ABSTRACT

In this short essay, I offer an alternative ontology and epistemology of the term “lesbian” vis-à-vis my relationship with my brown Pakistani mother. I bring into this reading a number of variables ranging from the geographic, historical, biopolitical, and economic to the embodied, affective, esthetic, and immaterial. In recounting formative moments of my childhood – Quranic pedagogy alongside classical voice, singing and dance lessons – I re-read the spaces that produce homosociality and homoerotics as sites of brown maternal knowledges and feminist transgressions. This essay uses memory to examine the different ways that lesbian, both as a term and a mode of being, is not necessarily attached to sexual identity and practices. Analyzing how desire and secrecy are mediated by global capital, postcolonial respectability, nation, and compulsory heterosexuality, brown erotics and sacred notes offers a close look into the nuanced relationality between a brown mother and brown daughter, and takes seriously questions of what constitutes living a feminist life, and being and becoming a lesbian.

摘要

在这篇短文中，我针对我与棕色巴基斯坦母亲的关系，提供了“女同性恋”一词的另一种本体论和认识论。我在阅读中引入了许多变量，从地理、历史、生物政治和经济到具体化、情感化、审美化和非物质化。在讲述我童年的形成时刻——古兰经教学法与古典声音、歌唱和舞蹈课一起——我重新阅读了产生同性恋和同性恋的空间，作为棕色母性知识和女权主义违法行为的场所。这篇文章使用记忆来检查女同性恋的不同方式，无论是作为一个术语还是一种存在方式，都不一定与性身份和行为相关联。分析欲望和秘密如何由全球资本、后殖民体面、国家和强制性异性恋、棕色情色和神圣笔记调节，提供了对棕色母亲和棕色女儿之间微妙关系的仔细研究，并严肃地看待什么构成了生活女权主义生活，以及成为和成为女同性恋者。