Section 377 and the Myth of Heterosexuality

Gay and Lesbian relationships are branched off as two separate identity of homosexual behaviour and the issues relating to it has been a matter of intense debate in India and abroad in late 20th century especially, when in a post-war era the issues of identity crisis were being voiced by people through the corridors of academic study on postcolonial perspectives that employs certain critical strategies to examine literature, culture, history etc. of the former colonial countries of the empire. When the empire writes back; it results in the attempt to resurrect culture through critical inquiry and it branches off to different critical strategies like hybridity, diaspora, feminism etc .The present paper focuses on Dattani’s handling on the homophobic condition of Indian homosexuals, their dehumanizing and split personality due to social norms and law of the land, their aspirations, the existential dilemma and the author’s plea for a tolerant view on them rather than banishment from the society. At the outset the gay and lesbian movement is discussed vis-à-vis the western paradigm. Key Words: Absurdity, Existential dilemma, Gay, Lesbian, Homophobia

The paper is an attempt to understand the concept ofqueer in the Indian context. The first part of the paper tries to look into the relationship between women ~ movements and sexuality rights groups analysing what it means to be a queer in a feminist space and to be a feminist in a queer context. The second part of the paper looks at how sex work can be understood through queer theory and queer politics. For this, the paper addresses the debates on the definitions of who is a sex worker and the rights of sex workers raised by sex workers' organizations/ movements. The autobiography of a sex worker by Nalini Jameela from Kerala, south India is used as a case study to analyse the usefulness of the concept of queer. Being Queer The term queer, as a way forward from a coalition of identities-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender/sexual)-has brought in a space where there are new discussions and debates around the possibilities of seeing the interconnections between sex, gender and sexuality. However, being another 'imported' concept, there is a bit of anonymity and strangeness towards the term. This paper attempts to understand the meanings and definitions of the term/concept 'queer' in Western theoretical debates in comparison with how it is used in the Indian context. The meaning of the term queer in the Indian context is derived from the definitions and debates of the sexuality rights groups in the country on the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender/sexual communities. The relationship between sexuality rights groups, sex workers' movement and women's movements in the country shapes a different meaning to the conceptual meaning of the term. The first part of the paper tries to look into the definitions of the concept and politics of being queer in Western writings. This exercise

The Wolfenden Committee met between 1954 and 1957 to consider the laws pertaining to street prostitution and homosexual offences. As the first ever statesanctioned inquiry into homosexual vice, it was formed as a reaction to a string of high-profile buggery and importuning cases involving famous social elites in early 1950's Britain. The committee's recommendations to decriminalise consenting homosexual acts in private has often been incorporated into Whiggish 'progressive' narratives that propagate the three-year review as a landmark event in liberalising the laws relating to homosexuality. I do not dispute the significance of the Wolfenden Committee. But rather than interpreting it as a watershed for gay rights movements, this dissertation offers a more cautionary tale. By invoking Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish as a theoretical backdrop, I explore the ways in which modes of punishment changed in the Wolfenden era. I argue that there was a self-reflexive movement from the theatre of trial by smear and humiliation, to more subtle and insidious modes of control of individuals. In as such, my thesis engages with an emerging post-structural strand of historiography on the Wolfenden Committee, which considers the inquiry's creative technologies and its capacity to shape homosexual 'identity' in its own preferred image. However, there are important differences. I am keen to stress that the Wolfenden Review was not a monolithic juggernaut and a spectacular demonstration of the states power to tackle homosexual offences. I argue that extant scholarship on Wolfenden is marked by a tendency to misconstrue the very nature of power itself. It is conceived of in juridical and excessively negative terms. My thesis contends that within an atmosphere of secrecy and containment, the Wolfenden Committee worked at fragmenting power between a whole team of medico-scientific professionals. Psycho-therapeutic analysis, probation schemes, reformative regimes, all became crucial bodies in a new tactic of regulating, disciplining, and normalising homosexual offenders. Moreover, I also suggest that the agency of key actors at the committee has been neglected in recent scholarship. By investigating the testimonies of the three self-confessed homosexual men at Wolfenden, I suggest that those who stood to gain from the committee's recommendations -namely the respectable, discreet queer -helped to shape new ways of imagining homosexuality; an emerging selfhood that was subject to covert constraints, and which was to have far-reaching and ultimately ambiguous consequences.

2004

Starting with a critical interrogation of what constitutes ”lesbian and gay literature” and finding its territorializing criterion methodologically inconsistent, this essay first proposes a metacritical examination of what the emergent field really means to whomever constructs it. For a most recent textual phenomenon, in which homosexuality is represented openly but apparently for ”other” purposes, has forced this problem onto lesbian and gay critics, who are now stretched between the specialized practice of ”closet reading” and the unprecedented denial of the relevance of those homosexual representations. A particular group of this textual phenomenon, namely that of postcolonial or national allegory, is chosen for close examination because it is believed that an analytical understanding of the dominant representational mechanism should also be considered an important task for lesbian and gay criticism. In order to illustrate this point, the essay discusses in particular the figurat...

Indian Journal of Gender Studies

The Indian Supreme Court in the Navtej Singh Johar vs Union of India judgement (6th September 2018), decriminalized homosexuality. However, the space cleared by the legal judgement cannot be immediately availed of by those affected by it because legally determined/defined space doesn’t necessarily become social space. This essay looks at the formation of this social space and the perception of homosexuality in civil society. It will examine the impediments of communication that homosexuals encounter in the heteronormative world, and the ensuing misunderstandings regarding homosexuality. It argues that a proper medium is necessary to provide communication in a social space that would then treat homosexuality as ‘normal’. I argue that Mahesh Dattani’s plays enable the imagination and the construction of such an accepting civil society.

Queerness or rather queer sexuality in India has always been the favourite child of debate and discussions. Queer identity in India has always suffered through the dilemma of to be or not to be. As Dasgupta puts it, " Identities are complicated to begin with and become more complicated when relating them to nation and sexuality ". Given the diversity of India in terms of not only culture but ethnicity as well, Indian sexual identities are the product of " Mulipicitous effects and perceptions of tradition, modernity, colonization and globalization " (Dasgupta, 2011) that are more often in conflict with each other than in a harmonious synthesis. The main argument of this paper is to trace a lineage of queerness in India both in terms of its representation in literature by analyzing The Editor (1893) and The Housewife (1891) by Rabindranath Tagore; Lihaaf (1941) by Ismat Chugtai; and R. Raja Rao's The Boyfriend (2003), and how it prevailed in reality or the societal perception of the same. Providing a literature review by building a bridge in between the ancient and the contemporary India, the paper attempts to trace the missing links of when and how queerness went behind the curtains only to reappear in front of a more complicated, confused and probably a more rigid audience.

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.

Africa 91(3): 398-417

In modern social thinking, norms are generally thought of in opposition to a space of freedom that is more or less curtailed by and through processes of normalization. ‘Transgression’ thereby becomes an implicit or explicit act of resistance against the norm. This is particularly clear in Western Queer Theory, where a political and analytical investment in anti-normativity has – paradoxically – become a field-defining norm. Yet such strong anti-normativity can become a liability when trying to do justice to actually existing queer dynamics in past and present African realities. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork among sexually dissident young men who call themselves ‘fioto’ in urban Democratic Republic of Congo, this article shifts the always already oppositional relationship between queerness and normativity – not by arguing that queer is normal too or by showing that queer lives produce their own norms alongside heteronorma- tivity, but by suggesting that queerness is a potential of normativity, rather than an opposition to it. It specifically thinks with two groups of fioto friends in Kisangani to show how and why norms generated their own queerness – as something that was already there as an inherent dimension of their dynamism and multiplicity.