Learning My Mother’s Tongue: Affective Archives, Queer Shadows, and an Intimate Pakistan

• In Event: 232 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Paper Session. Feminist and Queer Methods

Abstract

A central aim of this paper is to put oral history (which relies on the historical “speaking” subject) in direct conversation with queer theory (which seeks to dispense of this very subject). Using the oral history of one Pakistani woman - a figure fetishistically marked by both chaos and irrelevance in the global marketplace, I argue, that a transnational feminist analysis alongside a queer/ing oral history, illuminates: 1) the far-reaching relations of domination in everyday life and, 2) constitutes an alternative way of understanding Pakistani women’s experiences at a particular historical juncture where their stories often function in the service of empire and neoliberal narrative capital. By tracking the presumed irrelevant story of one woman, I reconstruct the Pakistani grammatology that lost its public complexity to an endless war, an incessant empire, and one corruptive state regime after another. Moreover, by positioning Pakistan as a “geo-body” that is at once dubiously artificial and powerfully real (Winichakul 1994) and my subject’s story/body as an archive of South Asian diasporic histories that are increasingly difficult to access, I take on the methodological quandary of simultaneously “doing” oral history, queer theory, and de/coloniality. Thus, this paper is part of a queer oral history project that is motivated by two central polemics: my desire to find a method of knowledge production that implodes and exceeds disciplinary and methodological conventions and a way of writing that could track and understand the fragmented woman subject, always and already undergirded by queernesses.

Author

• Moon Charania, spelman college