and mocking their homosocial ways, such as straight men holding hands, is the beginning of showing anxieties about others. While the presenter sees “gayness” in men holding hands, rubbing shoulders, and playing mud wrestling, he simultaneously articulates the impossibility of being gay for ‘the other’ as: “Being Pakistani and being gay are not two things that go together in my head.” Being gay is perhaps the realm of whites or those assimilationist nonwhites who, like the presenter, embody homonormative ideals. Similar tropes are employed throughout the documentary. For instance, when the presenter is invited to an underground party arranged by a transgender woman and her male partner at a posh non-residential location in Karachi, he addresses his audience for a comparison with London before entering the space, “I wonder if it would be anything like Soho.” Viewers are not informed about who has access to the party and its economy or whether there are other forms of social and political organizing that people do, just a superficial visit to a party is presented.
Homonormative ideals are also articulated in the presenter’s interactions with the subjects in the documentary. He interviews the transgender woman and cisgender man who organized “the gay” party, and pushes the idea of a “Muslim gay” wedding: “You could potentially be the first gay couple to get married in Pakistan.” While making such speculations, the host also conflates the terms “gay” and “transgender” subsuming the latter into the former by calling the transgender woman and cis gender man “gay” couple. This kind of slippage will not be acceptable in any contemporary media in the West where transgender and gay mean two different identity markers since the 1990s (Valentine, 2007). While gay marriage has achieved a prominent status in LGBTQ rights-based politics in the West, this notion has little relevance in a country where homosexuality is legally a criminal offense. Critiquing a singular focus on gay marriage for people of color in the US context, Roderick Ferguson (2005: 61) emphasizes that “women, men of color, and the economically disadvantaged need a much broader and deeper social change to improve their lives.” A broader change, including perhaps the repeal of penal laws that criminalize same-sex sex, has better applicability in postcolonial Pakistan. Research indicates that some community members and activists in Pakistan are wary of even calls for the repeal of these penal laws as potentially damaging to their overall cause (Hamzić, 2015). However, one can’t ignore how the documentary feature produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation facilely elides Britain’s colonial legacy of criminalization of homosexuality in South Asia.
The BBC documentary claims to investigate aspects of “gay” Pakistan but the presenter keeps on interviewing and meeting “transgender” women or hijras/khawaja siras throughout the documentary. However, the documentary presents the evidence of how “gay” identity functions in Pakistan in an interview with the director of a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). The director grew up in the USA and had his US citizenship revoked when he contracted AIDS. He explains his experiences with other men after coming to Pakistan as follows: Right after coming to Pakistan, I was having a lot of gay sex and … with the type of men I would not have been able to access in the US because these were … straight men. And straight men in Pakistan … a lot of them not all of them … do have sex with other men. They are not attracted to them but they have sex with them because … females are not accessible easily.
To inform viewers about the licentiousness of men having sex with men, both the BBC Three and Vice News features visit a low-cost lodge for local travelers and migrant blue-collar workers in Lahore, Pakistan. A number of outreach workers on their bikes, some of them covering their faces, reach the “hotspots” – sites of MSM activity. The presenter in How Gay builds suspense for the viewers who are about to witness sites/sights of illicit sex, “I am not at all prepared for what I am about to see and hear, the reality of the MSM world.” What we see is a dilapidated building with multiple-beds set up, narrow stairs, and a couple of unsuspecting men resting in the lodge. Outreach workers, who are at the service of HIV/AIDS medical industrial complex, become optics through which the documentary genre surveils these sites. The workers help the audience imagine primal scenes of licentious behavior. “Some will be doing it doggy style here, others there … some at the top. Others at the bottom of the stairs,” one outreach worker explains as they climb through the narrow stairs. Simultaneous pathologization of such sexual activities are also done, as they are necessary for the sustenance of transnational funding for NGOs. “These people get a lot of STIs because they share beds,” informs one worker. Without the safeguard of an identificatory system, these men are imagined as vulnerable targets of disease. Outreach workers also regurgitate easy explanations for such sexual behaviors, “They can’t find female prostitutes so they sleep with each other.”
Since these men challenge the stability of identity categories, they also become a source of anxieties, and are deemed excessive, licentious, and aberrant. Stories of men having sex with men become what Snorton (2014: 153) calls “morality tales,” which “reduce and redirect critical attention from contemporary flows of power and accumulations of capital.” Documentary becomes a vehicle to tell such tales of morality as the presenter calls the place a “sex den,” and mocks men’s sexual practices by proclaiming, “Most Pakistanis don’t think of MSM as gay sex … to me it definitely is … It seems like the whole country is in the denial of the whole issue.” The onus is on the other to assimilate into the identificatory system that will save them from shame that was once associated with gayness. This is the exploration of territories that Hiram Perez (2005: 177) defines as “populated by pansexual, uninhibited brown bodies—bodies without shame.” The documentary optics project them as such and disavow them for their hypersexuality and animalism.
Visions of liberation and oppression
In 2016, Google’s parent company, alphabet think tank and technology incubator, Jigsaw collaborated with Vice News to produce a documentary series called Blackout, with the stated purpose of demonstrating how digital technologies can be used as “weapons in the fight against oppression” (Gold, 2016). The liberating and democratizing potential of communication technologies and digital media platforms is pitched in binary opposition to the supposed oppression of what they call “existing orders, existing power structures, and status quo” of regimes across the world. To show their agenda of supporting “communities battling censorship,” Being LGBT in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Hereafter: Being LGBT) is the first documentary of the series. 9 Being LGBT starts with an ominous soundtrack complimented by visuals of mountains and tribal men in traditional clothes carrying guns while their faces are covered. Viewers hear an unidentified sound bite of supposedly one of the veiled men claiming that he killed two men who were having sex. This murder has not been reported in national or international media. The artifice of the opening sequence not only serves to project an extremely oppressive tribal climate so that it can be juxtaposed with modernity but also makes room for only those participants who can fit into this tradition–modernity binary. The sequence of tribal men is thus followed by the stories of two young, upper-middle class, English-speaking, mobile, well-connected, and tech-savvy transgender women. They shop, party, and use dating apps. The two transgender women were also invited to New York for the launch of the documentary series. The whole media event, from production to launch, certainly fulfilled Google’s agenda of juxtaposing modernity/liberation and tribalism/oppression behind this whole project.
The portrayal of upwardly mobile trans bodies may be considered a part of what C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn (2013) call a globalized transnormative political project. Like global homonormative distribution, the circulation of trans normativity tends to align with mobility, modernity, and privilege. In their eagerness to demonstrate that they are modern and progressive, one of the transgender women in Being LGBT declares, “(The) World is changing now, trans is the new trend.” Presentation of these “transgender” women effaces the community of hijras/khawaja siras who are interconnected with each other from big cities to small towns through their formal and informal network throughout the country as well as regionally in India and Bangladesh (Hossain, 2018). Hijras also connect with each other through cellular technologies and applications like WhatsApp but their technological connections are not spectacularized. Being LGBT subordinates the communitarian interconnectedness to the supposed technological connectedness of the privileged few to suit the aims of the documentary and its commissioning authority. It privileges and recognizes these modern transgender women as the only acceptable and authentic other, while effacing other local/regional formations.
As opposed to the presentation of modernity enabled by technology, the oppressive and tribal society is projected as its other. The director of the NGO, also featured in How Gay, shows a blurred video, sent by an anonymous source on WhatsApp, claiming to be of tribal men sodomizing a teenage boy with a stick who was supposedly “caught in the act.” The director showed the same video in How Gay. The documentary also brings up details of an incident of a reported murder of three men by another man. Tribalism, discussions about and presentation of reported and unreported murders and crimes, and questions about imagined threats portray the perfect picture of an oppressive society and produce moral crisis around it. Sara Ahmed (2003: 393) informs us that the declaration of crisis works with real facts or figures, and in the case of these documentaries imagined events as well, and transforms them into “a fetish object.” So, what emerges is the tribal other as the fetish object of the discourse. The documentaries produce the tribal Muslim body that gets metonymically linked with homophobia and transphobia.
While the discourse of fear projects tribal and homophobic others, the tropes of presenting conservative clerics and common people who hold on to their orthodox views despite the world changing around them, produce Muslims and their traditions as a static and binary force functioning in opposition to modernity and modern sexuality. Thus, all three documentaries include token statements of clerics who condemn homosexuality and gender variance. While it is apparent that the hardline clerics are not going to magically reinterpret the scriptures and present liberal views, the trope of Muslim cleric is deployed as a quintessential part of films on non-normative sexuality and gender variance in Muslim cultures produced for the West. These tropes function to present Muslims as racialized others. As a racialized category, Sara Ahmed (2014: 93) argues, “the Muslim becomes the stranger, the ‘body out of place’; the one who is not us, or not like us, the one who endangers or threatens our well-being.” This approach of focusing on negativity corresponds with Said’s (1981: 10) observation that “the Muslim world is reducible to a small number of unchanging characteristics despite the appearance of contradictions and experiences of variety that seem on the surface to be as plentiful as those of the West.”
The documentaries conjure what Saba Mahmood (2005: 1999) calls a “rhetorical display of the placard of Islam’s abuses” that present the collective of homophobic and transphobic Muslims as objects and trigger moral panics around them. This happens in contrast to the histories and current practices that demonstrate manifestations of non-normative sexuality and gender variance in Muslim cultures (Boellstorff, 2005; Massad, 2007; Vanita and Kidwai, 2001). However, Muslim cultures are projected as incommensurate others because there is a desire for an outcome “whose telos is assimilation into West” (Massad, 2007: 16). Tom Boellstorff (2005: 582) examines same-sex desires among Muslim men in Indonesia and argues that “gay lives exist and are lived every day; what exists is a habitation, not a resolution, of incommensurability.” However, simplistic formulations in these documentaries disregard lived realities and complexities; their developmentalist schema simply relegates others to a spatial imaginary whose inhabitants have not yet entirely embraced the Euro-American sexual politics and a temporality where time is not considered “an agent of change but rather the proof of its lack” (Massad, 2007: 171). These narratives, as Svati Shah (2013) argues produce the timeless others who must be rescued into the present. A teleological framework reifies those who identify with a universal, modern, homo/trans normative, secular, and cosmopolitan self while all others need to be rescued from the clutches of oppressive, backward, traditional, and homo/trans-phobic Muslim societies. The imagination of liberation in these films is thus a projection of competing temporalities in which the other is defined by the markers of belatedness and backwardness.
Conclusion
The documentary projects that I have highlighted present the problem of privileging a master narrative. The optics, modalities, and language employed in the documentaries indicate a reliance on mastery and discipline. These documentaries tell us little to nothing about gay identity in postcolonial Pakistan. Hijras/khawaja siras and their established cultures are projected as traditional and flawed, pitched in opposition to transgender identifying subjects, imagined as modern and mobile. Frameworks of perversity, hypersexuality and libidinous animalism render sexual practices of hijras/khawaja siras, sex workers, and men who have sex with men (MSM) aberrant, while they also simultaneously portray an over-determined and overpowering fear of homophobic and/or transphobic Muslim cultures. Reductive ways of presenting subject positions of others make them and their relations unintelligible. Intelligibility appears to be the least of concerns in these documentaries, as no regard is given to context, complexities, and histories. Instead, the documentaries are invested in and center on white, Eurocentric, homonormative, and transnormative ideals. The labeling of communities, groups, and nations as oppressive without recognizing any complexities only functions to serve the viewers, producers, and sponsors of the films and to strengthen the global hegemony of the West. At the same time, these presentations could also bolster right-leaning political ideologies in non-Western locations that dismiss non-normative sexuality and gender variant practices as Western imports.
What can be done when communication about others results in an impasse? Transnational feminists have highlighted that the answer is not cultural relativism and suggest building “more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation” (Abu-Lughod, 2002: 789). Saba Mahmood (2005: 199) argues, “To render unfamiliar life worlds into conceptual or communicable forms is to domesticate that which exceeds hegemonic protocols of intelligibility.” Halberstam (2011: 12) suggests “conversations rather than mastery” as a way of being in relation to one another. Locating gender variance and non-normative sexualities elsewhere demands filmmakers and cultural producers to move away from mastery and destabilize hegemonic protocols of intelligibility that privilege the West. I have shown that the hegemonic modes work to the advantage of those whose gaze others respond to. Decentering this gaze and making its power structure visible may render intelligible voices from the margins that may be beneficial for the margins.
