Spaces of Critique, Spaces of Desire: Gender-Crossing in Pakistani Cinema

This chapter explores a series of gender transgressive performances in three Pakistani films. While the narratives of all three films serve to essentially restore the heteronormative patriarchal order, gender-bending performances temporarily invoke and make claims on particular kinds of gendered power, refigure norms and practices, and reimagine the limits of filmic desire. These films show the myriad possibilities that gender reversal or play in films open up for cinemagoers. In the Pakistani context specifically, this has ramifications for understanding the ways gender intersects with other identity formations in performance, such as class, caste, ethnolinguistic identity. It also offers insight into how gendered and gender transgressive performance styles, as indices of such identity formations, develop and are enregistered over time.