Revered as the ‘Queen of Qawwali’ and ‘Queen of Sufi music’, sixty-seven-year-old Abida Parveen is a spiritual phenomenon who transcends gender while performing. She is known for her signature fashion style of buttoned-up masculine-cut kurta (tunic) with matching shalwar (loose trousers) and an ajrak (block-printed) shawl. Her aesthetic circulates within transnational and national fashion media and popular cultural spaces through descriptors such as androgynous, masculine, modest, indigenous and sacred. As a highly respected figure with widely circulating performances on both the national and international stages, as well through multiple media circuits, including television, social/digital media and broadcast concerts, Parveen's undeniable fame and her transgressive entry into an otherwise male-dominated music genre raises important questions about gender, embodiment, spirituality and the sacred. In analysing Parveen's body and dress in performance, I centre her sartorial style as sites of spirituality and affect to ask: what does it mean for Parveen to transcend gender through a performance of androgynous Sufism and mobilise it as an entry way into spiritual iconism? What imaginations around spirituality and the sacred become available through Parveen's sartorial practices? How does Parveen's style offer an alternative route to Muslim spirituality? Taking up Parveen's embodied coagulation between fashion and the sacred reveals an absence in feminist fashion studies on which subjects and styles are viewed as important, relevant, resistant or transgressive and thus worthy of theorisation. As a feminist scholar interested in the relationship between gender, power and self/representation, I see Parveen as a key global cultural and spiritual figure who necessitates transnational feminist analysis. This article is situated at the intersections of fashion and cultural studies, feminist, queer and trans spiritualities and South Asia studies.

In June 2016, Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani social media star, was murdered. Her death sparked both public outrage and a policy debate around ‘honour killing’, digital rights and sex-positive sexuality across Pakistan and its diasporas. Qandeel challenged what constitutes a proper Pakistani woman, an authentic Baloch and a respectable digital citizen. As a national sex symbol, she failed at the gendered workings of respectable heterosexuality, and during her short lifetime she optimised this failure and public fetish as a technologically mediated social currency (clicks, hashtags, comments, likes, reposts) to build a transnational celebrity brand. I centre Qandeel Baloch’s life and afterlives to think through the economic entanglements of honour, racialised ethnicity, coloniality, sexual violence and social media at the intersections of globalised anti-Blackness and honourable brownness as a matter of global capital. Within these complex registers of coloniality, Qandeel’s life and brutal murder necessitate a rethinking of categories of racialised ethnicity (Baloch), sexual labour (racial capital) and social media (digitality) as vectors of value for capitalism and nationalism. By centring Qandeel, I define honour as a form of racialised property relations. This rereading of honour, as an economic metric of heteropatriarchy, shifts my lens of honour killing from a crime of culture to a crime of property. Women’s honour functions as a necrocapitalist technology that constructs female and feminine bodies as the debris of heterosexual empire through racialised, gendered and sexualised property relations. These relations and registers of honour get further complicated by social media currency and discussions around digital rights, privacy and freedom of expression. Honour is, therefore, the economic management of sexual morality produced through race, religion and imperialism.

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.

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