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Queer Companions
Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2022
About this book
In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place’s patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state’s infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints.
Author / Editor information
Omar Kasmani is Postdoctoral Research Associate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the CRC 1171 Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin and coeditor of Muslim Matter: Photographs, Objects, Essays.
Reviews
“A lyrical and moving meditation on Islamic saints, Sufi intimacies, and affective histories of contemporary Pakistan. Through encounters with fakir life stories, Omar Kasmani offers us an exquisitely written ethnography on the queerness of religion, region, and belonging. Queer Companions pulls us in, moving us toward more radical modes of the social life of the intimate.”
-- Anjali Arondekar, author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India
“Queer Companions presents the reader with perceptive observations that illustrate how desire not only works, but worlds. How striving for saintly companionship puts certain futures within your reach, while this orientation alienates you from other normative ways of life.”
-- Max Schnepf Hypotheses
“By engaging with the ways in which fakirs in Sehwan encounter and experience affective bonds with the more-than-human and more-than-living, Kasmani ingeniously illustrates a form of queer world-making in unexpected places. For those who ruminate on questions pertaining to queerness, Islam, affective encounters with more-than-human entities, and/or religion-state relations, Queer Companions is an essential book and it will truly bloom as a companion in the time to come.”
-- Febi R. Ramadhan Reading Religion
"In reading queerness religiously, this ethnography unsettles the epistemological foundations of both queer and religious studies, leaving the reader to contemplate unorthodox intimacies between saints and fakirs, religionists and queer scholars, shrines in the global South and gayborhoods in the global North."
-- Lucinda Ramberg GLQ
"It is a testament to Kasmani’s engaging, poetic writing and thought-provoking theoretical intervention that I found myself mulling over the book for some time after reading it and continue to do so now months later. This is not a book to be read once. It warrants multiple (re)readings to fully tease out and appreciate the intricate suturing Kasmani performs of queer, religious, and affect studies to make an insightful, transformative argument for tarrying at the intersections of these disciplines to rethink their very constitution and possibilities."
-- Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz Pacific Affairs
-- Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz Pacific Affairs
“Kasmani’s multilingualism, the length of his fieldwork research, and his personal cultural and religious backgrounds offer a unique perspective that is a valuable addition to the literature.”
-- Suvarna Variyar Journal for the Academic Study of Religion
-- Suvarna Variyar Journal for the Academic Study of Religion
“An excellent read . . . [Queer Companions] will draw in students at all levels while introducing them to recent anthropological theorizing and method.”
-- Katherine Pratt Ewing Journal of Anthropological Research
-- Katherine Pratt Ewing Journal of Anthropological Research
"Kasmani’s Queer Companions moves through a detailed web of relationships, networks, and bureaucracies to give us a rich and moving ethnography of fakir lives in Sindh, Pakistan."
-- Hafsa Arain Anthropological Quarterly
-- Hafsa Arain Anthropological Quarterly
"A tour de force in the anthropology of Pakistan, this book is certain to break new grounds in our understanding and engagement with the microcosm of South Asian Muslim devotional selfhood, in all its internal diversity."
-- Vanja Hamzic Bloomsbury Pakistan
-- Vanja Hamzic Bloomsbury Pakistan
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Note on Orthography
ix -
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Acknowledgments
xi -
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Introduction: On Coming Close
1 -
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1 Infrastructures of the Imaginal
36 -
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2 Her Stories in His Durbar
60 -
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3 In Other Guises, Other Futures
84 -
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4 Love in a Time of Celibacy
107 -
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5 Worlding Fakirs, Fairies, and the Dead
130 -
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Coda: Queer Forward Slash Religion
152 -
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Notes
165 -
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Glossary
181 -
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References
185 -
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Index
201
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
April 21, 2022
eBook ISBN:
9781478022657
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478022657
Keywords for this book
2023 Ruth Benedict Prize Winner; Association for Queer Anthropology book awards
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
