Pakistani transgender activists on Instagram: The politics of postcolonial language appropriation and abrogation

Abstract

This study examines marginalized communities in postcolonial states, in particular transgender people, and attempts to understand the tension between globalized or transnational ‘queer’ language and local vernacular ‘Indigenous’ language. Drawing upon postcolonial concepts of appropriation and abrogation – typically only limited to the ‘literary studies’ tradition – this article analyses how colonial aesthetics are articulated and rejected on social media by multilingual transgender activists in the Pakistani context. By using the case study of the Indigenous khwajasira – Pakistan’s transgender community – we analyse 600 social media posts from public Instagram accounts of four activists including Mehrub Moiz Awan, Shahzadi Rai, Hina Baloch and Nayyab Ali. Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis combined with the theoretical framework of postcolonial appropriation and abrogation, we find that khwajasira activists deploy innovative linguistic and textual strategies such as code-switching, codemixing, metonymy, interlanguage and neologisms to negotiate their hybrid identities. We argue that contestation between ‘the global’ and ‘the vernacular’ is manifested through code-switching from one language to the other or between formal and informal registers, creating culture-specific neologisms or lexical items, colloquialisms, metaphors and slang. Through deploying visual modality, iconic global symbols, ‘trans’ colours, emojis and clothing artefacts, khwajasiras create new meanings on social media. Lastly, this study critically shows that transgender activists challenge and co-opt normative conventions as they draw on the past, Indigenous knowledge(s), spirituality, religious terminologies and historical allusions in their linguistic repertories to resist and dismantle dominant power relations.

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