I’m hoping to start updating this blog more regularly with original content. I’d like to post my musings on queer life in India — not-totally-formed ideas that might eventually turn into a column or make it into my research projects — as well as the general things I’ve been up to, and the photography I’ve been making. For now, I thought I’d write a summary of my Fulbright project: how it started and where it stands. Feedback is much appreciated, as I’d like to make my blog a platform for sharing and discussing my ideas with others.
In the summer of 2010, having been accepted into Dartmouth’s new Foreign Study Program in Hyderabad India (which would take place the following Winter), I began thinking about how I might conduct independent research during my time abroad. Queer studies and critical legal studies were the two disciplines I had explored the most during my undergraduate career, and eventually it hit me that the question of queer identity in India would be a fascinating topic to research.
I spent the summer reading up on postcolonial thought. “Lesbian” and “gay” are terms that originated in the West, and I figured that, in order to theorize about their meaning in a place like India, I’d need to better understand how the colonial encounter shaped sexualities, identities, and communication.
When I began my work in Hyderabad, my research questions and methodologies were all over the place. I wanted to understand how globalization and the rapid growth of transnational communication had shaped the ways that people with non-normative sexualities perceived and expressed their sexual identities. I also wanted to study queer social movements and the idea of an international LGBT community. How might we understand transnational community forged along the axes of politics and desire in a world where the diffusion of media, culture and identity is mediated by the dominant logics of global capitalism?
Part of my work was documentation. Who are the major players in the queer political organizing in India? What is the key terminology used to describe sexual minorities? (In India, a multitude of terms abound to describe people with non-normative sexual or gender identities that have far more complex social, political and economic connotations than “gay” or “lesbian,” including “hijra,” “kothi,” and “panthi.” The proliferation of these terms has been buttressed in part by the internationally-funded HIV/AIDS NGO apparatus, which has a stake in categorization for the purpose of surveillance. To put it succinctly, queer terminology becomes a site where complex social realities are contested and negotiated.)
I was basically composing an informal ethnography of a gay foreigner trying to “figure out” queerness in India. I met with leaders of NGOs, I interviewed everyday “out” queer people, I went to gay parties, I participated in Bombay’s Pride march — anything “queer” event, space or person I could access, I would. Needless to say, this was a somewhat disorganized and scatter-brained approach to doing research, and I’m still trying to comb through all my notes from Hyderabad and put it into a meaningful schematic. There were also some unintended consequences to my do-anything approach; at Bombay’s pride march, I was approached by a reporter wanting to hear my thoughts about the gay movement in India. She chose the least palatable thing that I said (and twisted the actual words) to make me sound very critical of the state of gay activism in India. While I do have my criticisms, the way my words appeared in print made me look awfully imperialistic and soured some relationships I had been building with NGOs.
Towards the middle of my term in Hyderabad, I learned through an email listserv of a particularly nasty, homophobic news segment on a popular Hyderabadi television channel. The program, revealing titled “Gay Culture Rampant in Hyderabad,” aired in the local Telugu language and “outed” men who maintained profiles soliciting for sex on the online gay dating website Planet Romeo. Within days, the news segment had incited outrage and condemnation from sexual minority organizations and media outlets across the globe. Ironically, Hyderabad was one of the last cities to formally respond to the event; at the time it lacked the queer activist organizational structure of other cities, but eventually a TV9 protest was executed, which I helped to plan.
The TV9 event became a major turning point in my research. When I returned home, I realized that — as a witness to the incident and participant in the political response — I could focus on the entire debacle as the centerpiece of my project. The controversy illustrated the complex interplay of local and global forces in the construction of homophobia and in queer political reactions to homophobia. The issues and challenges that emerged as queer groups organized responses to the event reflect some of the major debates and tensions facing queer Indian politics in general. When is it useful to forge alliances across communities of sexual minorities, and is it ever counterproductive? How should queer people represent themselves in the public and political sphere? Does transnational queer organizing efface important local specificities in its construction of a “global gay” identity? What kind of reactions did I observe from people in relation to the broadcast? Why do these questions matter?
I completed a preliminary paper which covered the basic things-to-know about “queerness” in India, and then examined the TV9 controversy as a sociological spectacle. Through a close reading of the broadcast itself, I argued that it constructed an imagined culture of queer criminality to serve as a scapegoat for anxieties over Westernization and global capitalism. The middle-class invisibly-gay man, who secretly cruises for sex on the Internet and attends parties only visible to those “in the know;” who is connected to global communication networks through his work, his education, his sex life; who could be your brother, your co-worker, your husband; this man is like the insidious force of Westernization that destroys “Indian culture” from the inside. I juxtaposed this construction of queerness to the Bollywood industry, which represents the interests and power of global capitalism without receiving same sensationalized criticism — in part, I believe, because of Bollywood’s hypnotic power as a desire-producing machine.
So, to fast-forward to where I am now, I’m living in Bombay and trying to develop my ideas into a publishable academic paper, working with Shilpa Phadke, a women’s studies and media studies professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. At times, it feels a little counter-intuitive to have traveled back to India when my research has lost its “ethnographic” angle; as I see it now, this paper will look at a set of media controversies around queerness in India that have a transnational component, using portrayals of queerness in the media as a lens to better understand Indian attitudes around globalization and sexuality. Theoretically, I could complete this sitting in a library back home. (Wherever “home” is, now that I’m no longer a student…). But I’m trying to make this unique opportunity worthwhile, leaving open the possibility for new research angles, continuing to participate in and take notes on queer life in India, and trying to present my ideas to queer Indian audiences for their feedback and suggestions.
I attended a queer conference in Calcutta last month — a sort of academic/activist event — where I met a student who presented an excellent paper looking at the recent decriminalization of homosexuality in India through a “Foucauldian” lens, using Foucault’s concept of biopower to argue that the Delhi High Court judgement declaring India’s sodomy statue unconstitutional further legitimized and normatized the respectable homosexual subject. His arguments paralleled what I wrote in a paper on Lawrence v. Texas (the 2004 US Supreme Court case which also declared sodomy laws unconstitutional), and since the conference we’ve been talking about co-writing a paper, combining our arguments and comparing the two court cases. So there’s a useful reason to be in this country! The more I think about it, the more I realize I’m also more prepared to work on this co-written paper than I am on my own project — so I guess I’ll just have to see which takes precedence.
I’ve also been trying to get involved in side projects not totally related to my research goals, especially things that would get me out of the house and interacting with people. There’s an NGO I might be volunteering for, a “national queer archive” project I might assist with, and a column I might be writing for TimeOut Mumbai — all stuff that’s currently in the works. I’m also planning to audit some courses in the media studies department when the Indian semester begins this November. Overall though, I’ve been feeling a little disillusioned with the city of Bombay after my somewhat premature conclusion that this was the “hot spot” for queer India. In keeping with the city’s commercial nature (Bombay is the finance capital of India, and home of course to Bollywood, the world’s largest film industry), the queer “scene” feels a lot more glitzy than politicized. There are multiple gay parties organized every week, and the city is home to India’s first queer store (a sort of gay knick-knack boutique), but the activism seems to pale in comparison to cities like Delhi and Bangalore, where multiple groups and organizations are regularly working on queer issues from a more explicitly leftist stance (understanding “queerness” in the more inclusive sense of resistance-to-hegemony). The way I’ve summed it up to friends is that I’ve never met so many “fiscally conservative” homosexuals in India before coming to Bombay. Perhaps activism is the wrong word here — there is, in fact, a lot of very important activism going on. What I feel like I’m lacking is the sort of queer leftist intellectual community that seems to thrive in other Indian cities (where, incidentally, there are also more and better universities) and that I was hoping to find, especially after feeling like I was missing out at Dartmouth as well.
All that being said, Bombay is a fascinating place to live, and I’m beginning to really appreciate all the diverse facets that make up our neighborhood. Now that I have replaced my camera, I hope I can share some of what makes it so special on this blog.
