Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies

Katherine O'Donnell, Noreen Giffney, Katherine O'Donnell, Noreen Giffney

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781560236504
• eBook ISBN: 9781317992301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An enlightening, entertaining look at what the term "lesbian" really means—and what it means to be a lesbian Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies focuses on the field's institutionalization into the humanities and social sciences, examining how the term "lesbian" is used in activist, community, and cultural contexts, and how its use impacts the lives of women who have chosen it as an identity. The book's contributors include many of the world's foremost experts in lesbian studies, as well as scholars whose primary research is in bisexuality, transsexuality and transgender, intersex, and queer theory. The innovative essays touch on five individual themes—"Genealogies, " "Readings, " "Theories, " "Identities, " and "Locations"—as they explore the past, present, and future of lesbian studies. Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies places the term "lesbian" at the center of analysis, whether as a concept, a category, an identity, a political position, or an object choice. The book's cutting-edge essays examine the various meanings of "lesbian;" the risks taken by women who live and/or act, write, and speak as lesbians; current genealogical myths; and the lives, studies, and activism of lesbians who represent a range of geographical and historical contexts. The book presents research produced outside the United States/United Kingdom, two places which tend to dominate the field, and essays that focus on areas, such as medieval studies, that are often ignored in theoretical discussions. Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies considers these questions:

• does the term "lesbian" still have relevance as an identity descriptor or political position?
  
• who does "lesbian" include and/or exclude?
  
• how does intersectional thinking impact the way we formulate lesbian identities?
  
• are we now "post-lesbian?"
  
• what, if anything, defines the field of lesbian studies?
  
• what is the current state of the field?
  
• what is the possible future of the field?
  
• what current topics should be most important to practitioners?
  
• how is work that falls under the "lesbian studies" umbrella connected to efforts in the areas of feminism, LGBT, intersex, and queer straight studies?
  
• and many more

Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies is an enlightening, entertaining, and essential read for academics and students working in all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, and for the lesbian/queer population, in general.

SECTION V

LOCATIONS: TRANSLATING ‘LESBIAN’

The future of Lesbian Studies has to listen to my mother’s voice, to the silent scream and making of revolution of my sisters in Latin America, to the poverty and strength of my sisters in Africa. If there is a future for Lesbian Studies this has to be full of the songs, words and stories of my sisters in the Middle East, Asia and Australasia. It is not enough to inhabit a virtual village of Lesbians somewhere in the colourful spatial wires of the Internet; the future of Lesbian Studies must also come down to earth and create a place like Zami’s Carriacou where ‘women work together as friends and lovers,’ a place where I can smell and taste the sweat, the juices, the tears and the laughter of the ‘other.’ If there is going to be any future in Lesbian Studies, our European and North American sisters, framed by centuries of colonial and capitalist past and present, must wake up and organize conferences where the proportion of Black and white women is similar both in presence and in active participation. Maybe the future of Lesbian Studies needs my Mixed-Race Latina and Black Lesbian sisters to begin to accept invitations to attend these conferences and thus influence what issues and actions are to be put in the agenda and programmes. The future of Lesbian Studies must have a vision, artists, allies, intellectuals and activists.

–Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes

Lesbian Studies and Activism in India

Ruth Vanita

Ruth Vanita is Professor of Liberal Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Montana. She is the author of Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (1996); co-author of Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000); and editor of Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (2001) among others. Her book, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West appeared in 2005 and was published by Palgrave Macmillan, New York, and Penguin, India.

Address correspondence to: Professor Ruth Vanita, Liberal Studies Faculty, The University of Montana, 32 Campus Drive, Missoula, MT 59812, USA (E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]).

SUMMARY. This essay surveys public debates and writings about lesbianism and the history of activism around lesbian issues in twentieth-century India. Weddings between women and joint suicides by female couples over the last twenty-five years are among the under-researched, but increasingly reported, phenomena that suggest future directions that activism and the study of lesbianism in India may take. doi: 10.1300/J155vlln03_07 [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved]

KEYWORDS. India, lesbians, same-sex weddings and suicides, LGBT movements, women’s movements, feminist academics, Fire, Suniti Namjoshi

The experience and representation of lesbianism in India have much in common with those in the West, but also have some distinctly different dimensions. One example of a different manifestation is the phenomenon of same-sex couple suicide (as distinct from individual suicide). The first reported case occurred in June 1980, when Mallika, aged 20, and Lalithambika, aged 17, attempted suicide in Kerala. In her suicide note, Lalithambika wrote, “I cannot part with Mallika. Bury us together” (Lenous, 1980: 7). Since then, similar reports have appeared from all over India, as well as reports of women marrying each other, some with family support and by traditional rites, others despite family hostility. Almost all the couples are female, lower middle-class, young, not primarily English-speaking, with some education, but no contact with any lesbian or women’s organizations. Some of the couples attempt unsuccessfully to obtain state endorsement of their weddings.

Such phenomena suggest some directions that the study of lesbianism in India might take. My book, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West (2005), examines Indie literary, legal, religious, political and social traditions of love, marriage, kinship, gender and death, to which these couples appeal when they make public statements of their commitment through a wedding or a suicide.

DEBATES ON LESBIANISM

In Same-Sex Love in India (2000, 2002), a collection of translations from texts in fifteen Indian languages, written over more than 2,000 years, Saleem Kidwai and I demonstrated that female-female and male-male sexual relations have been reflected on and debated in many different generic contexts in India. Along with other scholars, we argue that social and textual constructions of homosexuality as a sexual preference and an identity category have been going on in India for about two millennia, and Michel Foucault and his followers are wrong to claim that these constructions began in nineteenth-century Euro-America (xx–xxi, 24–28, 46–54, 107–125, 220–228).¹ Following colonial rule and nationalist attempts to reform Indie practices and texts in conformity with Victorian ideals, such debates about same-sex relations and terms used for them were stifled or went underground. Pre-Modern Indian texts, authored by men, contain some amazing representations of female-female amorous relations, for example, several fourteenth-century devotional texts tell the story of two women whose love-making, blessed by the Gods, results in one of them giving birth to a heroic child, and some early nineteenth-century texts describe unions between women, some of which were ritually formalized (Vanita, 2005; 2004).

The first public twentieth-century debate on female homosexuality occurred when Ismat Chughtai’s Urdu short story, Lihaf (Quilt), was prosecuted for obscenity in 1942; this debate was largely confined to the press and literary forums. The second major debate took place in 1998 when right-wing extremists attacked theaters showing Deepa Mehta’s film, Fire. This debate raged in the national and international media and on Indian streets for several months. While many women’s organizations and human rights organizations defended the filmmaker’s right to freedom of expression, some of them were unwilling to accept lesbianism as a women’s rights issue (Patel, 2001; Bachmann, 2001). The controversy put the issue of lesbianism squarely on the political agenda, as national dailies printed photos of women holding placards that read, “Lesbianism is part of our heritage.” The controversy also elicited important analyses by Indian lesbian academics (Ghosh, 1999; Kapur, 1999). Lesbian activism, which emerged in India in the early 1980s and grew in the 1990s, became widely visible through the Fire debate.

Before this emergence, the writings of Suniti Namjoshi (born 1941) constituted a lone voice in the wilderness. Her oeuvre constitutes a decades-long reflection on multiple dimensions of being lesbian and Indian. Writing in a variety of genres, such as poetry, fiction, fable, non-fiction, children’s literature and biomythography, she explores the intersections of lesbianism with nationality, race, gender, class, caste, motherhood, age and species (Vanita, 2000; Vijayasree, 2000).

Despite its innovative brilliance and its devoted fan following across the world, including in India, Namjoshi’s work has not received the attention it deserves, even though Indian writing in English is now internationally renowned. This is largely because of the lesbian content of her work. As a result of this neglect, Indian women’s and lesbian movements have yet to take cognizance of her irreplaceable contribution to the idea of what it means to be an Indian lesbian (Dasgupta, 2001).

Although there have been in the past and still are words to refer to lesbians in Indian languages, these words are now not widely circulated.² The word, ‘lesbian,’ has been used in Hindi texts throughout the Twentieth Century and continues to be widely used in the Indian press and media, both in English and other languages. Some academics and activists object to the use of identity terms, such as ‘gay’ with reference to non-Western societies, claiming that such usage is neo-colonial or imperialist. Interestingly, ‘lesbian’ has not been objected to as much, probably because lesbians are less visible, lesbian organizations do not receive as much foreign and governmental funding as organizations serving gay and bisexual men do, in the wake of the AIDS crisis, and it is therefore less urgent for activists to reconstruct lesbians in ways that would be more attractive to funders.

In my view, such objections are in part constructed by homophobia, because the same theorists seem to be untroubled about using terms and concepts like ‘family,’ ‘nation,’ ‘child,’ ‘law,’ ‘woman’ or ‘man,’ when discussing non-Western societies, where the other-language approximates of these English words have substantially different meanings. If one were serious about using only indigenous terms, one would have to write about non-English texts entirely in their own languages, which is not feasible. English has now been spoken and written in India for two centuries, and there are more English speakers in India than in Canada and Australia put together.

A few Indian academics also use the term ‘queer’ in addition to ‘lesbian.’ Most Indian lesbian groups and activists identify as lesbian, even if they also use the term ‘queer.’ Most English-speaking Indians still understand and use the word ‘queer’ to mean ‘strange’ or ‘odd,’ hence ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ are more easily understood in the mainstream media.

LESBIANISM IN THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT AND THE ACADEMY

Even though lesbians and bisexual women, some married to men, some single and some coupled with other women, were at the forefront of feminist organizing during the new wave of women’s movements in India from the late 1970s onward, lesbians and lesbianism remained invisible in these movements. Women’s movements, both in their academic and activist dimensions, focused almost entirely on redressing the problems of married women by trying to reform marriage-related and violence-related laws.³ One reason was that most feminist activists emerged from the Left, whether from official Communist parties or Trotskyite and Maoist groups, and many remained linked to those groups, which, by and large, considered homosexuality a Western capitalist perversion (Srikanth, 1996). Most feminist scholars in the academy are Marxists or heavily influenced by orthodox Marxism, and were, until very recently, indifferent if not hostile to Lesbian and Gay Studies.

A shift took place in the 1990s, marked by the founding of India’s first national-level gay-lesbian magazine, Bombay Dost, in 1990. Humsafar Trust, the organization that publishes it, is typical of the many mixed-gender groups that have arisen in Indian cities and towns. In the early 1990s, gay men and lesbians held Red Rose meetings at a coffee house in Delhi, placing a rose on the table to identify themselves. From 1993, a group in Delhi, called Friends of Siddhartha Gautam, organized annual festivals, largely of gay and lesbian films, in memory of a gay activist who died young; since then, similar festivals have proliferated in other cities, providing forums for discussion. Contacts with lesbian and gay groups in other countries, particularly the US and the UK, and especially with diasporic Indians involved in those groups, also provided support, for example, San Francisco-based Trikone, a magazine for LGBT South Asians, was available in India from its inception in 1986, and regularly carries contributions as well as Personals from Indians (Ratti, 1993). The Internet has boosted these communications, with several chat rooms, web-sites and listservs linking South Asian lesbians across the world.

The AIDS crisis increased both the visibility of homosexuality and the funding available to anti-AIDS groups, including some gay groups. Lesbians have been active in various initiatives for the revocation of Section 377, Indian Penal Code, the law passed by the British in 1860 that criminalizes intercourse “against the order of nature”; left-wing and liberal women’s and human rights organizations have also joined these campaigns (Vanita, 2005). Although the law has not so far been used to convict lesbians, it has been used to threaten and harass them (Bhaskaran, 2001).

Sakhi in Delhi, now defunct, and Stree Sangam in Mumbai, still active by the name of Labia, were among the earliest lesbian groups. Giti Thadani, founder of Sakhi, published Sakhiyani (1996), perhaps the first book to examine lesbianism in India. Many other lesbian groups have come into being and disappeared or morphed into other groups; those currently in existence include Olava in Pune, Aanchal in Mumbai, Sahayatrika in Kerala, Sappho in Calcutta and Sangini in Delhi (Fernandez, 1999). These groups produce newsletters, reports and chap-books. Newspapers have reported other lesbian associations that have been repressed, for example, seven schoolgirls in Kerala were expelled from school in 1992 for forming a Martina club (Author Unknown, 1992).

In December 1990, the fourth National Conference of Women’s Movements for the first time held a session on ‘Single Women.’ A Stree Sangam activist narrates how the first workshop on lesbianism at the fifth National Conference evoked antagonism from other women delegates (Amita, 1999). Since then, LGBT conferences, seminars and festivals have proliferated.

Autonomous women’s groups and non-governmental organizations working on women’s issues now discuss sexuality issues at Women’s Studies conferences and also conduct sexuality workshops for activists as well as rural and urban poor women. But national-level women’s organizations attached to political parties and engaged in electoral politics remain wary if not hostile. For example, in the late 1990s, the All India Democratic Women’s Organization (AIDWA), which is allied with the Communist Party of India (Mar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• SECTION I GENEALOGIES: CONTEXTUALIZING THE FIELD
• SECTION II READINGS: DESIRING FICTIONS
• SECTION III THEORIES: DISCIPLINARY CHALLENGES
• SECTION IV IDENTITIES: THINKING INTERSECTIONALLY
• SECTION V LOCATIONS: TRANSLATING ‘LESBIAN’
• Index