Degree

BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)

Faculty / School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Department

Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts

Date of Award

Spring 2025

Date of Submission

2025-07-30

Advisor

Palvashay Sethi, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences

Committee

Ramsha Siddiqui, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences

Project Type

SSLA Culminating Experience

Access Type

Restricted Access

Keywords

film studies, chronopolitics, queer futures, affect, pakistani cinema

Abstract

This thesis moves through 1970s Pakistani Urdu cinema, lingering in the bourgeois household—bedrooms, kitchens, drawing rooms—as a space where gender, class, and desire are constantly staged, disciplined, and yet occasionally undone. These films arrived in my life as carriers of memory, affect, and care: gestures, repetitions, and haunted interiors that connected generations, that hovered between pedagogy and pleasure. Here, the house is never inert; it is thick with rules, but also porous, a moral and spatial architecture where bodies are coded, desire circulates sideways, and queer traces accumulate in the interstices.

Through close readings of Aabroo (1974), Sharafat (1974), Naukar (1975), and Aina (1977), I follow moments of masquerade, domestic labor, erotic proximity, and classed misrecognition—what I call chronotopic pause and chronotopic torsion—where narrative time stutters, heteronormative forward motion bends, and possibility gathers in small, sometimes imperceptible folds. Drawing on queer, film, and urban studies scholarship, this project engages with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope alongside Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of chrononormativity and temporal drag to imagine cinematic space as archival, affective, and queer: a repository where memory, power, and desire refract, multiply, and unsettle expectation. Subsequently, the bourgeois house, in these films, is less a container of resolved morality than a site of tension, excess, and lateral desire. Bodies that masquerade, linger, or refuse destabilize hierarchy, temporal logic, and moral legibility. By attending to these frictions, this thesis offers a queer historiography of Pakistani cinema. In doing so, it asks what it might feel like to move through cinematic space and time not forward, but alongside, around, and in the folds of possibility.

Pages

94

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