Neoliberalism, Postcolonialism and Hetero-Sovereignties

2022

In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India's liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signalled the co-option and depoliticization of struggles for women's rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women's empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and non-queer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality's focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism-both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.

Antipode, 2015

Understanding contemporary sexuality and gender politics in India compels an examination of the imbrications between cities, the idea of modernity, the production of non-normative identity-based social categories, and critiques of neoliberalism. Recent developments in Indian sexuality and gender politics with respect to non-normative subjects must be understood through the critical lens that scholarship on neoliberalism offers. At the same time, an uncritical use of the theoretical apparatus of neoliberalism in the Indian context risks overdetermining the discursive space of normative urban gay elites. The conflation of gay identity with elitism, and transgender identity (when it is conflated with hijra-ness) with poverty, has characterized much of Indian public discourse on non-normative sexualities and genders. Emphasizing the vagaries of the daily lives of non-normative subjects, read through their geographical valences, is one way to disrupt this binary, while demonstrating the unique role of the urban imaginary in the discursive production of sexuality and gender based activism in India. This is important in the current moment, as “LGBTQ” rights are taken up as a foreign policy issue by governments around the world, and the newly elected Indian government promises to build 100 “world class cities” during its tenure.

2022

Of the different movements that have grabbed headlines in recent years as comprising the “global far right,” the Hindu nationalist movement in India is the numerically largest. Although neo-Nazis and Hindu nationalists may seem worlds apart, there are shared characteristics that justify their common designation as “far right.” Among these is their ideological stance on demography, gender, and sex, which have a central place in far-right ideologies worldwide. This project investigates the specific ways in which these themes manifest themselves in the Hindu nationalist movement, especially in its simultaneous and contradictory emphases on celibacy and maintaining a Hindu demographic majority in India. In doing so, the analysis draws on primary sources from foundational Hindu nationalist ideological tracts to newspapers across the span of 150 years. I argue that the Hindu nationalists’ embrace of celibacy has its roots in British colonial rule, in which a group of Indian men were deemed sexually and romantically undesirable in the eyes of the British. Reacting to this humiliation, these men – the precursors of the modern Hindu nationalists – adopted celibacy as a way to compensate, claiming to be indifferent to the world of love and sex they still craved but were denied access to. These dynamics of humiliation and compensation were subsequently sublimated into the history of the Hindu nationalist movement from the twentieth century to the twenty-first. These findings raise the question of agency in the face of the legacy of history: to what extent was the Hindu nationalists’ celibacy voluntary or chosen, and to what extent was it imposed upon them by their British colonizers? My conclusions display how gender, sex, and demography play out differently in each movement according to local histories and contexts. Understanding the Hindu nationalists’ views on these questions is therefore inseparable from a consideration of the afterlives of colonialism and empire in India.

Feminist Dissent

This article explores the convergence and contradictions between the two hegemonic projects of neoliberalism and Hindutva and the reinforcement/reconstruction of patriarchal gender relations in relation to welfare. Analysis of some key social policies and specific legal interventions show the fusion of the two in the construction of the family/nation/gender related to population regulation, governance of populations, the forging of a paternal contract, the move from welfare to financialization and the undermining of labour rights through regulatory and disciplinary labour codes. The convergence of neoliberalism and Hindutva results in a shift from rights-based entitlements to further commodification and digital financialization and the creation of a hindutvatised neoliberal subjectivity. Keywords: Neoliberal authoritarianism, Hindutva, Welfare, Gender, Labour

Feminist Dissent

The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebellions in check within its formal territory, and has for long provided the means of the production of sexual violence to dominant sections of society. In this essay I suggest that with the rise of the Hindu right to political power at key levels of states and the centre over the last three decades, a new social and political dynamic has been unleashed. Sexual violence has come to constitute public and private lives in unprecedented ways that include a radical realignment of public and private spheres as well as the production of a rejuvenated masculinist state and society seeking to resignify tradition and modernity within the framework of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy. While this force signals a political defeat for liberal and secular feminism at some level, it also opens up new opportunities to reimagine the vocabularies of freedom and rights against the new political order.

The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebellions in check within its formal territory, and has for long provided the means of the production of sexual violence to dominant sections of society. In this essay I suggest that with the rise of the Hindu right to political power at key levels of states and the centre over the last three decades, a new social and political dynamic has been unleashed. Sexual violence has come to constitute public and private lives in unprecedented ways. These include a radical realignment of public and private spheres as well as the production of a rejuvenated masculinist state and society seeking to resignify tradition and modernity within the framework of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy. While this force signals a political defeat for liberal and secular feminism at some level, it also opens up new opportunities to reimagine the vocabularies of freedom and rights against the new political order.

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.

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Gender Research (ICGR), 2019

In the past year, several important policy changes regarding gender and sexuality have occurred in India. In the month of September 2018, two pivotal rulings were made by the Supreme Court of India. (1) On September 15, 2018, the Supreme Court overturned Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), a relic of the British Penal Code that had outlawed sexual activities deemed to be “acts against the order of nature.” Previously, this had ostensibly criminalized both homosexuality and gender nonconformity. (2) On September 26, 2018, the Supreme Court decriminalized adultery by overturning Section 497 of the IPC. (3) In July 2018, the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, passed the Trafficking of Persons bill. If passed in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, and signed into law, the bill would define new offenses under Section 31 of the IPC as “aggravated forms of trafficking,” punishable with imprisonment for 10 years to life, plus fines of a minimum of 100,000 Rupees. (4) In August 2018, the Transgender Persons Bill passed in the Lok Sabha, but has not yet passed in the Rajya Sabha. This bill would introduce regulations where individuals would need to be medically screened in order to be legally recognized as a third gender person in India. In 2005, India created a new third gender designation (E), distinct from males (M) and females (F), opening the option for people to register under this designation on their passports, voting registration cards, and other legal documents. Taken together, these policy changes mark significant shifts to the ways in which the State in the Indian context regulates gender and sexuality. This paper seeks to review these current policy changes in light of the history of how sex work and gender nonconformity have been regulated in the historical periods before, during and following colonialism.

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.

Gender and Society, 2018

The Journal of Asian Studies, 1994

It is well known that mahatma gandhi felt that sexuality and desire were intimately connected to social life and politics, and that self-control translated directly into power of various kinds, both public and private. Gandhi's enigmatic genius and his popular appeal among India's masses may be attributed, at least in part, to the degree he was able to embody a powerful ideal of sexual self-control that linked his sociopolitical projects to pervasive Hindu notions of renunciation (S. Rudolph 1967). Affecting the persona of a world-renouncer, Gandhi was able to mix political, religious, and moral power, thus translating personal self-control into radical social criticism and nationalist goals. Gandhi's mass appeal was partly effected on a visceral level at which many Hindu men were able to fully appreciate the logic of celibacy as a means to psychological security, self-improvement, and national reform. Although my concern in this paper is not directly with Gandhi's n...

Social Change, 2004

Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 2022