Yaariyan, Baithak, Gupshup: Queer Feminist Formations and the Global South

Abstract

In this essay, we join Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) and Eve Tuck’s (2009) call to decolonize and de-center “damage-centered” research, embedded in settler/colonial ways of knowing. We attend to the ethical responsibility and intimate relationalities that this contemporary moment requires of us as privileged feminist, queer, global south, and South Asian scholars. We introduce yaariyan, baithak, and gupshup to theorize queer feminist care in/as research practices. As ethics of care, compassion, and collectivity, these practices enable us to study and share knowledges together. Building on transnational feminist and queer scholarship (Chowdhury and Philipose 2016; Banerjea et al. 2017), we argue that responsible knowledges mean thinking about methods as relational rather than transactional and relationality as activated and not automatic. We explore how gupshup and baithak provide methodologies of co-production of knowledge, inclusion, accountability, sharing, and reflection. This work must be located in different frameworks of home, diaspora, and language. Pakistan, we contend, is always already a transnational space in which gender and sexuality have been categorized (to deadly consequences) but not contained as words which denote experiences, identities, practices, desires, and histories. It is these words that we reach for in and through our friendship as a condition of possibility of a different kind of knowledge-making.

Female Intimacies and The Sacred Rituals of Desire in Pakistan

“…For if I have learnt how to turn my hands gentle from my mother, her languages still cannot yet articulate this act of mercy. Minai and Shroff (2019, p. 33) remind us that ideas of gender and sexuality in the context of Pakistan are usually expected to constantly be invented as categories and theories and nomenclatures and introduced as legible taxonomies. But the worlds that the sacred lets us into, of what it allows for, of the bodies that emerge out of plays with the sacred and its ornaments, are but ephemeral visions of what can be possible, of what awaits us still.…”

Getting by with my <i>Yaars</i>: Analyzing Decoloniality and the University through <i>Yaariyan</i>, <i>Gupshup</i> and <i>Baithak</i>

“…In order to think through this question of my own engagement with decoloniality, I refer to the works of queer, global south, and South Asian scholars, through which I reflect on the kind of responsible and intimate relationalities I associate with decoloniality as praxis. I think of Naveen Minai and Sara Shroff's theorization of yaariyan (friendship), gupshup (a mode of speaking), and baithak (a mode of space) as responsible knowledges that are located in relational rather than transactional methods, where critical relationality must be activated and not be seen as automatic (Minai and Shroff 2019). Yaariyan, gupshup and baithak-taken from Urdu-as activated methodologies, are premised on transnational feminist tenets of co-production, sharing, reflection, and accountability that enable queer feminist scholars of color 'located in/between academic institutions/networks in the global north and global south to produce and circulate knowledges' (Minai and Shroff 2019, 32).…”