Patently Queer: Late Effects and the Sexual Economies of India

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2024

Queerness is now global. Many emerging economies of the global South are experiencing queer mobilization and sexual identity politics raising fundamental questions of citizenship and human rights on the one hand; and discourses of nationalism, cultural identity, imperialism, tradition and family-values on the other. While some researchers argue that with economic globalization in the developing world, a Western, hegemonic notion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity has been exported to traditional societies thereby destroying indigenous sexual cultures and diversities, other scholars do not consider globalization as a significant factor in global queer mobilization and sexual identity politics. This paper aims at exploring the debate around globalization and contemporary queer politics in developing world with special reference to India. After briefly tracing the history of sexual identity politics, this paper examines the process of queer mobilization in relation to emergence of HIV/AIDS epidemic and forces of neoliberal globalization. I argue that the twin-process of globalization and AIDS epidemic has significantly influenced the mobilization of queer communities, while simultaneously strengthening right wing "homophobic" discourses of heterosexist nationalism in India.

2015

This chapter analyses whether queer desire has been liberated from the postcolonial closet and, if so, how the processes of the market and law have combined to bring about the emergence and legibility of queer desire and the understandings of justice that inform such processes. I question whether these processes have produced an unequivocal victory in terms of bringing justice to highly stigmatized identities and the practices associated with them. I unpack how the effects of either a victory in the courtroom or greater visibility in and through the market result in instantiating queer desire into a linear, regulatory frameworkdesigned to cabin and confine, rather than to liberate or emancipate. Justice is equivalent to nothing more than restraining homosexuals to the borders of heteronormativity. This restraint is partly produced in and through the discourse of tolerance in law combined with the makeover of homosexuality produced in and through the consumptive market.

Studying Youth, Media and Gender in Post-Liberalization India: Focus on and beyond the 'Delhi Gang Rape', 2014

Men have always engaged in penetration and yet fucking has never been the same. The symbolic attributions, emotions and the desire-specific framings of norms and expectations of society constantly change. As capitalist logic pressures people to label themselves, produce authenticity to mark difference and market more specific identities, sexual practices increasingly become identity resources. Looking at the history of gay empowerment and social activism in Indian cities since 1991, I argue that the very project of sexual liberation is heavily influenced by capitalist change and its interests articulated in semantics melding the rhetorics of freedom, pluralism (i.e. the production of difference), (in)security and egoism. This discourse became meanwhile medialised in India, where the new urban middle-class sets the agenda for the production of norms for media society, and heavily impacted on the legal process. As I will show in this chapter both debates were crucial for processes of communication and recognition of distinct LGBTQ sexual identities.

2006

2014

2017

What happens when queers become democracy's 'favourite minority' championed by the capitalists, the liberals, the conservatives, and the leftists, all singing in the language of rights? It marks the inauguration (or culmination?) of a moment that is not bad but dangerous. "If everything is dangerous," Michel Foucault wrote, "then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy, but to a hyper-and pessimistic activism." 1 The common-sense opposite of bad is good-and the good in this situation, of all of these apparently oppositional political positions becoming strange bedfellows to turn queers into rights-bearing subjects, as I will argue, is what makes this a dangerous common-sense.

Health and Human Rights, 2004

In this era of the rise of the Hindu Right (Hindutva), sexuality is being defined and articulated by activist communities in two distinct ways-both as an identity concern and as a health concern. What are the implications and the ramifications of Hindutva for those working to protect the sexual health and human rights of vulnerable populations as weil as for those who are putting forward concerns based on sexual identity? Are the two concerns separate, or do they intersect? This article uses concrete case studies to analyze the effects that Hindutva has had on sexuality and human rights in India. It makes the point that the "queer" in the Indian context becomes the target of Hindutva's political project, thereby necessitating a rethinking of strategy. These examples clearly demonstrate a larger point: namely that, in a state that criminalizes sodomy, work on health and sexuality must address the surrounding legal and political context.

Tarikh'2021 -- Exploring Sexuality: Histories of Taboo and Transgression, 2021

The current state of the emerging queer discourse in India is finding expression through incredibly bourgeois and idealised models — the tendency to extend queer identities into the infinitude of Indian history and the almost incessant combing through of Brahmanical texts and disparate cultural examples to string together the idea of an eternal homosexual and his place in Indian history is repeated ad nauseam in popular discourse. But what does the queer identity mean? Where and when does it arise? How much historical truth is in these popular assertions? What ideas do they seek to construct about queerness and its space within the national imagination of India? In my paper, taking cues from traditions of queer Marxism, I seek to draw a world-historical understanding of the queer identity and its emergence with capitalist accumulation — investigating how exactly the commodity form transformed the idiom on which “sexuality” was understood, as recently suggested by Christopher Chitty? Traversing the historiographical debate on the origins of the modern ideas of homosexuality, I seek to establish that “queerness” and it’s correlatives been inflected by particularities of caste, class and race; and that suggestions to build an ahistorical, and idealised notion of queerness that enforces idealisation of identity, while not reflecting on materialist politics feeds into the bourgeois need for such a class blind history that enables the policing of working class queer and trans people. Such blind mythmaking also allows bourgeois queers to pink-wash regimes of control like India’s involvement in Kashmir to indoctrinate the voices of Kashmiri queer organising in a bid to use their supposed condition of persecution by their own community to legitimise imperialism. Building from this argument, I seek to articulate how organising among queer and trans people — despite the origins of our identities from the freeing of wage labor under capital — has to be anti-capitalist and built on solidarities with the working class. No true emancipation for us lies in the vampiric system of exploitation under capitalism.

Gender and Society, 2018

Qualitative Sociology, 2016

In this paper, I comparatively examine the influence of transnational advocacy on legal struggles around sex work and homosexuality in contemporary India. While transnational scholars of sexuality understand globalization as a contradictory and uneven process, there has been little attention to how this unevenness is manifest in the realm of sexual rights and law. Based on qualitative research, I show how transnational discourses on health-in particular, HIV/AIDS interventions-and on human rights interact unevenly with national discourses on sexuality. Whereas discourses regarding HIV/AIDS enable sex workers to mobilize at the national level, global anti-trafficking discourses effectively reduce sex workers to Bvictims.F or Indian LGBTQ groups, discourses regarding the HIV/AIDS epidemic and global human rights enable these groups to problematize the anti-sodomy law in national politics. However, national legal discourses effectively reduce LGBQ individuals to Bcriminals,^and legal advancements in this arena are uneven. Focusing on this unevenness produced by transnational advocacy this paper highlights how sexual rights are articulated in context of asymmetric and uneven globalizations.

Contemporary South Asia

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2024

This essay contributes to the discourse on caste and queerness by focusing on savarna acts and protagonists, regardless of their political affiliations. Following the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which until September 2018 was being used to criminalize homosexuality, litigators Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju became the faces of the verdict. While their 2020 Oxford Union address has been criticized for its erasures of working-class queer and trans histories, I argue that if only certain savarnas are seen as the emblems of Indian exceptionalism, it runs the risk of creating a category of more ethical savarnas who are then tasked with imagining alternate queer futures. The essay is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on queer acts within city-based pride parades and public events, including the public address by the lawyers. The second part examines curatorial acts around Akhil Katyal and Aditi Angiras’ The World that Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia, as well as my autoethnographic notes on the processes of writing a poem for this anthology. Through a comparative reading of these acts, I emphasize the ability of fellow savarnas to be compelling protagonists whose acts, be they celebratory speeches, protests, or editorial acts of inclusion, reveal messy negotiations with the idea of the Indian democracy and the Hindu nation-state.

Contemporary South Asia, 2018