Fixed Possibilities: Transmasculinity and Homopatriarchy in an Urdu Tale

 

This talk will explore gender, transformation, and patriarchy in the 19th-century Urdu Qissah-i Agar o Gul (Tale of Agar and Gul), a story of the deeds of Prince Agar, who begins his life as the daughter of the vizier of Poppyseed City. Agar's tale is queer in many senses, involving real or apparent same-sex desire, bursting with innuendoes and oddities, and driven by the question of Prince Agar's gender. The talk will question the romantic strategy of celebrating Agar's tale as an anti-patriarchal transgender narrative, and will begin an examination of the story's instances of transformation more broadly, in relation to desire. Prince Agar's maleness makes his tale revelatory of the oppressive force of norms of masculinity and the workings of homopatriarchy through representations of manly virtues, sexual pursuit, traffic in women, rape, and the possibility of a reproductive future.

 

 

Pasha M. Khan is the Chair in Urdu Language and Culture and an Associate Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. He is interested in the narrative qissah genre and storytelling in languages such as Urdu-Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian, as well as South Asian literature more broadly. He is the author of The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu, among other writings.