Mehfil

This chapter thinks about desire and female intimacies through their sacred affects, their illegibility and incoherence, and through the pleasures and violence which become bonds between queer women in Pakistan. In this creative non-fiction essay, I think of queerness along intersections of class, language, religion, and locality. By doing so, I explore the moments of failure to define the desires and intimacies among women which escape stable meanings and identities. Furthermore, in imagining queer lives and elsewheres in Pakistan, this essay offers a queer mode of telling, and an exercise in form and method through which queer desires in Pakistan can be (re-)thought.