Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities

Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights

Kanika Batra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000430127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Genderforschung

Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities demonstrates how late twentieth century postcolonial print cultures initiated a public discourse on sexual activism and contends that postcolonial feminist and queer archives offer alternative histories of sexual precarity, vulnerability, and resistance.

The book's comparative focus on India, Jamaica, and South Africa extends the valences of postcolonial feminist and queer studies towards a historical examination of South-South interactions in the theory and praxis of sexual rights. Analyzing the circumstances of production and the contents of English-language and intermittently bilingual magazines and newsletters published between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, these sources offer a way to examine the convergences and divergences between postcolonial feminist, gay, andlesbian activism. It charts a set of concerns common to feminist, gay, and lesbian activist literature: retrogressive colonial-era legislation impacting the status of women and sexual minorities; amarked increase in sexual violence; piecemeal reproductive freedoms and sexual choice under neoliberalism; theemergence and management of the HIV/AIDS crisis; precariousness of lesbian and transgender concerns within feminist and LGBTQ+ movements; and Non-Governmental Organizations as major actors articulating sexual rights as human rights. This methodologically innovative work is based on archival historical research, analyses of national and international policy documents, close readings of activist publications, and conversations with activists and founding editors.

This is an important intervention in the field of gender and sexuality studies and is the winner of the 2020 Feminist Futures, Subversive Histories prize in partnership with the NWSA. The book is key reading for scholars and students in gender, sexuality, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

INTRODUCTION

Worlding postcolonial sexualities: Archives, activism, and anterior counterpublics

DOI: 10.4324/9781003170303-1

This distancing of sexuality from questions of transnational feminism or rather the practice of deploying an uninterrogated heterosexuality within transnational feminist analyses both cedes the domain of sexuality to LGBTT/queer studies and renders an incomplete story of the ways in which the racialized gendered practices of neoimperial modernity are simultaneously sexualized.

(Alexander and Mohanty 2010, 37)

Some of my most vivid and perplexing memories as a teenager are of a group of gaudily dressed masculine-feminine performers clapping loudly while singing outside homes celebrating marriages and childbirth. I also remember being confused on learning that two girls, students in a Delhi University college, were expelled for public displays of affection with each other. And I wondered how it was possible that my hairdresser’s husband was rumored to be sexually interested in workers at his construction company. Nobody around me used the terms transgender, lesbian, gay, or bisexual to describe hijras, women desiring women, men desiring men, and married men and women expressing same-sex desire in the India of the early 1980s. It was only later in the decade that feminist journals such as Manushi and gay magazines such as Bombay Dost provided Indians of my generation with a vocabulary for gender differences and sexual identities.

In this book I read feminist, gay, lesbian, and queer movement publications as activist literature to offer a feminist-queer history based on deep readings of these materials from the late 1970s to late 1990s. As documents and records of activism, these publications inscribed postcolonial genders and sexualities with cautious publicness that led to LGBTQ+ emergence from closeted enclaves to global arenas.¹ While feminist magazines have been frequently and consistently consulted as historical resources over the past few decades, postcolonial LGBTQ newsletters and magazines are infrequently used.² The central premise of Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities is that postcolonial studies, offering astute analyses of folklore, mythology, literature, film, theatre, art, music, dance, and law as sites of resistance to normative codes of gender and sexuality, will be richer in considering feminist and LGBTQ print media as equally important for histories of gender and sexuality. Preceding digital modes of connection and community building, these media describe an anteriority of local, national, and transnational connections, insufficiently examined in postcolonial gender and sexuality studies. Engaging three global South contexts, Jamaica, India, and South Africa, my goal is to chart common grounds of feminist-queer solidarities toward decolonial futures.

The heuristic ‘worlding’ describes how public emergence of feminist and queer activism – in response to colonial legislative legacies criminalizing sexual minorities, neoliberal development policies, increase in social-sexual violence, health crises fueled by unsafe contraceptives and the AIDS epidemic – led to hitherto unprecedented global discussions on postcolonial sexualities in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Worlding owes its conceptual charge to literary studies,³ international studies (Pettman 1996/2004; Tickner 2001), and urban studies (Roy 2011; Ong 2011). These accounts enable ways of seeing, learning, thinking, and knowing by diagnosing the imperialist-colonialist basis of North-South interactions, and ways to counter these by prioritizing South-South exchanges. My comparisons in this book are based on “research of an intermediate scale above the nation-state and below the world-system” (Cheah 2016, 5). The formation of feminist and queer organizational and print networks was part of a wider decolonial project to combat the colonizer-colonized relations of power/knowledge that dominated many Asian, African, and Caribbean nations and retained their hold in changed conditions of postcolonial governance. These networks played a key role in changing the direction of knowledge production about gender and sexuality. That Jamaica, India, and South Africa have some of the highest levels of violence against women and sexual minorities in the world at once complicates the task of changing the directionality of feminist-queer analysis and makes it even more imperative. The multifaceted critical purchase of worlding in this book is as follows: it describes how activists respond to sexualized violence, health crises, and outmoded legislation; defines how postcolonial feminists and queer activists create national, regional, and transnational alliances; and engages with the ways in which these concerns emerge in the transnational public sphere.

These actions of creation, emergence, and response enable a postcolonial feminist and queer history heeding M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty’s important call to interrupt “unexamined heterosexuality” in transnational feminist analysis and establish the “domain of sexuality” as common ground between feminist and LGBTQ+ activists. Observing the trajectory of Southern feminist and queer movements over the past decade I felt a rising urgency to think more about this common ground. Perhaps this urgency is a reflection of the push and pull of local-global forces which lead to sexual victories and sexual precarities: Jamaica’s history of gay liberation is all but forgotten amid accounts of rampant homophobia even as women, gays, and lesbians there struggle to achieve piecemeal legislative changes amid increased sexual violence; India’s women’s, gay, and lesbian movements have celebrated recent legislative gains that have not helped curb endemic and brutal rapes garnering global notoriety for the country; South Africa has emerged as a pioneer in guaranteeing gendered and sexual rights at a time when many African gay, lesbian, and women’s movements face extreme social backlash and sexual violence is on the rise. Discussing select publications from each of these contexts, Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities addresses the following questions: What is the archival status of feminist and queer publications as activist literature within and outside their countries of origin? Why is this body of work scarcely mined in postcolonial gender and sexuality studies? What does the increasing valence of “rights” talk evinced in these publications mean for global South feminist and queer movements? How do we develop historical and cultural methods for analyzing the publics and counterpublics preceding these media and brought into being by them? And finally, what lessons do these semi-remembered counterpublics carry for us two decades into the twenty-first century?

I did not locate these archival materials amid the “dust” that Carolyn Steedman (2002) eloquently theorizes as an occupational hazard for cultural historians; I found them in personal collections, organization offices, university libraries, and, more recently, in digital forums.⁴ In this introductory chapter, I begin with a broad-strokes sketch of feminist and queer concerns documented in these publications, fill in the details of socio-political contexts of activism, and finally, gloss the emerging shades and shapes of postcolonial feminist-queer coalitions towards panoramic comparisons. The chapters that follow describe the origins, form, content, and politics of newsletters, newspapers, journals, and magazines from the 1970s to the 1990s. These publications depict emerging postcolonial sexual publics in two distinct narrative forms: journalistic reportage, case histories, campaign accounts, meeting records, manifestoes, action documents (the social); and fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama (the literary). The publications are primarily in English, originate from urban metropolitan, multilingual locations, and serve as partial historical sources. Mine is a necessarily partial account since a comprehensive history of postcolonial sexualities demands engagement not only with activist literature in local languages from non-urban locations but also oral histories beyond the scope of my study. First, a turn to national and transnational framings of rights and development that contextualize postcolonial feminist and LGBTQ activist publications in the final decades of the long twentieth century.

Worlding sexualities in gender time

An unobstructed path from feminist to gay and lesbian to queer activism, in which social movements steadily learn from previous exclusions and march towards idealized inclusiveness and perfected political strategies, presents an uncomplicated but historically inaccurate map. Such a map cannot easily account for dissensions and contradictions within and between movements. Feminist and queer scholars have challenged such linearities, temporalities, and spatialities (Grewal & Kaplan 2001; Freeman 2010; Arondekar & Patel 2016). Highlighting non-linearities, my account similarly pushes against existing historical and geographical specializations in postcolonial studies to think through feminist, gay, lesbian, and queer studies in a comparative framework.⁵ The analyses offered in the chapters raise several challenging queries addressed through South-South comparisons: How does the Indian trajectory of gender and sexuality-based activism, with its oscillation between progressive and retrogressive ideologies, compare with Jamaican and South African postcolonial sexual histories? How do we account for the Jamaican state’s recalcitrance on legalizing abortion and decriminalizing homosexuality when writing comparative postcolonial sexual histories? Is it valid to cite South Africa as exemplary in securing constitutional freedoms for gay and lesbian citizens despite its high rates of “corrective rape” against lesbian women and a significant section of people living with HIV/AIDS without adequate recourse to treatment? These queries disrupt neat narratives of progress from colonial domination to postcolonial liberation to decolonial futures assuring improved lives and rights for women and LGBTQ+ citizens.

Cross-border teaching, activism, scholarship, and pedagogy has influenced the comparative analyses in Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities that combine archival research, examination of national and international social, cultural, and legal policies, close readings of the contents of representative publications, and interviews with activists and founding editors. Revisiting “Under Western Eyes” several decades after it was first published, Chandra Talpade Mohanty sketches a curricular strategy she calls “The Feminist Solidarity or the Comparative Feminist Studies Model” based on “understanding the historical and experiential specificities and differences of women’s lives as well as the historical and experiential connections between women from different national, racial, and cultural communities” that would organize syllabi around areas like sex work, militarization, environmental justice, and human rights (2003, 243). Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan question “the distinctness of areas presupposed by the comparative framework” while “respecting the specificities of historical and cultural conjectures” to arrive at “new insights into the workings of gender and patriarchy across various borders rather than simply within the parameters of the state or the nation.” (2001, 668–669). Over the years this book took shape, I taught several graduate courses on transnational feminist and queer studies. One iteration of the course connected feminist and queer studies to introduce two important modes of thinking and activism, their separations, and the intersectional social, political, and academic potentialities of race, class, caste, religion, gender, sexuality, and nationality. The course description emphasized the complementarity of feminist and queer approaches in responding to the AIDS crisis, sexual violence, and the sex panics of the previous decade that prefigured the emergence of queer studies in the 1990s. In retrospect, I was testing the North-South approach to gender and sexuality studies, learning from my students the ways in which these comparisons challenge assumptions about feminist and queer movements in the South, and working out how to “rewrite postcolonial gender histories of social change in conversation with studies of decolonization, anticapitalist critique, and LGBTT/queer studies in the North and the South” (Alexander & Mohanty 2010, 25).⁶

My training in literary studies, especially the work of comparatists and feminist intellectuals who deploy narrative analysis to study gender and sexuality, has been crucial in the connections between feminist and queer analyses (Apter 2010; Hemmings 2011; Lanser 2014–2015). Narrative and women’s studies scholar Susan Lanser’s argument that comparative studies today can be as much about “confluence” as it was about “influence” in the recent past and her call for the interconnectedness of queer and feminist critiques have been central to the analyses offered in this book:

Modifying feminist with queer resists a feminism that would promote stable or unified, cross-cultural or cross-temporal categories of sex, gender, or sexuality. But anchoring queer with feminist reminds us that however queer we might want comparative literature – or the world – to be, heteronormative and gender-based hierarchies, inequalities, oppressions and suppressions are global phenomena, if widely diverse in configuration.

(2014–2015)

Lanser’s awareness of inequalities and oppressions echoes transnational feminist work in the global South which often mingles “questions of access to drinking water with those of access to antiretroviral drugs, and the languages and spaces of ‘empowerment’ and poverty with those of intimacies and sexualities” (Nagar & Swarr 2010, 13). Examining three configurations and terrains of struggles meant delving into social, political, and legal contexts of feminist and LGBTQ+ activism including sustained interaction with collectives and organizations. From 2008–2020, I attended meetings, observed and participated in performances, and sat in on community outreach workshops and training sessions in India, Jamaica, and South Africa. I also conducted semi-structured interviews and had numerous recorded and unrecorded conversations with activists to seek connections between the production of knowledges and “a politics of social change in favor of the less privileged people and places” (Nagar 2014, 94).

The activist literature (magazines, newsletters, newspapers, and journals) analyzed in Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities translate middle-class and subaltern experiences into feminist and queer analyses for a local and national readership across varying levels of literacy. Nation, location, translation, and language are useful heuristics in “engendering a map” that is “attentive to different spatializations in the construction of sexualities” (Alexander & Mohanty 2010, 36) to assess the specific impact of these publications. Benedict Anderson’s important claim that the nation as an imagined community is dependent both on the emergence of print and comparisons with pre-existing forms of national...