Yaariyan, Baithak, Gupshup: Queer Feminist Formations and the Global South

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.