Unstable Assemblages: Mediated Discourses and Lived Realities of Hijras in Pakistan
| dc.contributor.advisor | Soderlund, Gretchen | |
| dc.contributor.author | Mokhtar, Shehram | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-02-27T22:32:50Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2020-02-27T22:32:50Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020-02-27 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Hijras comprise a community of female-identifying gender-fluid individuals of generally low socioeconomic status in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. They are also known as “Khawaja siras” in Pakistan. The English term “eunuch” was employed for them before “transgender” became a term of currency in media and legislative discourses. While the community did not figure prominently in national and transnational media until the state began granting them citizenship rights in 2009, the discourses on gender variant practices are produced in a highly mediated environment since then. Historically, the community was marginalized and criminalized first under the British colonial rule and subsequently in postcolonial South Asia. However, hijras endured as a close-knit community relying on their kinship system of guru-chela (teacher-disciple) and their unique performance cultures. In contemporary Pakistan, most members of the community typically survive on singing/dancing, begging, or sex work, the means of livelihood considered undesirable. The media have brought these and various other aspects of hijra lives under close scrutiny. This dissertation project examines such national and transnational media - documentaries, films, television talk shows, awareness campaigns - and the discourses of exclusion and belonging that they produce. While the media in conjunction with other external and internal forces function to shift the conversations and practices around gender embodiments for those who have access to the sites of mobility and imagination, these discourses leave out a majority of those on the margins and do not address realities and complexities of hijra lives. This project highlights such complexities and addresses questions of subjectivity and agency in contemporary mediated discourses of human and sexual rights and visibility and identity politics. I argue that the media function as unstable forces, territorializing and reterritorializing marginal spaces and temporalities. While media discourses remain marginally relevant to their lives, hijras continue to negotiate their presence by bringing forth their contingent self, working with and against the pull of essentialist identity politics and its assimilatory imperative for specific ends. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25241 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Gender and Sexuality | en_US |
| dc.subject | Hijra | en_US |
| dc.subject | Media | en_US |
| dc.subject | Pakistan | en_US |
| dc.subject | Transgender | en_US |
| dc.subject | Transnational | en_US |
| dc.title | Unstable Assemblages: Mediated Discourses and Lived Realities of Hijras in Pakistan | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | School of Journalism and Communication | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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