Violent Legalities: Bureaucratized Rights and Transgender Identity in Pakistan

As an interdisciplinary project, this dissertation combines scholarship from critical STS, medical anthropology, critical race studies, and queer theory to consider the lived experience of human rights in Pakistan. Specifically, it seeks to explicate how different actors interpret the category ‘transgender’ to navigate barriers to everyday liveability and make transnational LGBTQ+ rights relevant to local perceptions of emancipation. It follows acts of interpretation and their effects under new transgender rights legislation, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 (TPA 2018). Transgender personhood in Pakistan is now a contradictory site of oppressive emancipation as it is rendered simultaneously legal and illegal between the TPA 2018 and the colonial legacy of the Criminal Tribes Act 1871. Ethnographically, the project centers trans identifying citizenship-seekers, doctors, legal practitioners, NGO workers, and government officials in Pakistan. It looks at how narratives of authenticity are built as transgender people attempt to access new categories of citizenship made available by the ratification of the TPA 2018, and its frictive interplay with state imaginaries of truth, biology, and legal identity. It asks: What interpretive frames are generated for ‘khwaja sira’ and ‘transgender’ identity through its legal delineation? How does the social life of law assemble ‘transgender’ as a liveable human identity? Based on 18 months of ethnographic research, I propose that transgender identity comes to animate the curation of access to liveability through fleshwork, which marks trans bodies with ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh’ (Weheliye 2020; Spillers 1987). Emancipation is embodied in everyday routines mediated by legal and medical technologies of care, depicting the temporal hold of coloniality over trans bodies that must continually prove their authenticity. This puts at stake different interpretations of the question of freedom and its imbrications with global imaginaries of care, and the emergent meanings of the category of ‘human’. Nonetheless, trans- identifying people negotiate this violent terrain and its multiple emergences through de/colonial acts of creative interpretation in order to access its dream of a liveable life. In the process, the disorienting experience of legal and medical visibility enacts a displaced sense of lost time that is bound with livable futures. I show how apocalyptic chronologies of medical and legal care build ‘khwaja sira’ and ‘transgender’ as newly (and unequally) imagined liveable identities which makes dreams of emancipation an everyday de/colonial praxis. I explicate the development of a legal consciousness among transgender people who expand the capacities of legal identity categories and reimagine the political experience of rights for differently sexed and gendered citizens. Following the precarious orientations born of expectations of freedom that impinge on the daily living of transgender people through apertures of an emancipatory imagination, Violent Legalities shows how the world presents itself as a temporal opening for trans futurities through a de/colonial consciousness that learns to live within politicized forms of recognition.