Desi butch in the kitchen: The politics of queer masculinity from South Asia

• Published in: Journal of lesbian studies pp. 1 - 14
• Main Author: Minai, Naveen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England 01.09.2025
• Subjects: postcolonial; Masculinity; queer; Pakistani; Food
• ISSN: 1089-4160; 1540-3548; 1540-3548
• DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2025.2549226

Cooking is central to my understanding of desi butch as a form of Pakistani queer masculinity. A part of me is reluctant to write about this understanding because cooking (like so many other things and practices) immediately activates feelings, attachments, and meanings-a practice through which romances of home and family are conjured, pleasure is shared, cultures are inherited, defiance is crafted, labor is devalued, pedagogy is mobilized, sex becomes a metaphor, and global sinews of war and trade are glossed. Yet I write anyway, with and against these meanings (and with great restraint against the delicious puns noted outside the margins) because, well-I can't resist food. In this autotheoretical essay, I take up cooking as a site from which to think about desi butch as a particular formation within the erotic and political cartographies mapped by 'lesbian' and 'South Asia.' Situating cooking at the nexus of Pakistani, queer, and masculinity, I think about class and ethnic politics of livable spaces across postcolonial and settler colonial regimes, and the messy, sticky relationship between the 'global' and the vernacular,' to trouble familiar metrics of the authentication of 'South Asian' and 'lesbian.' I ask after cooking as queer kin-making rather than familial inheritance through imaginaries which are not diasporic but are, nonetheless, marked by transnational mobility, afforded by class and accent. Thickening the plot (like a stew), I think of what cooking as labor in multiple modes means for butch as a form of queer masculinity, routed through the class politics of Pakistan. I write from desi butch, a term which situates desi (Urdu for land and people simultaneously) and butch (most often understood as female masculinity among queer women, bordering into trans). Desi butch is a sexual-spatial analytic which I use to examine sexuality, class, and race as embodied and embedded logics of difference across spaces, borders, and colonial formations. Desi butch allows me to think about masculinity at the intersection of 'lesbian' and 'South Asia.' I use autotheory because desi butch is a term which I use to name how the 'I' on this page becomes a subject across transnational regimes of capital, empire, and war-complex, vast socio-cultural and politico-economic processes including multiple empires, postcolonial damages and dreams, different routes of migration, and accented hierarchies of class. I use cooking as a site for thinking about the infrastructural and the intimate, and the infrastructural the intimate, where complicated and dense meanings of labor, desire, care, and compulsion accumulate.