Power and its negotiation in indigenous gender diversity in South Asia: A case study of decoloniality in pedagogy and advocacy

• In Event: Learning from Indigenous knowledge(s) and pedagogies: toward equity in education

Proposal

Relevance
Embracing Social Identities is a three-year ethnographic research project in collaboration with the UKRI to develop a series of digital pedagogical resources to teach about power, gender, and violence against indigenous gender-diverse groups, inclusive of but not limited to the Khwaja Sira, at the higher education level. Using extensive ethnographic case studies of ethnic-gender minority communities in Pakistan, these resources (including an ethnographic docuseries, short stories, and curriculum guides) use a decolonial and critical theory lens to trace the historical and present-day systemic injustice against these communities.

This paper presentation intends to share lessons from the project on researching and documenting indigenous knowledge through decolonial methods, exploring erasure in society and academia as a form of violence against indigenous minorities, and leveraging the reparative potential of education for the reclamation of subaltern narratives.

The relevance of the project extends beyond the need to teach about the nature and extent of violence propagated by society, to also understand the colonial legacies in our methods of inquiry and advocacy for these communities (Smith, 2012). Our vocabulary, associated with gender and power theories mainly originating in Western contexts, is insufficient in capturing the diversity and complexity of indigenous knowledge, expression, and identities in local contexts (Mohanty, 1984; Wilson, 2008). This can help us recognize the visible violence propagated against them by socio-political and economic institutions and the invisible violence of erasure in academia and media. The project and its findings are relevant to discourses surrounding inclusive and reflexive research conventions, developing pedagogies that have a “catalytic intent” to facilitate social impact through global citizenship education (UNESCO, 2015), and leveraging digital affordances to increase representation and decentralization of knowledge.

Context & Theoretical Foundation
Different indigenous gender-diverse communities in Pakistan are often singularly categorized in academia and media as the “Khwaja Sira” or “hijras” (Abbas, 2021). They are often characterized as gender ambiguous, transgender, or the “third gender.” Despite their centuries-old presence in the society, literature, and histories of the subcontinent, they have been subject to intense scrutiny, violence, and erasure (Khan, 2017). At first glance, discrimination against gender minorities may seem like a product of the current patriarchal norms practiced in Pakistan. However, a closer reading of power traces the roots of their disenfranchisement to a complex history shaped by colonialism and oppressive social structures (Hinchy, 2017). Their remnants have led to a system of prejudice and discrimination against these communities across sociopolitical institutions and interactions (Khan, 2019). In addition, it perpetuates violence and omission by family and larger society through ostracisation in education, religion, and employment (Nisar, 2018).

The conceptual framework is derived from the works on “problem-posing” education (Friere, 2000), gender as a category of analysis (Scott, 1996), fluidity and the inherent power of gender performance (Butler, 1988), the colonial history of gender diversity in South Asia (Hinchy, 2014), and the post-colonial legacies of oppression in Pakistan (Khan, 2019; Abbas 2021). Connecting theories of power and gender, we applied this framework to understand the operationalization of gender in negotiating power, visibility, and mobility.

Inquiry
This project was a product of a three-year ethnography of gender-diverse communities in Pakistan to produce gender-transformative pedagogies for higher education. A secondary literature review of local and international scholarship, government documents, and archival records served as the foundation for the collection of primary data in the form of 30 semi-structured interviews conducted across 5 cities in Pakistan. We adopted an abductive approach to the analysis of power, gender governance, and injustice against minority and minoritized groups. Furthermore, the project and its research methods were grounded in decolonial theory to facilitate a reflexive and reiterative mode of inquiry that challenged the inherent positionality of the researchers and their research conventions (Lugones, 2008; Manning, 2018). The methods and outputs heavily relied on co-creation with these communities. The research outputs were translated into multimodal resources, including a six-episode docuseries, a curricular resource pack, a short-story anthology, and publications.

Findings
Our research found that systemic marginalization emerges from a deeply rooted social bias against gender diversity. It can be traced to colonial practices of criminalizing indigenity to discredit native expressions of gender and culture at large (Hinchy, 2017; Ghosh, 2006). Gender-diverse communities, particularly the Khwaja Sira, have documented history and cultural practices that have roots in the native culture of South Asia (Abbas, 2021; Hinchy, 2019). However, associations with Western language and categorizations of gender have led to an erasure of their indigenous presence. The colonial overwriting of their culture is further impeded by the use of Western research conventions that do not accommodate the diversity of their expressions, confining them in labels that do not adequately translate their native expression (Khan, 2019).

The erasure of their indigenous identities, expressions, and culture contributes to the violence of omission, which is prevalent, particularly in pedagogy, academia, and media. There is little to no representation of these gender identities in curricula taught across all levels and media only features stereotypical caricatures (Asghar & Shehzad, 2018). Academia is constrained by limitations of Western research conventions, such as those that try to define their gender identity as “transgender” or “non-binary” which does not encompass the fluidity and complexity of their gender identity.

Contribution
The project contributes to the existing literature on indigenous gender diversity in South Asia by documenting the various types of violence faced by these communities in different institutions. It presents an intersectional and decolonial method of understanding, representing, and teaching about these communities. Instead of attempting to catalog or define these communities using Western conventions, we attempt to reclaim indigenous knowledge by exploring their gendered experiences instead of their gender identities or labels, which do not possess equivalents that may exist in English or Western gender theories. Additionally, the project has developed resources that highlight how decolonial, reflexive methods can be adopted to conduct research in this area without further minimizing native cultures and expressions. The digital and multimodal nature of these resources facilitates teaching and learning about social justice across different contexts, expanding its impact on pedagogy and advocacy.

Authors

• Rameen Iftikhar, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

• Ramsha Fatima, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania