Fixed Possibilities

Abstract

Agar's Tale is a nineteenth-century Urdu qissah that recounts the adventures of Agar, a prince who was born as a girl. From a modern queer/trans liberatory standpoint, the pervasive queerness of this story appears warrant a celebratory reading. However, this reading of Agar's Tale takes a deidealized approach based on the work of Kadji Amin. It demonstrates how transmisogyny and the reproductive imperative work in the tale to contain Agar's dangerous fluid masculinity. The reading fixes on the workings of “fixing” (sābit honā) in the qissah and shows how Agar is reduced to a singular gender, and spatially contained in the tale. Finally, the chapter argues that while a thoroughly deidealized reading is necessary to begin with, the counterfactual mode of the tale opens it up to be grasped as an ancestral representation for queer and trans people in the present.