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Post-Script
‘Queer’ has become a repository of many things over time. To be queer is an identity; to live a queer life is embodiment; to do queer things is action, doing something queerly/queering something are pro cesses. For each use of the word ‘queer’, we can ask – what does it mean to be queer, to live a queer life, to do queer things, to do some thing queerly, to queer something? More importantly, perhaps, who is queer and who is not, is there a blueprint of a queer life, what is a queer thing and what is not, is there a benchmark beyond which something is queered? And perhaps the most difficult, do all queer subjects live a queer life? Who or what decides the parameters of queer ness, the spectrum on which one subject is ‘more queer’ than another? It is somewhere amid these questions that a politics of queerness (as opposed to a queered politics) reveals itself, and these questions are kept open as I attempt to map queer politics and queer subjectivity in this book.
Queerness is dynamic, it changes forms and articulations upon each utterance; and yet, queerness is also stable, marked in difference to heterosexuality and, sometimes, heteronormativity (Butler, 1990; Sedgwick, 1990; Halberstam, 1998). Like the preface that pre-deter mines entry into a text, and a text that simultaneously upholds and annuls the preface (Spivak, 1976/2002), queerness remains fixed at the level of its signification as that which is different from heterosexuality and/or binary genders, but is flexible in how that difference is inter preted and per formed in everyday life. Each utterance of queerness has the potential to reveal the limits of heterosexuality and binary genders, but it is not necessary that all acts, moments, or performances of queerness will actualize that potential. In such an understanding of queerness as embodiment/way of life/orientation/political strategy (Ahmed, 2006), where it represents an incommensurate difference from heterosexuality and conventional gender norms, there is a segregation of queer subjects as political or apolitical that, if explored, comes close to answering some of the questions asked above.
‘Queer’ is often also (only) about sexuality and the gender binary. It is, for the most part, defined based on who you are or are not attracted to, have sex with or do not, and hinged on where you consider your self to be on the gender spectrum that exists between conventional masculinity and conventional femininity. This limits the possibilities of manoeuvring trans narratives beyond masculinity and femininity and restricts them to either upholding or opposing binary gender. It also reduces sexuality to the sexual act, and this stratification of sexual ities reduces their field of signification and leaves other manifestations of sexuality outside its discourses. These discourses of sexuality are also largely determined by a history of sexuality that emerges in Western contexts (Foucault, 1978), and are generative of a kind of sexual subject that is located in those cultures. Here, sexuality is a domain of truth and the deployment of power, defining the know ledge of queerness, its nature, and its limits.
The politics of queerness that emerge in such contexts, which determine what will fall within the field of queer politics and outside it, and help differentiate between who comes to be seen as a queer subject and to what degree, do so by producing certain discourses of queer sexuality at the cost of erasing others. Queerness becomes an isolated identity and helps invisibilize power imbalances between queer sub jects (Upadhyay & Ravecca, 2017). After all, “[i]dentity is what we bequeath, not what we inherit, what we invent, not what we remem ber” (Darwish, 2009, p. 156). It is not surprising that a radical critique of heterosexuality and the gender binary emerges alongside a critique of queer identity politics from spaces that are attuned to the segregations of race, colour, and class (Haritaworn, 2017). To universal ize queer subjectivity is to erase narratives of queer people of colour and un-see class differences within queer subjects; it is to promote the unrealistic promise of solidarity that queer identity politics cannot deliver while refusing the possibility of racist and capitalist supremacy in such politics (Judge, 2018). The seduction of pinkwashing and the effective ness of homonationalism demonstrate the complicity of queer politics in various parts of the world with nationalist, colonial, and neoliberal agendas (Puar, 2017).
It seems that queer politics in India, insofar as it sees queerness as insulated and restricted to sexual identity, also carries these dangers, and often actualizes violence against those subjected to its politics. Perhaps the Indian State’s assimilationist strategies can already be seen in the aftereffects of the Rights of Transgender Persons Bill of 2014 and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2016, which have sparked debates within transgender communities about which subjects classify as trans gender and the processes behind such classi fication. In India, where male-to-female transgender visibility and collectivization far outstrips any articulations by female-to-male transgender subjects, within queer spaces and outside them, these bills have further sharpened the divide between the two groups, making female-to-male transgen der subjects feel even more oppressed and ostracized (Sutanuka, Shraddha, & Poushali, 2014). However, perhaps because of the State’s reticence to dispense with Section 377, homo nationalism has not yet actualized its potential in queer politics in India and pinkwashing remains removed from its horizons, even as its threat looms large. Strong critiques of capitalism from within queer spaces ensure that most Pride marches in India remain free from corporate funding, and an inter sectional approach that links caste and queerness is germinating. Because both caste and queerness are about who we can and cannot touch, intimately, privately and publicly, their inter section provides a produc tive possibility of imagining queer politics as contestation and resistance.
As such, Queer Politics is India is all these things and more. It imagines queer politics as operating “both with and against circuits of power and politics … as an embodiment of both discipline and its defiance” (Judge, 2018, p. 7), as a space of complicity and critique, and positions itself at the border-zones, searching along its interstices for that which has been lost and that which can be found. In this book, I have tried to preserve a strong sense of all these contestations while narrating one story of queer politics in India among many. The next three chapters are influenced by my work with three groups that work on lesbian, bisexual, and transmen rights – Sappho for Equality in Kolkata, LABIA in Mumbai, and LesBit in Bengaluru, my experiences of queer spaces in New Delhi, and on dialogues that emerged in national consultations organized by LABIA in 2015 and Sappho for Equality in 2017. This is supplemented by research that emerges from and about queer politics in India (Caleri, 1999; Fernandez, 2002; Narrain & Bhan, 2005; Basu, 2006; Sappho for Equality, 2010, 2011; LABIA, 2013; Katyal, 2016; khanna, 2016).
Even though the book tries to capture queer politics in India, it noticeably misses articulations of queerness from Southern and Northeastern India, and does not place transgender subjects in the history of such politics. To some extent, both absences are about the necessary limits of the scope of this book, and largely based on the link between queerness and culture. Different parts of India have different arti culations of queerness that rely on geographically specific cultural histories. Similarly, a larger game is at play with respect to transgender subjectiv ities in India that goes beyond gender or sexuality; the contemporary transgender subject in India finds itself caught between a fading voice of colonialism from the past and the strong pull of globalization in the present. Moreover, no documentation of queer politics in India can be complete; the multiplicity of queer voices and segregations between queer subjects ensure that any mapping of queer politics in India remains one among many queer scripts.
When Swapna and Sucheta Mondal were found dead on 21 February 2011, on the outskirts of Sonachura, in Nandigram, West Bengal, their death became a part of this segregated and many-tongued queer politics. They had ingested pesticide, and died embracing each other. Their bodies were not claimed by their families, and they were cremated close to Nandigram police station one week later. A fact-finding team from Sappho for Equality went to Sonachura on 26 February 2011, and again nine months later. From their investigations emerged a fact-finding report, a preliminary document that was circulated among other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (henceforth, LGBTQ) groups and organizations across India. In 2013, Swapna’s and Sucheta’s deaths, and Swapna’s suicide letter, became part of the documentary titled Ebong Bewarish (… And the Unclaimed), produced by Sappho for Equality.
Since their death comes to us as a lesbian suicide, claimed by queer activists to demonstrate how queer lives are continuously unclaimed, the question that formed the roots of this book was whether queer politics in India would have made space for Swapna and Sucheta had they been alive, and what the place of their subjectivities would have been in the topology of such politics. This necessitated a mapping of queer politics in India on the one hand, and an attempt to understand Swapna and Sucheta’s place as queer subjects among other queer subjects affecting and affected by such politics on the other hand. This divided path moved this book in apposite directions. The circuitous routes it takes, and the disciplines it rests on and wrests from are a way to demonstrate how Swapna and Sucheta were absent from queer politics in India, even as this politics lay its claim on them after their death. This absence is not an absolute one, but one that is grounded in processes that misrepresent Swapna and Sucheta as lesbian subjects. Swapna and Sucheta’s place in queer politics in India seems to be a metonymized one, where they are subjected to – but not agential subjects of – such politics.
It is the absent acknowledgement of their difference from other queer subjects who author queer politics and the forgetting of their subjectivities when imagining a queer subject that pushed the central thesis of this work Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects who lie at the “limits of truth” (Derrida, 1993), insofar as truth is determined by knowledge structures that put such subjects outside their borders. The last two chapters are therefore about thinking through why Swapna and Sucheta are sexual subaltern subjects, what it may mean to be such a subject, and what it might demonstrate about queer politics in India. The sexual subaltern subject may serve as a reminder to – and remainder of – a queer politics in India that is at risk of forgetting the problems of increasingly insular and identitarian politics that is driven towards inclusive citizenship despite its psychic and political costs.
In many ways, this book is a reconstructive project, piecing together narratives, stories, and histories to produce a coarse, interdisciplinary text that tries to find sexual subaltern subjects at its interstices. My own framework with which to understand sexuality has shifted from psychiatry and mainstream psychology, to psychoanalysis, critical psy chology, and feminist and queer theories in a way that tries to bring together psychoanalytic and political theorizations of subjectivity. This shift in perspectives also determines the nature of this work.
For me, psychiatry and psychology, with their history of characterizing queerness as abnormality, perversion, and deviance (Davidson, 2001; Foucault, 2003; Tosh, 2015), and psychoanalysis, standing divided on whether to celebrate the ‘polymorphous perversities’ that Freud (1905) theorized as intrinsic to psychoanalytic subjectivity, were not fully able to provide non-pathological frameworks with which we could understand queer sexuality. Even though psychoanalysis could demonstrate how everyday life was replete with sexual motivations, which became a fertile ground on which to build an understanding of human subjectivity (Parker, 2011), critiques of some branches of psychoanalytic theory and practice demonstrated how they interiorized the subject by reinforcing a strong division between what is inside the subject (psyche) and what is outside the subject (society).
The task of critical psychology, then, could be seen to be two-fold – first, to make visible and critique the frameworks of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis that intend to normalize the subject in the name and norm of cure, and, second, to discover and build effective models of psychological care that can see the individual subject as not only within the boundaries of interiority and as patients who needed to be cured of pathologies that were necessarily internal, but as persons (often belonging to communities) whose symptoms were responses to society and culture. In other words, the task is to reveal the workings of power within circuits of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis, which we now know are linked to global capital and economies that sustain relations of colonization (Mills, 2014). The added challenge of critical psychology in India, with its history of colonialism, is to provide a robust model of psychotherapy and subjectivity that is emblematic of critical cultures and its resultant subjectivities (Siddiqui, 2016). It is to think through the subject as an extimate one, to shift from a model of interiority to a frame of exteriority.
This shift to critical psychology, for me, required a necessary turn to queer and feminist theories, which have historically critiqued psy chiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis as reinforcing patriarchal and heterosexual structures (Beauvoir, 1949/2011; Mitchell, 1974; Butler, 1990; Chesler, 2005), claiming that the grounds of these knowledge systems are stacked against queer subjects (Sedgwick, 1990; Rubin, 2011). These critiques, attuned to the ways in which sexuality is dis cursively interiorized and localized in the subject, attempt to move towards the production of a sexual self that cannot remain within the bounds of the psyche, but is influenced by society, culture, and political economy (Oliviera, Costa, & Carniero, 2014).
It is this history that is at work in the way that this research is framed, where the politics of the sexual and sexuality are not necessarily the same, and where the task is to think through hitherto given discourses of what sexuality means, and what it can mean in the future. As such, this book is also an attempt to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and politics while remaining aware that both disciplines need to be rethought in order to be brought to a dialogue. In both psychoanalysis and political theory, there is a sustained theorization of the subject – both schools of thought are concerned with resistance and transform ation. However, psychoanalytic resistance is not the same as political resistance, and both disciplines have distinct but potentially overlapping ideas of transformation. Further, as this book is about sexual subaltern subjects, it hopes to take an extra step towards placing such subjects at the centre of psychoanalysis and politics as these disciplines are rethought, creating knowledges and standpoints that are perhaps necessarily fragmented, built on shifting sands that move towards opening queer politics to different registers of queerness, and other queered languages of differance.
My life … My life was once very beautiful, like a flower.
When I was growing up, I used to think about nothing except
studying; studying was everything for my life. To study all the
time was something I liked. I used to compete with everyone in
studies, they all tried to defeat me, but nobody managed to do
so. Since I was very young, I used to study under my
grandmother – until class 4. After that, all the years that I have
studied have been without tuition classes – I studied by myself.
It used to be very difficult, without anyone’s help … every so
often I felt I won’t study. But I couldn’t stop studying. When
I used to study, there was a lot of poverty at home. We could
not gather enough food for ourselves. Baba and Ma used to fish
in the river … Whatever fish they caught and sold that money
was used to buy rice. In this meager way we managed our
expenses. Sometimes I would go to catch fish with Baba and
Ma. Whatever money I would get, I used to keep with myself.
I used to save that money. With that saved money, I would buy
books, notebooks; I would satisfy my needs. I would not burden
my father. This was because to meet the needs of five brothers
and sisters was not possible for Baba. He used to buy good books
for my elder sisters, but never managed to send them for tuition
classes. Neither my brothers. All five of us have struggled hard to
study. Now we are grown up. Since we were young, me and my
elder sisters, Ma, all of us have worn others’ clothes and spent
our days. Even then we were at peace … there was happiness.
We had everything. I had a strong wish to go very far in my
studies, but my luck is bad, that is why I have not managed to
study so far.
Swapna’s letter, page 1.
Translation mine
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Fragmentary Fields
A map of queer politics in India
Any mapping of a movement is a necessarily difficult task, perhaps one that can only present a history of moments or events that have been contingently fixed during its process. In reality, it seems that boundaries and alliances are always shifting, and there are multiple voices that support and contradict one another that emerge from within movements, giving them a dynamic character. And yet, there is a s...
