Details

ISBN-10: 1478018038
ISBN-13: 9781478018032
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 05/13/2022
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.48" H

Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan

Paperback

Price: $26.95

Overview

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.

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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"
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Details

ISBN-10: 1478018038
ISBN-13: 9781478018032
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 05/13/2022
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.48" H
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