Gustakh is a queer memoir, an archive of my relationships, with my significant other, my body, land and identity, offering a feminist introspection of how I maneuver in a postcolonial, heteropatriarchal, and neoliberal setting. Gustakh is an attempt to re-present love outside the heterosexual imagination through embodied experience, and a radical engagement with the politics of sexual identity.

 

Exhausted from the representations of and the discourses around queer bodies whose past is being continually erased, and whose present has collapsed into clichés, Gustakh is a work of autotheory to explore and produce new ways of seeing and imagining queer lives in the global south, moving away from the unquestioned hegemony of cisheteropatriarchy that refuses to reflect on its own practice, through feminist retrospection, to tell my story truly on my own terms, as a critique of capitalistic failure to acknowledge and accommodate queer people in their living realities.

 

My desire with Gustakh is to drift away from the exhausted, capitalized, commodified modes of storytelling. I created this text for queer sociality, turning the book from an object into an encounter. It only exists in singularity; you cannot buy it from any bookstore in the world. To read it, you must demand it from me, and that allows us to seek new truths that could only emerge in the absence of the oppressor(s). 

 

This work is not available for digital viewing.