Unveiling Precarity: Family, Recognition, and Intersex Vulnerability in Khuda Mera Bhi Hai (2016)

Abstract

Pakistani television dramas are important cultural artefacts which shape, contested and sustained the norm of mainstream gender in Pakistan. The first mainstream Pakistani serial that featured a transgender child or intersex in the main character was Khuda Mera Bhi Hai (ARY Digital, 2016) which sparked public debate on issues of family honor, social pressure and transgender and intersex rights. This paper is a scene-focused qualitative analysis that explores construction of intersex protagonist Noor as ‘visible' and ‘precarious' in this drama. Judith Butler's theory of precarity has informed the study, where precariousness is defined as a universal condition, one that all lives experience, but that precarity is also understood as a socially- and institutionally-produced condition—one that puts certain lives at a disadvantage of being more likely to suffer harm, exclusion and neglect. The paper also builds on Faris A Khan's scholarship on khwaja sira identity to position the drama as an identity in the context of the South Asian kinship and honour dynamics. A detailed examination of significant scenes, from scenes of birth and familial rejection, to scenes of exclusion from school, to the individual protection of the mother and to enquiries about marriage and adult belonging, to the drama's negotiated resolution, reveals how emotional intimacy and maternal sacrifice help to humanize Noor; the persistence of the structures of institutional neglect, moral policing, and conditional acceptance are relatively unchanged. The paper suggests that the drama's reputation for boldness is mostly about somehow rendering intersex vulnerability noticeable and emotionally obvious to the wider stream society, and not in the creation of permeant protection based on rights. By so doing, it also does its part to feminist media scholarship on South Asian televisions by providing a sustained single-text analysis based on Butler's concept of precarity, and the critical analysis of how popular drama can simultaneously question and reinscribe the lines of what constitutes a fully grievable life.