Hijra Human Rights and Legal Recognition in Pakistan: Gender Justice, ‘Third Gender’ and Embodied Identity will historically and ethnographically explore how a ‘third gender’ has been legally institutionalized in the case of hijras (non-binary, non-heteronormative transgender persons) in Pakistan. The project will investigate why were international human rights norms taken up by South Asian high courts between 2007 and 2018 and why have their celebrated judgements extending equal rights to sexual minorities failed to yield anticipated new social equalities for hijras in Pakistan? This project will moreover consider the role that medical, particularly surgical and cosmetic, knowledge has played in helping to produce as well as contest legal definitions of third gender/LGBTQI+ identities and, in turn, how fields of medical practice and expertise have been influenced by legal categories of gender.
Funder: SSHRC Insight Development Grant
Meet the Principal Investigator
Dr. Salman Hussain is a Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Feminist Research and a Sessional Lecture in the Department of Social Anthropology at York University. Dr. Hussain is a Cultural Anthropologist with research interests in Human Rights and Social Movements, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Political Violence and Terror, and Law and Decolonization. Dr. Hussain has held research and teaching fellowships at The Gradauate Center, CUNY, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
His current research examines new forms of queer activism at the intersection of liberal legality and sexual biopolitics in Pakistan. He is interested in looking at how activism for demanding gender rights and contesting inequality and marginalization revolves around the evidentary politics of the body by traditional communities of khwajasaras in Pakistan. Hussain’s project is part of his long-term research and activist commitment to the khwajasara communities and follows their engagement with third gender laws in the country.
His research has appeared in American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Postcolonial Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Anthropologica.