Pakistan Desires

“In this volume Pakistan emerges as a valuable site from which to think queer not only because it is forgotten in the scholarly and global imagination, but because it is richly complex in its gender and sexual politics. Pakistan Desires is an urgent re-narration of Pakistan as well as an important call to queer studies to more seriously engage the Muslim world, see the limits of the field’s universal theorizations, and to ask how else queer can manifest elsewhere.” - Kareem Khubchandani, author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife

“This extraordinary collection of literary, aesthetic, ethno-historical, art-historical, and sociological writings on queer thought, lives, and politics in Pakistan captures the pulse of a defiant, restless, and fierce creativity: it is what makes Pakistan Desires such a pathbreaking collection.” - Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, author of The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories

“Pakistan Desires, edited by Omar Kasmani, is an elegant anthology that takes up the impossible task of providing thick context to the imbrications of queerness and queer lives with theology, myth, temporalities, geohistories, and popular culture in Pakistan even as it also disrupts the desire for such contexts through framing devices that center mistranslations, failures, logjams, improvisations, and inventions.”

"For readers engaged in queer theory, South Asian studies, or interested in the intersections of identity, culture, and religion, Pakistan Desires offers an essential exploration." - Apurva Das, IIAS Review

"This joyous and ground-breaking book delivers lavishly on all of its promise." - Kaveri Qureshi, Bloomsbury Pakistan

"The contributions tease out potentialities and push the thinkable, let alone effable, to critically challenge the occlusion of queerness in the obstinate narratives of Pakistan with plurality, complexity, and alternate imaginations. . . . . A necessary, affective contribution to queer queer studies." - Anna-Maria Walter, Gender & Society

"The publication of Pakistan Desires is a timely move toward the internationalization of queer scholarship."

"An important, timely, necessary intervention into the field of queer studies—expanding, probing and thinking in intersection with studies of the Islamicate world, religion, postcolonial studies, global south theory, comparative literature, art history, curatorial practice, legal studies and sociology. As such, it is a generous volume, which productively contributes to all these fields." - Aziz Sohail, Performance Research

"The ethos of leaning into . . . shadowy places of illegibility and ambivalence limns the collection. . . Religion is one such standardized frame made capacious throughout this collection." - Namrata Verghese, South Asian Review