Resistance” is traditionally defined as a struggle for freedom, where people band together to protest their unfair treatment and demand retribution. This captures the essence of the campaign for queer rights in the Global North and their strategies of Pride. Here, the suggestion of anything LGBTQ (case in point, the “debates” on the 2018 Trans Rights Bill and at moment of writing, their roll-back by the FSC) seems to stir up so much outrage and controversy – and sometimes outright violence – that openly campaigning for queer rights feels impossible in Pakistan. But queer folk continue to live their lives every day and I became interested in the quieter, more adaptable forms of resistance they practiced.

Depending on how they present, cis queer women can occupy a space of in/ visibility, where they can avoid being recognized as queer by mainstream society. Existing under the public radar may be a safer alternative for marginalized communities. Queer women/AFAB folks who already face gender-based discrimination may not want to invite (even more) overt sexual violence because of their sexuality.

I was interested in examining the veil of invisibility assumed heterosexuality granted to queer women, one that walked a fine line between being deployed intentionally by the subject and being imposed by others. They exist on the threshold of the closet, neither in nor out. One participant defined it as more of a “coming in”, inviting people who had earned their respect and trust into this small safe circle with them, rather than a “coming out”. These women fashioned themselves into “tacit subjects”, carefully constructing strategies of protection with a dual function; while they were a way to provide them protection from their families and the possibilities of violence attached to “coming out”, they were also intended to, quite simply, give them space to breathe.

Choosing (partial) invisibility as a reaction to inhospitable circumstances may seem counterproductive. Resistance for the sake of social justice has an ethical demand at heart – to change an unjust system. However, protesting the injustices of the situation one is born or thrown into and asking for retribution is not an option available to everyone. Few have the power and community support to go up against institutions that permeate everyday life. These are also existing criticisms of feminist movements in Pakistan, they inadvertently become spaces only for women who have the time, money, and mobility to engage in activist labour. Whether you are organizing a movement or practising feminist politics in your everyday life, open, disruptive resistance comes with material and emotional costs. Lollar’s theory of strategic invisibility is applicable here. It combines Heidegger’s concept of dwelling places and Arendt’s concept of visibility combine to capture how those placed in inhospitable situations seem to understand that to maintain safety invisibility to greater powers is preferable to transparency.4 Instead of resistance, they practice subversion by taking what they can from their inhospitable surroundings to create space for themselves to survive – a strategy I personally favoured when conducting my initial research.

However, conversations with “A”, a young medical student in Lahore, raised more questions for me. Unlike the other folks I spoke to, they favoured a strategy of open resistance to the sexism and homophobia prevalent on their university campus. They were vocal about their feminist leanings and about working with Aurat March. At one point they joked about being discredited as a “Feminazi”. Their activism involved action too. The medical society they were part of began collecting signatures for a petition that demanded intersex people undergo medical examinations to determine their gender. They instead uploaded a statement on the society’s social media opposing the move as discriminatory and inhumane – cis people are not subjected to gender examinations so why should intersex and trans folks be? This move did not go unnoticed, and the consequences they described for their resistance are what many fear. They still struggle with fear and depression, but they continue to be fuelled by anger at the way things are and a desire to change them.

Few have the power and community support to go up against institutions that permeate everyday life.

Why do the queer folks at LUMS prefer creating private subversive spaces instead of open resistance? The normal rules that govern life in Pakistan are suspended here to a certain extent, and perhaps they wished to protect the freedoms they already had. There is also a question about how such resistance would affect their material freedoms. Even A acknowledged the relative freedom they were operating from. Unlike many other young women, they lived in Pakistan while their parents lived miles away in the Middle East. This afforded them a crucial level of privacy and distance from where they could practice their activism. Ties to the home and the family, access to material privileges that make life liveable, protecting the freedoms you already have, or simply not desiring the emotional toll of activist labour are all extremely understandable reasons to fear violent disruption of the way things are.

Though one cannot deny that there is an ethical conundrum to hiding. “Invisibility maintains an unspoken truce with the culture and the social sphere”. It obscures the “ethical demand of one’s presence” and the possibility of a positive contribution to public discourse. To persevere these small subversive spaces must remain hidden from the mainstream to preserve themselves. These are spaces where the marginalized experience joy, they are certainly not perfect and often have internal hierarchies and problems. Though they come with their own great costs, they are still spaces where one can breathe and protect themselves from the violence of the outside world. The current wisdom of queer activism operates within a liberal, legal rights-based framework and seeks to gain recognition and protections from the state. One imagines that a change in legislation has the power to change our social reality for the better. This kind of resistance exposes one to violence and requires fixing identities and knowledge about the community that goes against the ambiguity of their lived experiences. But the fact remains that using the legal framework of human rights is necessary to a certain extent, because the minimum requirements for a liveable life must be ensured. However, I would still contend while this framework might be able to address legislative issues, its power to guarantee freedom is limited.

What is the way forward then? How do we move towards a queer utopia? We need to expand the rigid definitions of concepts such as rights, freedom and resistance and separate them from a purely “human rights” based discourse. Instead, we need to find a new middle ground, we must imagine a new kind of emancipation. In a way the spaces queer women created for themselves with other queer folk were like a kind of utopia, many participants described finding a sort of joy and comfort in these relationships that they could not find anywhere else. We can perhaps use these subversive spaces to begin thinking about how a utopic future can look different for different groups of people. Freedom does not have to look the same for everyone, we perhaps need to move towards a vision that places it in a particular cultural and historical context where women are allowed to decide/design for themselves what their utopia would look like.

In a way the spaces queer women created for themselves with other queer folk were like a kind of utopia, many participants described finding a sort of joy and comfort in these relationships that they could not find anywhere else.

Scheherazade is a final year Anthropology student and researcher, dedicated to illuminating the untold narratives of marginalized communities in Pakistan and employing feminist inquiry to drive social change.