Talk by Uzma Zafar (Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies, University of Rochester)

This talk explores nationalist temporalities of gender in Muslim transmasculine religiosity. Granted citizenship by the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018, transgender people have become an affective community before the law. Challenges to the 2018 legislative act by the Federal Shariyat Court (2023) have popularized the belief that being transgender is not morally compatible with Islamic practices and society. How does emergent masculinity make its religious morality stable enough to access nationalist legitimacy? This talk thinks with affective religious and temporal planes through an ethnography of psychic states during prayer to imagine a lived theory of nationalist religious temporality.

Uzma Zafar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Susan B. Anthony Institute at the University of Rochester, and an attorney of the High Court of Lahore, Pakistan. His writing, teaching, and legal practice draw from an interdisciplinary approach to law and medical anthropology, concentrating on areas of public health, gender, citizenship, and human rights in South Asia.