“Totally Unscripted”: Postcolonial language appropriation and abrogation by Pakistani transgender activists on YouTube podcasts.

In the complex tapestry of postcolonial societies, marginalized communities, especially khwajasiras or transgender individuals, employ appropriation and abrogation strategies to dismantle and decolonize using the colonizers own language, vocabularies, and discursive practices. By drawing on the analytic framework of postcolonial appropriation and abrogation (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 1989, 2002) combined with multimodal critical discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Machin & Mayr 2012), the study analyzes how marginalized voices “appropriate” i.e. adopt and adapt dominant language and “abrogate” i.e. reject or resist imposed linguistic norms. As highly contested techniques in the postcolonial canon, appropriation and abrogation have typically been limited to literary and scholarly traditions – with caveats in a mediatized context. We analyze this tension in identity construction by Pakistani transgender activists in monolingual performances across eight YouTube video podcasts in Urdu – a language with pronounced gender distinctions. By examining the language practices and textual strategies of transgender activists, this article briefly discusses the dynamics of Pakistani YouTube podcasts, as an alternative broadcast medium, in generating knowledge, engagement, sociopolitical awareness, visibility, and fashioning a participatory arena to amplify the voices of a disenfranchised community in a postcolonial setting. Transgender activists are invited on podcasts to be interviewed regarding issues emerging in their communities. Due to lack of mainstream media representation of transgender individuals, a number of activists have also taken the initiative to establish their own channels, assuming the role of hosts to share their perspectives. We examine both invited podcast interviews with transgender activists and podcasts created by these advocates, encompassing both categories to reveal nuanced counterhegemonic discourses and representations. Using purposive sampling (Cresswell & Plano Clark, 2011), we selected four transgender Urdu-centric activists including Bindiya Rana, Alina Khan, Jannat Ali and Julie Khan based on their degree of prominence within the community. Our findings show that language becomes a site for both decolonization and resistance, as activists employ rich vernacular expressions, slang, idioms, metaphors, and colloquialisms in their discourse. By challenging the hegemony of normative English, they draw on folklore, indigenous knowledge, religious terminologies and historical allusions to negotiate their contested identities.