Student Number

29816

Degree

Master of Science in Development Studies

School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Date of Submission

Spring 5-4-2026

Supervisor

Dr. Ahmad Azhar, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts

Committee Member 1

Dr. Ahmad Azhar

Committee Member 2

Dr. Zoya Sameen, External Examiner, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Arts & Sciences Aga Khan University, Karachi

Committee Member 3

Dr. Arslan Waheed, Program Director, Graduate Programs SSLA, Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi

Keywords

Biopolitics, Subalternity, Necropolitics, Gender Nonconformity, Infrastructural Exclusion, Legal Recognition

Abstract

This research interrogates the paradox of legal recognition for transgender community in Karachi in the aftermath of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2018. While the Act promises rights to education, healthcare, and housing, this research reveals how legal inclusion often reinforces bureaucratic regulation rather than dismantling structural marginality. Drawing on 24 in-depth interviews with trans, khwajasira, non-binary, and intersex individuals—as well as educators, healthcare professionals, and a landlord—this study employs a qualitative, feminist, and ethnographic methodology, supplemented by fieldwork at the 2024 Sindh Moorat March. Theoretically anchored in biopolitics and subalternity, the analysis foregrounds how state institutions demand legibility, discipline, and respectability from gender nonconforming subjects while simultaneously withholding access to care and space. Themes of diagnostic violence, pedagogical erasure, spatial exclusion, and protest-based epistemologies are examined to highlight how the 2018 Act functions as an apparatus of biopolitical sorting. Rather than narrating trans life through frameworks of trauma or legal lack, the study foregrounds insurgent practices of survival, critique, and refusal. It concludes by arguing that recognition without redistribution merely recalibrates exclusion—and that trans life must be understood not through inclusion, but through its capacity to exceed and reimagine the state’s normative order.

Submission Type

Thesis

Document Type

Restricted Access

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