Class, Cross-Dressed Women, and Comedic Gender-Play in Pakistani Social Films

Pakistani cinema experienced its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, when it thrived in a commercial mode and adapted a gene termed “social” as a dominant mode of making commercially viable films in the language Urdu. While the term "social" suggests that these films dealt with serious social issues, it referred to a cross-generic form that incorporated elements of romance, melodrama, song-and-dance, comedy, and sometimes action, woven into narratives about family and changing society. If cinema is considered a technology of gender and sexuality, then Pakistani cinema is known for valorizing normative notions of both, concomitant with family, home, and nation. However, within Pakistani cinema, the normative order was also ruptured by unruly desires, which manifested through visuals, aesthetics, embodiments, performances, and styles that countered and transgressed the norms, before ultimately restoring them. This article examines the appearance of cross-dressing women in social films. In several social films, women’s characters from working and lower classes often cross-dressed and masqueraded as men to fulfill narrative demands. Trade magazines catering to Pakistani film fans frequently featured photographs of actresses in cross-dressed attire, showcasing a fascination with such characters. These unruly portrayals disrupted the normative gender assumptions of bourgeois moral order, leading to a comedic play of identities and a confusion of hetero- and homo-erotic relations within the films. This article analyzes the 1974 film Aabroo ("Honor") alongside a range of other films from the 1960s up to the 1980s that featured such characters. While the narratives often aimed to restore the acceptable gender order, this article argues that the instances of cross-dressed women offered subversive pleasures. However, these pleasures were less disruptive because they had limited screen time, were associated with lower- and working-class characters, and were played for laughs.