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

Kasmani, Omar

ISBN 10: 1478015411 / ISBN 13: 9781478015413

Published by Duke Univ Pr, 2022

About this Item

224 pages. 9.00x6.00x0.56 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # x-1478015411

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Queer Companions Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478015411
• ISBN 13: 9781478015413
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.4 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.