INDIA REVIEW

2016, VOL. 15, NO. 2, 241–271

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2016.1165570

Defining the “queers” in India: The politics of academic

representation
Virginie Dutoya

ABSTRACT
In the last 20 years, research and academic writing on “non-
heterosexual” lives, identifications, and sexualities have developed
considerably in India, in a context where lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) and queer politics have become more and
more visible in the public sphere. When it comes to gender and
sexuality, researchers are often activists, and scholarship is highly
political. In particular, by documenting non-heterosexual lives,
practices, and groups, social scientists participate in the construc-
tion of social categories that can be mobilized in the public sphere.
Using both Pierre Bourdieu’s and Stuart Hall’s views on representa-
tion as a discursive process by which representatives shape the
group they claim to represent, this article contends that social
scientists are engaged in a “work of representation” when it
comes to LGBT and queer individuals and groups. Yet, this process
is not without tensions, as there is a deep contradiction between
the making of an “object of study” that is spoken about, and the
promotion of a political subject, who can speak for him- or herself.
Drawing on a corpus of about 45 academic publications on LGBT
and queer people and issues in the last 25 years, this article
explores the contentious discursive formation of “LGBT” and
“queer” as analytical and political categories.

In the last 20 years, a substantial number of academic works dealing with lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and “non-heterosexual”1 practices,
individuals and groups have been published. These two decades were marked
by major political and legal developments regarding sexual and gender rights
such as the judicial process around the section 377 of the Indian penal code
(IPC). Moreover, a general perception is that nowadays, sexualities and gender
identities that do not fit in the heteronormative framework get more acceptance
in India than it has ever been the case since the colonial period, and that
their cultural and social representations have become less negative, and even
sometimes celebrative.2 To that extent the LGBT initials or the word “queer”
have become much more frequent, not only in academic discourses, but also in
political ones, as well as in the media or in cultural productions.
These dimensions of LGBT and queer visibility are not unrelated. Indeed,
many of the first and contemporary researchers on LGBT and queer issues in

Virginie Dutoya is a CNRS research fellow at the Centre Emile Durkheim.

© 2016 Taylor & Francis
242 V. DUTOYA

India also participate in the struggle for social visibility and recognition. The
connection between activism and the academia when it comes to gender,
LGBT, and queer issues is a well-known phenomenon3 and it seems obvious
that in this area, research and activism share a critical stance on heteronor-
mativity. Yet, tensions between academic and political logics may also arise,
and not only because the agendas of the academic and the militant might
punctually differ,4 even when they are the same individual. More impor-
tantly, there seems to be an irreducible contradiction between the making of
an “object of study” who is spoken about, or spoken for,5 and the promotion
of a political subject, who can speak for him- or herself.
To explore these tensions, I will articulate Pierre Bourdieu’s work on political
representation with Stuart Hall’s analysis of cultural representations. According
to Bourdieu, representation is grounded on a “symbolic takeover” (coup de force
symbolique), by which the group deemed to be represented is constructed and
projected by its claimed representative.6 Yet, while Bourdieu focuses on repre-
sentation as a form of usurpation, Hall’s work on identity and cultural repre-
sentations insists on the complexity and ambivalence of this process. At first,
Hall’s conception of language as a “representational (and signifying) system”7
and of representation as the production of “stabilized meaning”8 seems to
further Bourdieu’s claim. Yet, Hall also underlines the potentially emancipatory
dimension of this process, as it enables “the emergence of new subjects, new
genders, new ethnicities, new regions, new communities, hitherto excluded from
the major forms of cultural representation, unable to locate themselves except as
decentred or subaltern, [who] have acquired through struggle, sometimes in
very marginalized ways, the means to speak for themselves.”9
Consequently, as Bourdieu emphasizes the responsibility of social scientists to
deconstruct categories and show how they were historically constituted,10 Hall
stresses the continuity (but not merging) among political, scientific, and cultural
invisibilities, as well as the possibility for intellectuals to counter these invisi-
bilities through their scholarship.11 In that respect, if the act of representation
can be violent, Hall reminds us that invisibility is also violent and attempts at
countering it cannot be reduced to “symbolic takeovers.” The objective of this
article is then two fold. First, how scholars who produce knowledge on non-
heterosexual lives and practices in India, engage in a “work of representation”12
that defines social and political identities? Second, what type of tensions may
arise in this process, and how do scholars and activists address (or not) these
tensions? While any academic representation is political in nature,13 each field
and discipline is marked by specific structures of knowledge production. In the
case of scholarship on LGBT and queer issues in India, I contend that there is no
clear delimitation between the “political,” the “academic,” and the “personal.”
Consequently, there is a continuous back and forth among daily lives, theoriza-
tion, and political struggles and constant efforts to align political, personal, and
scientific representations.
 INDIA REVIEW 243

As I discuss the representational and political dimensions of social

sciences, I need to reflect on my own experience as a social scientist and as
a (not very active) participant in queer, lesbian, and feminist politics in
France. Indeed, this article seeks to address some of the tensions I felt
working on women’s political representation in India and Pakistan.14 While
feminism was one of reasons I chose such a dissertation topic, I became
uncomfortably aware that my work was part of a vast scholarship made by
white and “Western” scholars on South Asian women and needed to be
examined critically in that regard.15 On the activist side, I witnessed the
difficulties of feminist and queer movements in confronting relations of
power among classes, races, and sexualities. This led to two questions that
are central to this article. How social scientists produce representations of the
social world, and with what type of political consequences? How to analyze
domination when we are part of the dominating system? It might seem
paradoxical that to answer those questions, I once again put myself in a
position where my identity as a first-world researcher is problematic, yet as I
try to show, being “part of the problem” does not foreclose all possibilities of
valid academic work, and the discomfort of the scholar’s position can be
heuristic.
My analysis is based on a corpus of 45 academic publications in the field of
social sciences and humanities that address “nonheterosexuals” in India, or
question heteronormativity. There is an irreducible subjectivity in the selection
of the corpus, which does not pretend to be exhaustive. There are texts I
missed, and others I chose not to include because I felt the LGBT and queer
issues were secondary. Once acknowledged, this subjectivity can be useful, as I
am interested in the voluntary process of “subject-making” through scholar-
ship. This process is necessarily dialogic and subjective; as it needs an audience
for which the representation is produced and that will recognize it as such. It is
nevertheless necessary to unpack the various choices that were made in the
constitution of the corpus.
First, as I analyzed the making of academic or scientific representation, I
was confronted to the difficulty of identifying academic work in a field where
scientific and militant productions are often deeply intertwined. I considered
as “academic” or “scientific” texts that reported original theoretical or
empirical work, were published in scientific journals, as working papers, or
as books (or contributions to books). I also included texts who might not be
“scientific” in themselves but had been published in books edited by
scholars,16 and were recognized as such in other works whose academic
character was more obvious.17 A second major decision was to exclude
works published before the nineties. Indeed, there were few publications on
nonheteronormative sexualities before this decade, which also marks the
beginning of openly out LGBT and queer activism. The few works published
before that were mostly discrete publications while from the nineties
244 V. DUTOYA

onwards, one can identify a fairly coherent corpus, formed by authors who
reference one another, and seem conscious to be part of a common field of
studies. In that regard, I did not abide by the distinction between LGBT
studies, and works that use queer theory to question power, bodies and
sexualities in a counter-normative perspective. Both these approaches may
use the term queer, but in LGBT studies, it is mostly a descriptive umbrella-
term to designate all forms of nonheterosexual identifications and in queer
theory, it is as an adjective to qualify radical counter-normative processes and
critical approaches. Yet, this distinction is not always operational in India.
There is no institutionalization of LGBT or queer studies (or theory) and
“queer” can be used as an umbrella-term and as a conceptual tool to
deconstruct the heteronorm in the same work. Thus, though I point out
their differences, these two approaches are present in the corpus. Another
issue in the constitution of the corpus concerns its “Indian” nature. Did that
mean it should only include Indian scholars, scholars working and living in
India, all scholars of Indian origin, or any scholar working on LGBT and
queer Indians? I chose to include any work that focused on LGBT, queers
and non-heterosexuality in India, as long as the author situated his or her
work vis-à-vis Indian scholarship and debates.18 This meant that most of the
authors in the corpus were Indian or of Indian origin. Last, only texts in
English were included in the corpus. This was both a practical19 and political
choice. Indeed, I wanted this article to be part of the same field of the texts I
was commenting, which meant it should be accessible to each of the authors
of the corpus.
Arguably, the focus on one product of research, written texts, introduces a
bias in the analysis. Indeed, there is a risk in isolating the texts from their
context of production and from the other practices (teaching, participating in
conferences, engaging in administrative tasks) that constitute research as a
professional activity. To avoid this bias, I have tried to locate these texts in
their broader context by meeting with their authors when it was possible,
observing and participating in discussion around these issues on campuses,
and reading non-academic texts written by the authors of the corpus. I also
used the testimonies collected in the context of “Project Bolo” (literally
“project speak up”), a project that collects oral histories of “LGBT
persons”20 in which several social scientists have participated.
The first section of the article focuses on the conditions under which the
academia is a space for political representation, insisting on the specific
context in which studies on LGBT and queer lives and practices have
emerged in India. The second part explores how academic representations
participate in the creation of social and political identities and what conflicts
may emerge in this process. In the last section, I focus on the violence of
representation and on the attempts to address this violence through the
concept of “queer.”
 INDIA REVIEW 245

Academia as a space for political representation

The development of a scientific literature centered on counter-
heteronormative21 sexualities and gender identification in the nineties was
not isolated from queer and LGBT politics. On the contrary, there is a dense
web of connections between research and activism, let it be in terms of the
individuals and groups implied, the topics that were taken up and debates
that navigated from one space to another. In that regard, social science is
embedded in activism, which has strong implication for scholars, and the
way they conduct their work.

Social sciences in times of activism

The nineties were an important decade when it comes to the scholarship on
LGBT and queer issues. There were a few works on “nonheteronormative
groups” before this decade, particularly on hijras,22 but in the nineties, the
number of publications became much more important, and expanded to
other groups. To understand better the scientific production on LGBT and
queer issues, it is interesting to quickly analyze the corpus, which brings
together 45 texts (articles, chapters, books, and dissertations), and a similar
number of authors.23 Although I looked for publications from the early
nineties onward, most of the corpus was published after 2000. As a matter
of fact, the pioneers express their isolation, and their difficulties to impose
their thematic of research, both in terms of been recognized by their peers
and finding funding and publishers, particularly in India.24 This might
explain why only one-fourth of the authors of the corpus were working for
an Indian institution at the time of writing this article, and about 60 percent
in the United-States or in Europe, although almost all of them are of Indian
origin and most started their higher studies in India. Thus, a first struggle for
those wishing to engage with queer and LGBT issues was to exist within their
discipline, a struggle that seems to have been relatively fruitful, if one gauges
by the corpus. Not only there is a significant increase in the number of
publications on these subjects in the last 10 years, but also there is more
space for publication in India. Indeed, between 1995 and 2004, about one-
third of the corpus is “Indian” publisher wise; it is the case of 58 percent of it
from 2005 onward. LGBT and queer issues now have dedicated spaces, such
as the sexualities series, edited by Yoda Press under the direction of activist
and researcher Gautam Bhan. This development is consistent with a growing
interest for the issues of gender and sexuality in the Indian academia.
Women’s Studies Centres remain the main structure of the Indian university
system for women’s, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, but many of the
degrees these centers offer now include papers in gender and sexuality
studies. Moreover, on many campuses, students have developed LGBT/
246 V. DUTOYA

Queer associations and Gender studies group to discuss issues of gender and
sexuality both theoretically (through readings) and practically (fighting sex-
ual harassment for instance).25
While scholarship on LGBT and queer issues developed, these issues also
became politically visible. It is somewhat difficult to make the history of
LGBT and queer movements in India in the context of this article since this
exercise is loaded with political implications. Paola Bacchetta and to a certain
extend Nivedita Menon have pointed out how problematic it is to consider
that LGBT movements (finally) appeared in the nineties in India thanks to
the influence of global LGBT activism.26 Indeed, there were forms of non-
heterosexual resistances before and loosely organized groups in the eighties.
Yet, most authors agree on the fact that counter-heteronormative movements
emerged in the late eighties and bloomed in the nineties.27 It is not in the
scope of this article to retrace this process here, but a few key points need to
be outlined. First, in the late eighties, the HIV/AIDS pandemic became a
particularly acute issue, around which non-heterosexuals (mostly men and
hijras) started to organize. Many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
often relying on international funding, were created.28 This was also a period
of international development for LGBT politics and Gay and Lesbian studies,
including in the south-Asian diaspora.29
Movements and struggles developed in different arenas, from the fight
against HIV/AIDS to judicial battles. Yet, they were not independent one
from another, as for instance, organizations fighting HIV/AIDS were among
those who filed petitions against the section 377 of the IPC, which crimina-
lizes sodomy, or more precisely “carnal intercourse against the order of
nature.” The first petition against this section was first filed in 1991, but
more known is the one filed in the Delhi High Court (DHC) in 2001 by the
Lawyers’ Collective on behalf of Naz Foundation. They objected that the
section was not in conformity with the principles of equality, privacy, and
freedom of expression. After various judicial and political hiccups, the DHC
held in 2009 that criminalization of consensual sex between adults violated
constitutional rights such as equality and freedom from discrimination.30
However, on December 11, 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the DHC
judgment, finding not enough reasons to declare portions of section 377
unconstitutional. This decision fueled new demonstrations and actions on
the side of LGBT/queer groups, whose results are still unknown.31
The emergence and development of LGBT and queer scholarship in India
was not only parallel to these judicial and political processes. The actors were
often the same, as many scholars took part in LGBT and queer politics32 and
sometimes studied these social movements themselves. It is thus no surprise
that methodologically speaking, several of the texts of the corpus rely on
participatory observations.33 The connection between scholarship and acti-
vism is also forged through anthologies, in which both militants and
 INDIA REVIEW 247

academics contributed. For instance, the collective book Because I Have a

Voice aims at bringing “together writings that show how political and con-
ceptual spaces impact queer lives and also how queer lives shape these
frameworks in turn.”34 The editors do so by juxtaposing perspectives from
social scientists, activists and “queer individuals” (of course these categories
do not need to exclude one another). To them, such a move is necessary both
from the perspective of social sciences and of politics, as “unthinking acti-
vism, that is, a politics that doesn’t grapple with larger paradigms of thinking,
will lead to a dead end as will any theory which loses its grip of the reality of
people’s lives.”35 Yet, the political dimension of LGBT and queer scholarship
goes way beyond providing theories to activists, in particular, scholarship
plays an important role in constituting representations of the social.

Scientific work and political representation

Scholars working on (nonheterosexual) sexuality and LGBT/Queer people
often present the issue of visibility as crucial. Indeed, these subjects were
often considered as marginal and unscientific.36 However, this was not only
an academic struggle, as most of the scholars of my corpus expressed the
desire, more or less explicitly, to make the subject of their research visible
socially and politically. For instance, Maya Sharma justifies her initial impulse
for writing on working-class lesbians by the hope for “the emergence of a
collective voice and at least fragments of visibility through such life-stories.”37
Other examples on this enterprise of “unveiling” can be found in Parmesh
Shahani’s work on Bombay’s gay life,38 or in the various works trying to
account for the traces of same-sex love and sexualities in Indian classic or
contemporary literature or arts.39 As the categories “gay,” “lesbian,, and “same-
sex” were generally absent from their disciplines, scholars had to impose them
and often define them. This is particularly interesting in the case of Vanita and
Kidwai’s book, which deals with “same-sex love” in Indian classic and con-
temporary literature. They make the choice of studying together love between
women and between men, arguing that both types of loves share a common
experience of resistance to heterosexual marriage and procreation.40 Such a
choice of privileging sexualities over gender is a major one, as it suggests that
LGBT politics might make more sense than feminism for lesbians and other
nonheteronormative women. Similarly, many of the texts included in the first
anthology of (Indian) lesbian writings published in 1999 were commands,
written for the publication. Thus, this book not only renders visible something
that was not, but actually enacts41 “lesbian literature,” simultaneously docu-
menting its existence, making visible existing texts and expanding the corpus.
Many works also attempt at “queering” the social world. For instance,
the editors of a 2007 anthology on sexuality made the choice to focus on
“sexualities that are most usually seen as challenging the heteronorm” with the
248 V. DUTOYA

objective of “providing visibility and (…) demolishing culturally constructed

hierarchies of sexuality.”42 In that enterprise the word “queer” is used as a verb
to describe the process through which bodily, gender, aesthetic, scientific or
legal norms are questioned and heterosexual structures displaced. The work
of representation is then slightly different, it is not so much to make the
nonheterosexuals visible, but to develop representations of the social world
in which nonheterosexuality may become visible.
If queer and LGBT scholarship constitutes a representational work, it is also,
and maybe before, a counter-representational one, as the representations it
proposes do not appear in a vacuum and aim at countering former ones.
According to several authors of the corpus, queer and LGBT people are para-
doxically invisible and hyper-visible at the same time, let it be in the mass media,
where their lives are sensationalized,43 in the criminal law,44 in NGOs and social
movements45 or even in social sciences.46 This counter-representative dimen-
sion is characteristic of gender and postcolonial studies. Indeed, an important
endeavor undertaken under the banner of gender and postcolonial studies has
consisted in de-constructing medical, historical, sociological or legal discourses
that either obscured women and racialized individuals (as well as other groups)
or dispossessed them of their body and life.47 Such critics have led scholars in
those fields to fight false universalism by refusing to import or use blindly
concepts and methodologies and re-locating them into the structure of power
in which they were conceived.48
In that respect, the wish for representation is often ambivalent, for
representation is both feared and longed for. For instance, Gayatri Reddy
explains she is aware that her research project on hijras “might increase
hijras’ visibility within disciplinary regimes in India, resulting in greater
scrutiny in their lives.” Yet, she adds; “many hijras I encountered in
Hyderabad explicitly reiterated their desire to get the real story of their
lives down on paper, as much in response to this scrutiny as to vindicate
their life choices.”49 Moreover, very often, scholars do not only aim at
representing others, but also themselves. Indeed, many authors of my
corpus choose to “out” themselves as LGBT or queer. Self-reflexivity and
attention to position is not particularly original in the broader field of
gender studies. Yet, being openly out has a cost, particularly for those
who work in India.50 In any case, the choice to present themselves as
queer or LGBT while writing on LGBT and queer issues is significant. It
carries out a semantic move from their position as scholars to the group
they make visible. This move is particularly clear in Narrain and Bhan’s
book, eloquently entitled Because I have a Voice. In the introduction, the
editors state; “Our effort is to give voice to a concept, an identity and a
politics (…). The words of this anthology are our own scripts, written for us
by ourselves as we challenge the rights of others to script our lives.”51 The
shift from “I—the author” to “we—the queers/LGBT” is reminiscent of
 INDIA REVIEW 249

Bourdieu’s stand. According to him, representation is a “takeover” that has

both material and linguistic dimensions and that is marked by the perma-
nent back and forth between “I” and “we” operated by those who claim to
represent.52 Thus, scholarship does not only “make visible” what already
exists, but participates in the emergence of a collective “we,” grounded on a
shared identity. In this respect, scholars clearly engage in a “work of
representation (…) in order to impose their vision of the world, or their
vision of their own position in this world, of their social identity.”53

From visibility to identity: The making of political subjects

Gays, Hijras, Kothis,54 Lesbians, Queers, and Same-sex lovers: all these terms
are used to designate the object of studies in one or several books of the
corpus. This apparently simple fact of attaching a name to a group is at the
core of the work of representation defined by Bourdieu55 as well as Hall.
Indeed, according to the later, “how things are represented and the ‘machi-
neries’ and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and
not merely a reflexive, after the event, role.”56 Thus, it is important to pay
attention to the definition of the group that is done not only through a
process of “naming” but also by situating it in space and history.

In whose name? Debates over terminology

The search for words that would “tell what we are” is a recurring issue in
LGBT and queer narratives, including academics ones. Many refer to the
moment where they got words that would make their sexuality, desires and
feelings “speakable,” that is as Ruth Vanita puts it, having a “language for
that.”57 Trying to find the appropriate terms to designate the subject of any
study is difficult, but it is particularly true in disciplines that have a long
history of looking critically at processes of categorizations, such as gender,
LGBT, and queer studies. In that respect, Foucault’s work on the emergence
of sexual identities in Europe is often quoted and discussed.58 First, most
authors agree with Foucault that sexualities and gender representations need
to be de-naturalized and seen as historically constituted. Yet, many move on
to a critic of Foucault, questioning its relevance in the Indian context, as
Foucault failed to take into account that sexual categories are also constituted
in an East/West framework. While the adequacy of a “western terminology”
to the Indian social world is a major point of contention, other issues appear
such as the desirability of all-inclusive terms, and the need for a terminology
that would be intersectional.
An interesting starting point to analyze these debates is a quote from the
movie Fire, which is commented in different texts of the corpus.59 This
movie, set in India, produced in Canada, and directed by Canadian-Indian
250 V. DUTOYA

director Deepa Mehta was released in India in 1998. It depicts the sexual and
romantic relationship of two women, Radha and Sita, married to two broth-
ers and living in a joint family, thus placing the narration in a “traditional”
Indian Hindu middle-class setting. At one point of the movie, Sita tells her
sister-in-law and lover: “there’s no word in our language for what we are,
how we feel for each other.” As English is the language used in the movie
(and not Hindi or Punjabi, which should by all logics be the language spoken
by the characters), this sentence is slightly odd. Ruth Vanita underlines that it
disqualifies English as “our language” (though it is actually spoken by the
characters) while creating “our language” as all Indian vernacular languages
in which the word (lesbian?) do not exist. Yet, one can find several words in
Indian languages to designate two women having sex with one another, their
feelings, or desires. This leads to a double interrogation that Vanita unfolds
in several of her publications. First, as a historian, how to describe same-sex
relations that happened in the past? And, is it imperialist to use English
words to discuss India?60 According to Vanita, although it is important to
uncover older categorizations and terms, “homosexuality” is no more imperi-
alist or anachronistic than “family” or indeed “heterosexuality.” All these
terms did not always have the same meaning, but no Indian sociologist
working on family and writing in English would think about substituting
“family” by a word in an Indian language.61 Interestingly, she also argues for
writing in English because it is important for the texts to be “accessible to
urban bilingual populations whose opinions are crucial in determining who
gets civil rights.”62 Again, the political and academic agendas are deeply
intertwined.
On the whole, the idea of developing vernacular terms to designate non-
heterosexuals has been short-lived, at least in academic discourses. For
instance, in her book, Suparna Bhaskaran used the term “khush,” which
literally means “happy” (or “gay”) in Hindi and Urdu. Yet, this is the only
academic and conceptual use of such word, which is also little used by Indian
activists nowadays.63 Thus far, the only vernacular terms that are often used
are “hijras” and “kothis” to refer to groups that are perceived as specific to
the Indian context. But the debate was never set purely in terms of “foreign”
versus “local” concepts. Indeed, few scholars would argue that by rule,
foreign concepts are of no use in India. In reality, the issue is two-fold.
First, does the language of sexual identities make sense in India? Second,
whose language do we speak in terms of class, caste, regional or religious
identities?
In the early twenty-first century, Shivananda Khan, founder of Naz
Foundation, a London based NGO working on HIV/AIDS issues in India,
argued for the use of MSM (men having sex with men) in place of terms such
as gay or LGBT. He justified his stance by the fact that most Indian men who
engage in sexualities with other men do not think these practices in terms of
 INDIA REVIEW 251

identity. According to Khan, “lesbian and gay identities” are restricted to

limited audiences in terms of class and locality, who act as “instigators of a
queer India” which is akin to “sexual neo-colonialism.”64 As his text shows,
issues of imperialism do not always play on the India/West opposition, but
also within India, as some appellations are said to make sense only to a small
part of the population, which is generally upper middle-class (and often
upper caste Hindu), English medium educated, and urban. About 10 years
later, Ashley Tellis, who did his PhD in English literature and teaches in
India, formulated a similar critic. He argued that “LGBT rights” were now
part of a “globalspeak” and thus embedded in neoliberal politics. According
to him, “in simply taking the language of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ and applying it
undifferentiated to groups in India without bothering to learn how they
understand themselves and in what languages they speak, activists and
academics become willing victims in a neocolonial speaking in the coloniser’s
language.”65 To Tellis, the main issue is not that the term is foreign, but that
“identity categories” are imposed on those who do not want to fit in them.
Though Tellis and Khan’s critics seem similar, it is important to differentiate
them in one regard. Indeed, according to Khan the main problem with
the “identity framework” is that it makes prevention against HIV/AIDS
inefficient, an issue to which he is particularly sensitive as the founder of
Naz Foundation. While Tellis acknowledges this issue, he argues that
the development of the “LGBT globalspeak” is the consequence of the
development of NGOs in India, and particularly those working on HIV/
Aids who have adopted the terminology of their donors.66
The terms of this debate show very clearly that it is not only an academic
discussion over concepts, but that it is also a dispute over ethical and political
positions. In that respect, many authors of the corpus are aware that by
assigning a name to a group, they exert a form of power. As Nivedita Menon
puts it, “political action is precisely the attempt to produce particular forms
of self-identification and to hegemonise common sense meanings of
language.”67 Moreover, the definition of a LGBT/Queer subject is not con-
fined to the naming of this subject. As the debate over terminology suggests,
it is also about locating this subject in the Indian nation.

A located subjected
Among the early books discussing same-sex love, two focus on ancient texts,
trying to uncover their homoerotic dimension. Their project is to reverse a
common narrative at that time, according to which homosexuality would be
a Western import. By uncovering the past as well as colonial history,
Sakhiyani by Giti Thadani as well as Same-sex Love in India68 by Ruth
Vanita and Saleem Kidwai propose a counter-narrative, in which it is homo-
phobia that was imported from the West:
252 V. DUTOYA

Many societies foster the homophobic myth that homosexuality was imported into
their society from somewhere else (…) This kind of myth is very popular in India
today. Many believe that the idea and practice of same-sex love were imported into
India by “foreigners”—Muslim invaders, European conquerors, or American capi-
talists. (…) Labels like “abnormal”, unnatural”, and “unhealthy” are of relatively
recent origin in India.69

Such an attempt aims at correcting former misrepresentations, but also at

easing the tensions that non-heterosexual Indians might face as they are
considered as “culturally unfit.” Hence, Vanita and Kidwai hope that their
book “will help assure homoerotically inclined Indians that large numbers of
their ancestors (…) shared their inclination and were honoured and success-
ful members of society who contributed in major ways to thought, literature,
and the general good.”70 Moreover, according to Parmesh Shahani, “reclaim-
ing the right heritage of India homosexual’s past and constantly emphasizing
it, will provide hope and sustenance, more so for those are living very
difficult lives.”71
The debate over the place of homoerotism and love in Indian history is
connected to major discussions that have happened within LGBT and queer
activism that could be summed up in the slogan “Indian and Lesbian”. This
slogan refers to the controversy around the move Fire, commented in many
texts included in my corpus. In 1998, when the movie was released in India,
Hindu right organizations protested violently against the movie being
obscene and “non-Indian,” and went as far as attacking theatres in which it
was screened. This generated several counter-demonstrations, which are
often considered as the starting point of “out” lesbian politics.72 One placard
held during one of these demonstrations gained much attention. It just said
“Indian and Lesbian.” A picture of this sign appeared in many newspapers,
and it was later treated in the scientific literature as a major moment of
expression of an identity that was before deemed as impossible. Hence, the
affirmation of “lesbian and gay Indian” existences is an important focus of
the many scholars of the corpus, who purposely juxtaposed “Indian” and
“gay,” “lesbian,” or “queer” in their works, starting with the title.73 In that
respect, “India(n)” is used in most titles, even when the publication actually
concerns a specific location, or a period when India did not exist as a State.
This is probably in great part due to editorial demands for “marketability,”
yet it also problematically reinforces the Indian nation (albeit in a queered
form), without it being systematically questioned.74
The need to “find a place” in India is often discussed as much as a personal
need as an academic question. For instance, Suparna Bhaskaran introduces
her book on the emergence of queer sexual subjects in the nineties in India
by a reflection on her own position as an Indian queer graduate student
contemplating whether or not to do fieldwork in India.75 Yet, while the quest
for belonging is difficult to question, attempts at queering the nation have
 INDIA REVIEW 253

been debated both by activists as well as in academia. For Jyoti Puri, these
attempts are located within a broader debate about Hinduism being a “sex-
positive religion,” an affirmation often grounded on partial and uncritical
evidence.76 In a collective review of Vanita and Kidwai’s book, five scholars
of Indian origin teaching various disciplines (literature, history, and cultural
studies) in the United States, discussed this attempt at “tracking” same-sex
love in South Asian’s history. All were appreciative of the book, but several of
them pointed out the difficulty, if not the impossibility of making such a
history. They cautioned against the risk of “flattening” history for the
(respectable) desire of “fitting” LGBT and queer people in a national narra-
tive and having the pleasure of finding one’s place in history.77
Moreover, the insistence on Hinduism being originally a gynefocal or
tolerant religion (vis-à-vis sexual orientations) runs the risk of constructing
Muslims as sole responsible for puritanism, male domination, and
intolerance.78 This was a major debate at the end of the nineties, when
Ashok Row Kavi, a prominent gay (and Hindu) activist, criticized other
organizations for being funded by foreign countries and/or Muslims (he
was mostly referring to Naz foundation).79 Several social scientists/activists
took part in the controversy.80 “Queering” the past is thus problematic as
defining the Indian past is already highly political. Aside from issues pertain-
ing to the potentially disturbing use of a “queer national history” in the
Indian communal context, some authors question the political validity of
such a construction. For instance, according to Nivedita Menon, feminist and
queer politics cannot go along with an assimilationist agenda of fitting in the
mainstream as they should be disruptive and counter-normative.81 Naisargi
Dave is more nuanced, stating that it is nearly impossible for any politics in
India not to engage with the concept of the nation, and not to demonstrate,
by one way or another, its relation and attachment to this nation because of
the colonial experience.82
Both processes of naming the queers or LGBT and giving them a place in
Indian history (and nation) participate in the identification of a political
subject that may be a right-bearer. Yet, the concept of nation is a difficult one
to articulate, as it is often used to silence dissenting voices, or even exclude
them. As Gayatri Spivak underlined, “all (…) clear-cut nostalgias for lost
origins are suspect, especially as grounds of counterhegemonic ideological
production.”83 But beyond the issue of an Indian queer or LGBT, the mere
constitution of political identities is potentially an act of closure and exclu-
sion, for identification, “like all signifying practices (…) is subject to the
‘play’ of différance’. (…) And since as a process it operates across difference,
it entails discursive work, the binding and marking of symbolic boundaries,
the production of ‘frontier-effects’.”84 In that respect, it is ethically and
scientifically crucial for scholars to address the violence of the representa-
tions they participate in forging.
254 V. DUTOYA

Facing the violence of representation

Scholarship on LGBT and queer issues and lives often claim to participate in the
fight against the discriminations faced by all counter-heteronormative people,
and more generally, for a more equal and inclusive society. Yet, this does not
mean that it cannot be exclusionary as well. Indeed, the definition of an object
of studies generally means that some are left out, while others may be forced in.

The violence of representation: Invisibilization and exclusion

As early as in 1999, Jyoti Puri commented that “gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered narratives also tend to evince an urban bias and to be less
conscious of ethnic differences.”85 Moreover, a significant part of the scholar-
ship on LGBT and queer culture focuses on written text and cultural produc-
tions, which are often controlled by the elites, as acknowledged by Vanita and
Kidwai in 2000.86 Thus, there are important gaps in scholarship, and there is a
minimal amount of work (to my knowledge) on the interplay among caste,
class, and nonheteronormative sexuality. Yet, these issues can be crucial, as
noted by Gayatri Reddy in her work on hijras. During her fieldwork, she
realized that what she analyzed with the “theoretical lenses” of sexuality and
gender was also and maybe more importantly a matter of class. This was
problematic not only because it biased her work but also because the choice
of these theoretical lenses was embedded in her own history, as well as in the
North American academic agenda. Thus, she concluded on the need to “con-
textualize our analytic and personal agenda in any representational
endeavor.”87 In that respect, it is not the categories (as the result) that need
to be questioned, but more generally the choice to consider gender identity as a
major determinant in the lives of hijras. There is a risk to distort people’s and
groups’ identities so that they fit in one’s agenda, let it be political, scientific or
both. In that regard, efforts toward a greater inclusiveness of LGBT and queer
scholarship (in terms of object of studies) might not be seen as an effort to be
more inclusive, but as a strategy to gather as many as possible under the LGBT/
Queer agenda, without enough concern for the actual desires of the concerned
parties. Although this is done in conjunction with political and social move-
ments, research participates in the institutionalization and normalization of
categories that then tend to become hegemonic and inescapable. For instance,
in spite of Gayatri Reddy’s remark on the importance of class, it is nowadays
rare to refer to hijras outside of the framework of LGBT studies.
In a text written in 2014, Roshan Das Nair also warns against hegemony. He
argues that the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a “hegemonic
homosexuality” as “a way of being “gay,” which privileges some men and
disenfranchises others, based on socially mediated power differentials.” He
insists on the need to disrupt the idea of a homogeneous “gay community,” in a
 INDIA REVIEW 255

context where LGBT has become a dominant “mode of representation” of

“sexual minorities” in the West as well as in the “Global South.”88 Although
this can be politically justified by the need to get a critical mass, the hegemony
of the LGBT label can be used to “vilify” those who do not, by choice or
capacity, come under this umbrella. The consequence of misrepresentation
may also be very concrete. For instance, in 2011, Paul Boyce and Akshay
Khanna reiterated the critic made in 2001 by Shivananda Khan. According
to them, the focus on sexual identities rather than practices was particularly
detrimental. First, the will to categorize as homosexual all practices between
individual of the same sex might make them disappear. Second, the focus on
identities was not efficient in the context of the fight against HIV/AIDS.89
Many other scholars have acknowledged that research is potentially violent
and exclusionary. In the last 20 years, there have been efforts to expand
research in new directions, and in particular, beyond the urban middle-
class.90 For instance, in 1999, Ashwini Sukthankar regretted that most of
the women included in her anthology belonged to the English speaking
middle-class. She mentioned that she had discussed it with Maya Sharma,
who wanted to make a “strongly activist effort,” but it proved to be too
difficult and expansive to translate from Indian languages.91 Seven years
later, Maya Sharma published her own book, based on oral testimonies of
working class women.92 More recently, several contributions of the edited
volume Because I have a Voice explicitly confronted exclusionary practices
within the “community.”93 A 2014 book on Indian masculinities included
contributions on groups such as kothis, “trans,” and “fat gays.”94

Academic representation and speaking for others

The efforts to expand the scope of research on alternative sexualities and
gender identities are important. Yet, they do not address the issue that was
summarized by Linda Alcoff as the “problem of speaking for other.”
According to her, “certain locations are discursively dangerous,”95 and
when one speaks for those who are less privileged, the risks are high that
this ends up in their further marginalization and silencing, even with the best
intentions. Arguably, the authors of my corpus almost never directly claim to
speak for their respondents or the LGBT/queers, and at most, they are
speaking about different groups and practices. But according to Alcoff,
“both the practice of speaking for as well as the practice of speaking about
others,” engage “the act of representing the other’s needs, goals, situation,
and in fact, who they are.”96
Many authors are aware of this problem, particularly when it comes to
naming groups and practices. For instance, Paola Bacchetta operates a dis-
tinction between “lesbians” (women loving women but not identifying as
lesbians) and lesbians (women who identify as lesbians).97 Similarly, for
256 V. DUTOYA

Anirudha Dutta, though “lower class gender/ sexual difference may be

understood as ‘queer’ in as much as they defy identitarian boundaries,”98 it
is difficult to assign others to a terminology they do not use. Dutta then
concludes the discussion of terminology with caution, explaining that “all
terms should be read as if in scare quotes, denoting unstable formations of
identity rather than essentialised or historically unchanging subject
positions.”99 Yet, all these precautions do not change the fact that at some
point, identities might be assigned to individuals who do not recognize
themselves in them. And these identities are generally not confined to the
academia. In particular, the idea that there is an LGBT community is today
quite pervasive in the Indian media100 or even in public policy making. For
instance, a private member’s bill passed by the upper chamber of parliament
(Rajya Sabha) in 2014 referred explicitly to the “transgender community.”101
Obviously, this movement toward the fixing of communities and identities is
not the direct result of academic work, and there are many other actors. Yet,
academic representation can be said to participate in a process of fixing and
assigning these identities.
For some, in this context, the only solution is to make a political choice.102
According to Naisargi Dave, saying that labels such as “gay” or “lesbian” have
little appeal for working-class, rural or non-Anglophone Indians, is some-
times “elitism dressed up as class sensitivity.”103 She thus presents her choice
of “lesbian” as a “practice of enunciation,” “instead of thinking of ‘lesbian’ as
something people are or are not.”104 Maya Sharma similarly defends her
choice to call her respondents lesbians, though they do not use or know that
word. She quotes a report from one of the first organizations which chose to
call itself lesbian (Campaign for lesbian rights); “lesbian [is] so loaded with
fear and embarrassment and prejudice, a word shrouded in silence, a whisper
that spoke of an identity that must be hidden from others, that frightening
word that dare not cross any threshold.”105 This position is shared by Giti
Thadani and Ashwini Sukthankar, for whom calling one-self, and others, a
lesbian is important because the term is “uncompromising.”106
Another possible strategy to alleviate the violence of representing others is
to carefully locate oneself and one’s speech. This is particularly important, as
many scholars of the corpus do not work in India, and are part of the British
or most frequently North American academy. For them, being both insiders
(as they are identified as “Indian”) and outsiders is challenging, as they find
themselves at risk of commodifying “third world sexualities.” Parmesh
Shahani hence explains that some of his respondents “feel that I am exploit-
ing my sexuality to gain currency in Western academia,”107 while he is
sometimes a cause of resentment because of his “upper-middle class South
Bombay origins and [his] multiple-entry American visa that allows [him] to
cross (at least certain) border with ease.”108 As I have mentioned earlier, this
effort of disclosure can also include “coming-out” as a non-heterosexual
 INDIA REVIEW 257

/queer scholar. But while this strategy of disclosure is important in a context

where the researcher exposes the intimacy of his or her objects of study, it
can also give the impression that s/he belongs to the group s/he is studying
and is thus legitimate to speak for them. Moreover, within gender, LGBT and
queer studies, self-narratives have become a common trope, which is some-
time done in a very generic and automatic manner, without it profoundly
affecting the way the research is done.
Actually, Alcoff argues that disclosing one’s location is important, but does
not solve the issue of speaking for others. Using Gayatri Spivak’s essay, “Can
the Subaltern Speak?” she defends the idea of “speaking to” as a way to
alleviate the risks of speaking for.109 Indeed, in contexts were the sponta-
neous emergence of subaltern voices is unlikely, and thus might require some
speaking for, it is important, according to Alcoff to create the conditions of a
dialogue. Yet, it is not clear what “speaking to/with” can mean from an
academic point of view. It can imply that scholars should be ready to trans-
form and adapt their theoretical and analytical framework when it appears
that their analytical categories are not congruent with the worldviews of their
respondents. This was for instance the case in the aforementioned example,
when Gayatri Reddy realized that the hijras she was studying did not
necessarily define themselves in terms of gender.110 “Speaking to” can also
imply the organization of restitution sessions, particularly when it is highly
unlikely that the respondents will have access to academic texts in English.
However, the nature of my sources did not allow me to evaluate whether or
not restitutions were organized in the context of the studies gathered in my
corpus. “Speaking to” becomes more complex when it comes to research that
does not focus on an object of study who can speak, for instance in cultural
or literary studies. While this scholarship participates in the definition of
queer/LGBT subjects, it is difficult to see how it can organize a dialogue with
these subjects. An interesting case is the book edited by Bose and
Bhattacharyya, The Phobic and the Erotic, as this book brings together
academics, artists and activists, which can be a way to engage a dialogue.111
Such attempts at confronting academic discourses with other types of dis-
courses can be found in several books of the corpus112 and may be a way to
“speak to” instead of speaking about. Yet, this dialogue is not open to
everyone, as it supposes the ability to write in English.
While most of the authors of the corpus (but not all) seem to be aware of
the potential violence of academic discourses, and try to alleviate this vio-
lence, the risks to marginalize others by speaking for them is real. In that
respect, scholars (including myself) need to be aware of this risk and to
critically examine their work and their effects. This seems particularly impor-
tant in a context where the concepts of “queer” and queer studies are often
presented as a solution to some of the problems faced by scholarship on
queer lives and practices.
258 V. DUTOYA

“Queering” representation: A solution or a problem?

One can locate the first scientific discussions of “queer” in Indian context in the
early twenty-first century. In 2000, Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita briefly
discussed the relevance of the term “queer” to their work, and quickly discarded
it.113 Yet, soon after that, “queer” became a term of choice for many scholars
dealing with non-heterosexuals.114 The definitions varied, and sometimes, there
was no definition at all.115 Queer was first used as an “umbrella term” that would
encompass all types of “sexual minorities.” It was also used as a verb, in order to
signify the process by which alternative (queer) readings of social phenomenon,
law, or cultural objects are produced. Interestingly, in several publications, there
is a back and forth between these two types of uses. This move is particularly
visible in the books by Arvind Narrain.116 Already in the small book he
published in 2004, Narrain uses queer in a double understanding, as an umbrella
term which encompasses “the complexity, variety and diversities of identities”
operating “outside the heterosexual matrix,” as well as a term questioning the
heterosexual norm. In particular, he states, “the word ‘queer’ also signifies a
political understanding of the structural nature of oppression and a willingness
to take on board a variety of social struggles.”117 In 2005, he argues with Gautam
Bhan, that the term queer is both a “deeply personal identity and a defiant
political perspective” rejecting the “primacy of the heterosexual, patriarchal
family” and the “assumption of compulsory heterosexuality.”118 Thus, while
they continue to “list” a certain number of groups that they consider as queer,
they affirm that “queer”:

speaks, therefore, of communities that name themselves (as gay or lesbian for
example) as well as of those that do not, recognizing the spaces for same-sex desire
and sexuality that cannot be captured in identities alone. To speak of queer politics is,
in some sense, different from just speaking of gay, lesbian, bisexual transgendered,
kothi, and hijra communities. Queer politics does not speak only of the issues of these
communities as “minority issues,” but instead it speaks of larger understandings of
gender and sexuality in our society that affects all of us, regardless of our sexual
orientation. It speaks of sexuality as a politics intrinsically and inevitably connected
with the politics of class, caste, religion and so on, thereby both acknowledging other
movements and also demanding inclusion within them.119

Such a definition that combines the “umbrella” dimension of queer with

its critical dimension can be found in several other publications.120 “Queer”
is presented as a more useful category of analysis and political action than
“homosexual,” “gay,” or “LGBT” for several reasons.
First, it is a fluid category, open to anyone, group, or practice which is
counter-heteronormative. In that respect, “queer” would avoid congealing
sexual identities and enable meaningful alliances between different subal-
terns. Politically, queer movements originally defined themselves as been
more radical than LGBT groups in that they aim at disrupting the social
 INDIA REVIEW 259

order instead than asking for their integration in it.121 As such, the use of
“queer” can be analyzed as a way to operate what Stuart Hall calls the move
from the “war of manoeuvre” to the “war of position.”122 Hall used this
Gramscian analogy to discuss the transformations of black cultural politics.
He distinguishes two moments, which are not strictly successive. The first
moment is when the term “black” became the organizing category of a new
politics of resistance to racism and marginalization, cutting across many
categories. At this moment, being “black” became a hegemonic category,
dominating other identities and experiences that did not disappear alto-
gether. The second phase is more complex to characterize, and Hall is careful
to remind that it does not replace the first phase, which remains very much
necessary. Yet, in the second phase, there is a shift in the meaning of
representation itself, which must become not only expressive, but also for-
mative. It means understanding that “black” is as much constructed as any
other category and that epistemic violence is both inside and outside this
category. Thus, it renders necessary to move towards a politics:

which works with and through difference, which is able to build those forms of
solidarity and identification which make common struggle possible but without
suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities, and which can
effectively draw the political boundary lines without which political contestation
is impossible, without fixing those boundaries for eternity. It entails the movement
in black politics, from what Gramsci called the “war of manoeuvre” to the “war of
position”—the struggle around positionalities.123

This interplay between “identities” and “positions” is manifest in works

that keep identifying distinctive communities or groups, while insisting on
the position of these groups within power relationships. By defining non-
heterosexuals as “queer,” the objective is then not to participate in the
normalization and visibility of specific sexual practices and identities but to
question the existence of a sexual norm, and connect sexual normativity to
other systems of domination. As Menon puts it:

At best, society’s response to the question of sexuality has been in the form of
“respecting choice” (…)—that is “most of us are heterosexual, but there are others
out there who are either lesbian or gay, or B, T, or K.” The alphabet proliferates
endlessly outside the unchallenged heterosexual space. But if we recognize that this
‘normal’ heterosexuality is painfully constructed and kept in place (…), precisely in
order to sustain existing hierarchies of class and caste and gender, then we would
have to accept that all of us are—or have the potential to be—“queer.”124

In these reflections on the concept of queer, sexuality is incorporated in a

larger set of norms. Narrain and Gupta propose the figure of the “queer
subaltern,” relocating queer politics “within a larger history of the struggle
against forms of social subordination in India.”125 Importantly, the authors
contend that these alliances between subalterns should not be grounded on
260 V. DUTOYA

analogies (such as saying that being queer is similar to being a dalit) or need
for strategic alliances. Rather, they insist on the intertwining of dominations,
and thus the need to counter them simultaneously through the disruptive
potential of counter-normative love and desire, let it be same-sex, inter-caste,
or inter-communal.
The term “queer” is now also widely used in activist circles. One example
among others, the Delhi pride march, organized from 2007 onward is a “Queer
Pride” and not a LGBT or Gay Pride.126 On this point, there is clearly a
connection between activist and academic work, as some key actors are active
in both spheres. For instance, Gautam Bhan has played an important role in the
organization of the Pride, as well as in the academic diffusion of the term queer,
as an author, editor of collective books and publisher. The rapid diffusion of the
term “queer” in both activist and academic circles has been debated and
criticized. First, as underlined by Paola Bacchetta, “queer” remains a “foreign”
term, forged outside India and “inadequate in the South Asian context, for it
does not consider the complexities of Indian gender, sexual, subject, and rela-
tional formations contextually.127 Yet, as she notes that the attempts to construct
and propose Indian terms (in vernacular languages) were largely unsuccessful,
she sees no other option than using this inadequate term.128 Interestingly,
Nivedeta Menon, who contrarily to Bachetta lives and teaches in India, does
not have such hesitations.129 They both participated in a conference held in 2014
in Paris.130 In her talk, Menon presented the rapid adoption of the term “queer”
by Indian activists, as well as the fact that they had soon reached the conclusion
that trying to translate it would be meaningless.
A more substantial critic is made by Ashley Tellis in an article published in
2012 in Jindal Global Law Review. He argued that the term “queer” had no
critical or disruptive capacities in India, as it was taken over by NGOs and used
as a proxy to cover the “laundry list of identities” (gay, lesbian, hijra, etc.).131
According to him, the uncritical use of queer, disconnected of the social and
historical contexts in which it was forged, is a way to dress with theoretical
sophistication the lack of real engagements with the lives and struggles of those
who have nonnormative sexualities, from hijras to sex-workers. Indeed,
while the queer critics of heteronormativity can be theoretically rich, they
are often loosely connected to empirical studies, and thus actually say little on
how non-heterosexual people live and struggle. Tellis’ critique also targets
queer politics. For instance, in a blog post on Chennai floods
in December 2015, he criticized the lack of reaction of the queer movement
in harsh terms; “Where is the active participation of the queer movement in the
general Chennai relief activities on the ground (…)? Too busy having a panel
on coming out instead?”132 While his post generated reactions that pointed out
to actions of queer individuals and groups,133 it is true that in spite of frequent
call to unite the fights against heteronormativity, caste and class exploitation,
etc., there is little actual connection between these struggles in contemporary
 INDIA REVIEW 261

India. Thus far, the queer struggle is mostly associated to the fight against the
section 377 of the IPC, a fight for legal recognition that is partly grounded in
the right to privacy.134 And, although the actors of this very long judicial
struggle have demonstrated their resilience and efficiency in bringing the issue
in the limelight, this struggle has remained confined to the LGBT/queer and
feminist sphere, and has not forged alliances with other subaltern groups.135
As a result, thus far, the inclusiveness of queer studies and politics is
mostly discursive in the Indian context. Moreover, the very fluidity and
instability of “queer” as a concept can sometimes become problematic as it
can lead to disembodied analyses. As underlined by Pushpesh Kumar,
“‘queer’ loses its radical potential when it takes a purely cultural turn and
tends to neglect the pervasive impact of political economy.”136 In that
respect, while “queer” can be a useful concept to go beyond an approach
based mostly on sexual identities, its disruptive dimension is by no means
systematic. As any concept, it requires a careful examination, and although it
brings new dimensions to reflection over gender and sexuality, it also brings
specific limitations and issues.

Conclusion: The researcher and the activist

The role of researchers within the LGBT and queer movements has been
widely discussed. For Éric Fassin, although there is an evident continuity
between academic research on sexuality and activism, the perspectives need
to be different, as social scientists and in particular historians, need to question
the dominant historiography constructed within the LGBT and queer move-
ment, but also, more deeply, the very notion of “homosexuality” as a fixed
identity.137 John d’Emilio, a pioneer in LGBT history, expressed a similar
viewpoint when he argued that what historians had to offer the LGBT move-
ment was not reassurance about their identity, but tools to question sexual
identities as fixed categories.138 Such a position is in tune with Bourdieu’s
stand on the role of social scientists. According to him, the social scientist
“must take as his object of studies the intention to ascribe their classes to others
and to tell them what they are. (…) He must analyze, to repudiate it, the
ambition of a creative world vision (…) that would make things exist according
to his vision”, or he will just be “doing politics by other means.”139
In the case of gender, LGBT and queer studies in/on India, there
seems to be an irreducible tension between two objectives. First, ques-
tioning and deconstructing dominating social and political representa-
tions of gender and sexualities. Second, supporting feminist, LGBT and
queer politics that sometimes need to “fix” their constituencies, be it as
“women”, “LGBT” (or any of these letters) or “queer.” Yet, through the
Gramscian model of the “organic intellectual,” Stuart Hall suggests that
these two objectives might also function together, albeit with tensions.
262 V. DUTOYA

Hall uses the model of the “organic intellectual” to reflect on the roles of
researchers (himself included) who worked at the Birmingham Center on
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). To him, to be an organic
intellectual is to accept to play “the game of the hegemony,” yet trying
to out-smart it. Such an intellectual should also transmit knowledge and
theories to those who cannot access them directly, because they do not
belong to the class of the intellectuals.140 Many parallels can be drawn
between the academic and social marginality experienced by those who
initially engaged in cultural studies in the CCCS141 and those who
started working in the nineties on LGBT and queer issues in India. In
both cases, researchers expressed solidarity with their respondents, and
were critically aware of the potential consequences of their work, both
on the lives of their respondents and on themselves.
The role of the “organic intellectual” is not an easy one, and one might
argue that to avoid the risk of speaking for other and misrepresenting them,
scholars should remain as objective and distant as possible of their object of
studies. Yet, in a context where LGBT, queers and nonheterosexuals are
denied basic rights and face discrimination, such distance does not seem
possible or ethical. Academic representations of gender identities, practices
and sexualities are important as, along with cultural and political representa-
tions, they participate in legitimizing the presence of LGBT/queer individuals
and groups in the public sphere. Thus, while there is an irreducible tension
between the need to fix scientific and political subjects and the contestation
of (hetero)normativity, this tension should not be avoided, but worked
through by systematically reviewing political and analytical categories and
practices. In this regard, the absence of consensus on the “right” terminology
to discuss LGBT/queer lives and practices is positive, as it forces scholars to
always question their positions and choices, and never to allow their repre-
sentations to become hegemonic.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jules Falquet and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal for their comments and
suggestions, as well as the researchers and activists who took the time to meet me while I was
preparing this article. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Notes

1. It is difficult to opt for a more precise term, as one of the objects of this article is to
analyze the political dimension of scientific terminology. I use “nonheterosexual” for
those who do not identify as heterosexuals or do not exclusively practice “normative
heterosexuality,” considered in the Indian context as the sex/gender system based on
marriage and the (ideally reproductive) sexual relationship between a man and a
 INDIA REVIEW 263

woman. I use “LGBT and queer” to refer to individuals, groups, and political move-
ments who identify themselves as such or to any letter of the LGBT acronym or who
have nonheterosexual practices. When discussing specific individuals and groups, I have
kept the terminology they use. For the sake of fluidity, I use the expression “LGBT
and queer scholarship” to designate all academic work on nonheterosexuals, LGBT,
and queer.
2. Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya, dir., The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics
of Sexualities in Contemporary India (Oxford, UK: Seagull Books, 2007), x.
3. Soline Blanchard and Milka Metso, “Rue des entrepreneuses: des féministes universi-
taires à l’épreuve du marché,” in Les féministes de la deuxième vague, edited by Christine
Bard, dir., (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 221–30; Ellen
Lewin and William L. Leap, ed., Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay
Anthropologists (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
4. Laurence Cox, “Scholarship and Activism: A Social Movements Perspective,” Studies in
Social Justice 9, no. 1 (2015): 34–53.
5. Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique, no. 20 (1991–92):
5–32.
6. Pierre Bourdieu, “La délégation et le fétichisme politique,” Actes de la recherche en
sciences sociales no. 52-53, (1984): 50.
7. Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” in Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited
by Stuart Hall (London, UK: Sage, 1997), 1.
8. Hall, “Introduction,” p. 21.
9. Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture,
Globalization and the World System, edited by Anthony King, dir. (London, UK:
Macmillan, 1991), 34.
10. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988).
11. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies,
edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London, UK: Routledge, 1996), 441–49.
12. Pierre Bourdieu, “Espace Social et Genèse Des ‘Classes,’” Actes de La Recherche En
Sciences Sociales, no. 52–53 (1984): 5.
13. John Law and John Urry, “Enacting the Social,” Economy and Society 33, no. 3 (2004):
390–410.
14. Virginie Dutoya, La représentation des femmes dans les Parlements de l’Inde et du
Pakistan (Paris, France: Dalloz, 2014).
15. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses,” Boundary 212, no. 3 (1984): 333–58.
16. I consider as a scholar/academic an individual who works in a university or research
center, or who convincingly defines him/herself as an independent researcher.
17. This particularly concerns contributions to collective books that published texts from
activists, artists, along with academic texts. I have excluded books written by journalists,
as well as texts, which seemed too far from social sciences and mostly grounded in
public health (on the issue of HIV/AIDS for instance).
18. There is a similar discussion in Bandana Purkayastha, Mangala Subramaniam, Manisha
Desai, and Sunita Bose, “The Study of Gender in India: A Partial Review,” Gender &
Society 17, no. 4 (2002): 503–04.
19. English is the main academic language in India, I could have tried to access sources in
Hindi and Urdu, yet this would have been very time consuming, and there are many
other Indian languages.
20. Long excerpts of the interviews are available online: http://www.projectbolo.com/
21. I borrow “counter-heteronormative” from Nivedita Menon, who uses that term to “refer
264 V. DUTOYA

to a range of political assertions that implicitly or explicitly challenge heteronormativity

and the institution of monogamous patriarchal marriage,” cf Nivedita Menon, “Outing
Heteronormativity: Nation, Citizen, Feminist Disruptions,” in Sexualities, edited by
Nivedita Menon (New Delhi, India: Women Unlimited, 2007), 3.
22. Hijras are generally phenotypic men who wear female clothing and, ideally, renounce
sexual desire and practice by undergoing castration, more rarely, they were born
intersex, cf Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South
India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. Among the precursors work-
ing on hijras, we find; Laurence W. Preston “A Right to Exist: Eunuchs and the State in
Nineteenth-Century India,” Modern Asian Studies 21, no. 3 (1987): 371–87. Serana
Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
Publishing, 1989) (a second edition was published in 1999, it is not included in the
corpus, as the main work was anterior).
23. Some texts were authored by several individuals, and some individuals authored several
publications. The full corpus is presented in Annex 1. In terms of gender, the corpus is
balanced, with as many self-identifying men as women, and one author who does not
seem to identify in terms of gender (this was determined through the use of personal
pronouns in the “about the author section” or on the institutional webpage).
24. Giti Thadani, Sakhiyani, Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India (London, UK:
Cassel, 1996). Also see her interview, as well as Vanita’s and Kidwai’s for the Bolo
Project (www.projectbolo.com/).
25. I have followed the activities of the Gender Studies Group of Delhi University during
Spring 2015. A pioneer student association is Anjuman, a queer collective created by
JNU students in 2003. See http://anjuman_jnu.blogspot.fr/
26. Paola Bacchetta, “Rescaling Transnational ‘Queerdom’: Lesbian and ‘Lesbian’
Identitary-Positionalities in Delhi in the 1980s,” in Sexualities, edited by Nivedita
Menon (New Delhi, India: Women Unlimited, 2007): 103–27; Nivedita Menon,
“Outing Heternormativity,” pp. 3–5.
27. For a detailed chronology, see Pushpesh Kumar, “Queering Indian Sociology: A Critical
Engagement” (New Dehli, India: CAS Working Paper, 2014), 18–19.
28. Subir K. Kole, “Globalizing Queer? AIDS, Homophobia and the Politics of Sexual
Identity in India,” Globalization and Health 3, no. 8 (2007). http://globalizationand
health.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1744-8603-3-8 (accessed December 1, 2015)
29. Several authors point to the creation of the magazine Trikone (for LGBT people of
South Asian origin) in San Francisco as well as debates around who should be
authorized to participate in the South Asian Parade in New York, See Gayatri
Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
30. Arvind Narrain and Alok Gupta, eds., Law Like Love: Queer Perspective on Law (New
Delhi, India: Yoda Press, 2011), xxviii.
31. There have been recent developments in the case, when in February 2016, the Supreme
Court referred the curative petitions submitted by Naz Foundation to a five members
constitutional bench. Not all LGBT and queer movements and activists supported this
petition in 2001, See Naisargi Dave, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of
Ethics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 178–92. This ambivalence also appeared
in several of the discussions I had with scholars and activists between 2013 and 2015.
32. See for instance the testimonies of Saleem Kidwai, Hoshang Merchant, Giti Thadani,
Parmesh Shahani, Ruth Vanita and others, collected through Project Bolo (www.pro
jectbolo.com/). Among the authors of my corpus, Giti Thadani founded what is
considered the first “out” lesbian groups (Sakhi) in 1991; Gautam Bhan and Arvind
 INDIA REVIEW 265

Narrain have been members of different collectives. Maya Sharma was also part of
women’s groups, such as Jagori and later Parma, a LBT group based in Gujarat.
33. Among others: Naisargi Dave, Queer Activism in India; Aniruddha Dutta, “Claiming
Citizenship, Contesting Civility: The Institutional LGBT Movement and the Regulation
of Gender/Sexual Dissidence in West Bengal, India,” Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 1
(2012): 110–40. Parmesh Shahani, Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in
Contemporary India (New Delhi, India: Sage, 2008); Maya Sharma, Loving Women:
Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India (New Delhi, India: Yoda Press, 2006).
34. Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan, eds. Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India
(New Delhi, India: Yoda Press, 2005).
35. Narrain and Bhan, Because I Have a Voice, p. 17.
36. Gopinath, Impossible Desires, p. 135. Suparna Bhaskaran, Made in India:
Decolinizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), 3.
37. Sharma, Loving Women.
38. Shahani, Gay Bombay.
39. Hoshang Merchant, Yaarana: Gay Writing From South Asia (New Delhi, India: Penguin
Books, 2010 [1999]); Ashwini Sukthankar, Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from
India (New Delhi, UK: Penguin Books, 1999); Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds.,
Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York, NY: St
Martin’s Press, 2000); Thadani, Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India.
40. Vanita and Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India, p. xvii.
41. Law and Urry, “Enacting the Social.”
42. Bose and Bhattacharyya, dir., The Phobic and the Erotic, p. xiii.
43. Sukthankar, Facing the Mirror, p. xxii.
44. Arvind Narrain, Queer: Despised Sexuality, Law and Social Change (Bangalore, India:
Books for Change/ActionAid Karnataka Projects, 2004), 7.
45. Ashley Tellis, “Disrupting the Dinner Table: Re-Thinking the ‘Queer Movement’ in
Contemporary India,” Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 1 (2012): 142–56.
46. Reddy, With Respect to Sex, p. 3.
47. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton,
NJ, Princeton University Press: 1996); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY:
Pantheon, 1978).
48. Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2000).
49. Reddy, With Respect to Sex, p. 3–4.
50. Openly out Indian scholars confirmed this in personal discussions.
51. Narrain, and Bhan, Because I Have a Voice, p. 2.
52. Bourdieu, “La délégation et le fétichisme politique.”
53. Pierre Bourdieu, “Espace social et genèse des ‘classes’,” Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales 52–53, (1984): 5. Italics are in the original text.
54. Kothis can designate the “passive” role in a homosexual anal relationship, or, as an
identity biologically born men who behave and refer as themselves as women.
55. Bourdieu, “La délégation et le fétichisme politique,” p. 5.
56. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” p. 443.
57. On Project Bolo: she is not the only one to express such a lack of words.
58. Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India., p. xx; Gopinath, Impossible Desires, p. 60;
Sanjay Srivastava, ed., Sexuality Studies (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press,
2013), 4.
266 V. DUTOYA

This is not an exhaustive list, as Foucault appears in most of the bibliographies of the
books of my corpus.
59. Ruth Vanita, Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture
(New Delhi, India: Yoda Press, 2005), 61; Gopinath, Impossible Desires, p. 142; Shohini
Ghosh, Fire: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010).
60. Vanita, Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile, p. 61–65. This question is not specific to India,
also see Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007).
61. Vanita, Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile, p. 65. Similarly, for Shohini Ghosh the origin of
the word “queer” is not relevant to a choice that should be grounded merely on
scientific considerations (Interview with the author, New Delhi, India, April 2015).
62. Vanita, Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile, p. 67.
63. Now, the term is mostly used in diasporic contexts. For examples, two organizations,
respectively located in Texas and Washington DC are called Khush Texas and KhushDC.
Bhaskaran, Made in India.
64. Shivananda Khan, “Culture, Sexualities, Identities: Men Who have Sex with Men in
India,” Journal of Homosexuality 40, no. 3/4 (2001): 105.
65. Ashley Tellis, “Ethics, Human Rights and LGBT Discourse in India,” in Applied Ethics
and Human Rights: Conceptual Analysis and Contextual Applications, edited by Shashi
Motilal (New Delhi, India: Anthem Press India, 2010), 160.
66. Tellis, “Ethics, Human Rights,” pp. 154–59.
67. Menon, “Outing Heteronormativity,” p. 18.
68. Thadani, Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India (Cassell, 1998).
69. Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, pp. xxiii-xxiv.
70. Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, p. xxiv.
71. Shahani, Gay Bombay, p. 103.
72. For a detailed analysis, see Dave, Queer Activism in India, p. 138–65 and Ghosh, Fire.
73. See the corpus in Annex 1.
74. Among those who do question it, are those working on diasporas. Kidwai and Vanita
also discuss the term, but they nonetheless opt for “India” as a matter of commodity.
See Gopinath, Impossible Desires; Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, p. xv.
75. Bhaskaran, Made in India, introduction.
76. Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India: Narrative of Gender and
Sexuality (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 177–81.
77. Rosemary Marangoly George, Indrani Chatterjee, Gayatri Gopinath, C. M. Naim, Geeta
Patel, and Ruth Vanita, “Tracking ‘Same-Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in
South Asia,” Gender & History 14, no. 1 (2002): 7–30. See in particular the sections by
George, Gopinath, and Patel.
78. See for example, Thadani, Sakhiyani, p. 3
79. Menon, “Outing Heteronormativity,” pp. 31–32.
80. Menon, “Outing Heteronormativity,” p. 33. In her interview on the Project Bolo website,
Giti Thadani takes the defense of Kavi against Saleem Kidwai’s accusation of communalism.
81. Nivedita Menon, “How Natural is Normal? Feminism and Compulsory
Heterosexuality,” in Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, edited by Arvind
Narrain and Gautam Bhan, (New Delhi, India: Yoda Press, 2005), p. 34.
82. Dave, Queer Activism in India, pp. 161–63.
83. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), 307.
84. Stuart Hall, “Who Needs Identity?” in Questions of Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and
Paul Du Gay (London, UK: Sage, 1997), 3.
 INDIA REVIEW 267

85. Puri, Woman, Body, Desire, p. 174.

86. Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, p. xxiii.
87. Reddy, With Respect to Sex, p. 4.
88. Roshan Das Nair, “If Singularity is the Problem, Could Intersectionality Be the
Solution? Exploring the Mediation of Sexuality on Masculinity,” in Masculinty and its
Challenges in India: Essays on Changing Perceptions, ed. Rohit K. Dasgupta, K. Moti
Gokulsing (Jefferson MO: McFarland & Company, 2014), 77.
89. Paul Boyce, Akshay Khanna, “Rights and Representations: Querying the Male-to-Male
Sexual Subject in India,” Culture, Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for
Research, Intervention and Care 13, no. 1 (2011): 89–100.
90. Kumar, Queering Indian Sociology.
91. Sukthankar, Facing the Mirror, p. xxvii.
92. Sharma, Loving Women.
93. Alok Gupta, “Englishpur ki Kothi: Class Dynamics in the Queer Movement in India,” in
Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, edited by Arvind Narrain and Gautam
Bhan, (New Delhi, India: Yoda Press, 2005), 123–42. Ashwini Sukthankar,
“Complicating Gender: Rights of Transsexuals in India;” in Because I Have a Voice:
Queer Politics in India, edited by Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan, (New Delhi, India:
Yoda Press, 2005), 164–74.
94. Rohit K. Dasgupta and K. Moti Gokulsing, eds, Masculinity and its Challenges in India:
Essays on Changing Perceptions (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014).
95. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” p. 7.
96. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” p. 9.
97. Bacchetta, “Rescaling Transnational ‘Queerdom,’” p. 111.
98. Dutta, “Claiming Citizenship, Contesting Civility,” p. 119.
99. Dutta, “Claiming Citizenship, Contesting Civility,” p. 119.
100. See for instance in the reports regarding the judicial process around the section 377 of
the IPC; “SC to Hear in Open Court Curative Plea on Homosexuality,” The Hindu,
January 29, 2016.
101. See “Statement of Object and Reasons” of The rights of transgender persons bill, 2014,
as introduced in the Rajya Sabha, on December 12, 2014. http://rajyasabha.nic.in/
(accessed January 2, 2015).
102. There is one notable exception; in his introduction to his “gay writing anthology,”
Hoshang Merchant criticizes the use of the term gay, partly for its political dimension;
“I resent gay as a political category as it is a political one,” Merchant, Yaarana, p. xii.
103. Dave, Queer Activism in India, p. 20. Suparna Bhaskaran made a similar observation, see
Suparna Bhaskaran, Made in India, pp. 113–14.
104. Dave, Queer Activism in India, p. 20.
105. CALERI, Khamosh! Emergency Jari Hai! Lesbian Emergence: A citizen’s Report (New
Delhi, India: CALERI, 1999), 17; Quoted in Sharma, Loving Women, p. 5.
106. Sukthankar, Facing the Mirror, p. xx; Thadani, Sakhiyani, p. 9.
107. Shahani, Gay Bombay, p. 150.
108. Shahani, Gay Bombay, p. 152.
109. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” p. 22; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can
the Subaltern Speak?”.
110. Reddy, With Respect to Sex, p. 4.
111. Bose and Bhattacharyya, dir., The Phobic and the Erotic.
112. Narrain and Bhan, eds., Because I Have a Voice; Narrain and Gupta, eds., Law Like Love.
113. Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, p. xxi. In my corpus, the first in-depth use
268 V. DUTOYA

of the term queer is in a 1997 article by Geeta Patel. Yet, this text is set in the diasporic
context, and did not have the same kind of impact on “Indian” scholarship than Vanita
and Kidwai’s book. Geeta Patel, “Home, Homo, Hybrid: Translating Gender, College
Literature 24, no. 1 (1997): 133–50.
114. On the use of the concept in Indian context, see Brenda Cossman, “Continental Drift:
Queer, Feminism, Postcolonial,” Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 1 (2012): 17–35.
115. Among other examples, Rahul Rao’s article and Shohini Ghosh’s book both put “queer”
at the center of their work, without formally defining the concept. Ghosh, Fire; Rahul
Rao, “Queer Questions,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16, no. 2 (2014):
199–217.
116. Narrain, Queer: Despised Sexuality; Narrain and Gupta, eds., Law Like Love.
117. Narrain, Queer: Despised Sexuality, p. 2.
118. Narrain and Bhan, eds., Because I Have a Voice, pp. 3–4.
119. Narrain and Bhan, eds., Because I Have a Voice, p. 4.
120. Bhaskaran, Made in India, p. 9. Rajinder Dudrah, “Queer as Desis: Secret Politics of
Gender and Sexuality in Bollywood Films in Diasporic Urban Ethnoscapes,” in Global
Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, edited by Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti.
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 304; Gopinath, Impossible
Desires.
121. I do not have the space here to come back on the origin of queer movements, on that
subject, one can refer to David Bell and Jon Binnie, The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics
and Beyond (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000).
122. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” pp. 441–45.
123. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” p. 444.
124. Menon, “How Natural is Normal?,” p. 39.
125. Narrain and Gupta, eds., Law Like Love, p. xiv. Ratna Kapur for herself, speaks of a
“sexual subaltern,” cf Ratna Kapur, “Multitasking Queer: Reflections on the Possibilities
of Homosexual Dissidence in Law,” Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 1 (2012): 36–59.
126. Amber Vora, “Organizing Delhi’s Pride: A Conversation with Gautam Bhan,” Samar,
no. 30 (2008). http://samarmagazine.org/archive/articles/274 (accessed December 2,
2015).
127. Paola Bacchetta, “Queer Formations in (Hindu) Nationalism,” in Sexuality Studies,
edited by Sanjay Srivastava (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2013): 121–24.
128. Maya Sharma made a similar conclusion when she realized that though her respondents
did not identify as lesbian, neither did they identified with any Hindi word that had
been forged. On the contrary, Dave has shown that many middle-class non-English
speaking Indian women identified as lesbians. See Sharma, Loving Women, p. 33; Dave,
Queer Activism in India, p. 20.
129. Of course, there are probably other explanations to their respective positions than their
locations.
130. Paola Bacchetta “Décoloniser le féminisme: Intersectionnalités, Assemblages, Co-
Formations,” and Nivedita Menon, “Is Feminism about ‘Women’? Rethinking
Intersectionality from India,” Communications for the Conference “Intersectionnalité
et colonialité: débats contemporains,” Organized by the Cedref at the University Paris 7
—Diderot, March 28, 2014.
131. Tellis, “Disrupting the Dinner Table.”
132. Ashley Tellis, “Time for the Queer Movement to Deal with its Shit,” December 16, 2016
http://www.gaylaxymag.com/blogs/queer-shit/#gs.zfdzsmE (accessed January 15, 2016).
133. “Chennai Flood Relief Efforts—A Response to Ashley Tellis’s Post,” December 26, 2016
 INDIA REVIEW 269

http://www.gaylaxymag.com/blogs/chennai-flood-relief-efforts-a-response-to-ashley-
tellis-post/#gs.yssm950 (accessed January 15, 2016).
134. This obviously does not imply that this struggle is illegitimate; only that it relies on a
very classic right-based approach, which was contested within the movement, on this,
see Note 31.
135. The coalition Voice against 377 unites LGBT/queer activists and organizations, as well
as feminist collectives and NGOs. See http://www.voicesagainst377.org.
136. Kumar, “Queering Sociology,” p. 8.
137. Éric Fassin, Le sexe politique: Genre et sexualité au miroir transatlantique (Paris, France:
Éditions EHESS, 2009), p. 100.
138. John D’Emilio, “Making and Un-making Minorities: The Tensions between Gay Politics
and History,” Review of Law and Social Change 19, (1986): 915–22. On this issue, also
see Jeffrey Escoffier, American Homo: Community and Perversity (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1998).
139. Bourdieu, “Espace social et genèse des ‘classes,’” p. 9.
140. Stuart Hall, “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies,” in Cultural Studies, edited by
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, dirs. (London, UK: Routledge,
1992), 282.
141. On this, see Armand Mattelart and Erik Neveu, “Cultural Studies’ Stories. La domes-
tication d’une pensée sauvage ?” Réseaux 14, no. 80 (1996): 11–58.

Annex: Corpus
Anuja Agrawal, “Gendered Bodies: The Case of the ‘Third Gender’ in India,” Contributions to
Indian Sociology 31, no. 2 (1997): 273–97.
Zaid Al Baset, “Section 377 and the Myth of Heterosexuality,” Jindal Global Law Review 4, no.
1 (2012): 89–109.
Paola Bacchetta, “Queer Formations in (Hindu) Nationalism,” Sexuality Studies, ed. Sanjay
Srivastava, (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2013), 121–40.
Paola Bacchetta, “Rescaling Transnational ‘Queerdom’: Lesbian and ‘Lesbian’ Identitary
Positionalities in Delhi in the 1980s,” in Sexualities, ed. Nivedita Menon (New Delhi,
India: Women Unlimited, 2007), 103–27.
Suparna Bhaskaran, Made in India: Decolonization, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects
(New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya, eds., The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of
Sexualities in Contemporary India (Oxford, UK: Seagull Books, 2007).
Paul Boyce and Akshay Khanna, “Rights and Representations: Queerying the Male-to-Male
Sexual Subject in India,” Culture, Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for
Research, Intervention and Care 13, no. 1 (2011): 89–100.
Lawrence Cohen, “The Pleasures of Castration: The Postoperative Status of Hijras, Jankhas,
and Academics,” in Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture, ed. P. Abramson and S. Pinkerton.
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 276–304.
Brenda Cossman, “Continental Drift: Queer, Feminism, Postcolonial,” Jindal Global Law
Review 4, no. 1 (2012): 17–35.
Rohit K. Dasgupta and K. Moti Gokulsing, eds., Masculinity and Its Challenges in India:
Essays on Changing Perceptions (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014).
Roshan Das Nair, “If Singularity is the Problem, Could Intersectionality Be the Solution?
Exploring the Mediation of Sexuality on Masculinity,” in Masculinty and its Challenges in
270 V. DUTOYA

India: Essays on Changing Perceptions, ed. Rohit K. Dasgupta, K. Moti Gokulsing;

(Jefferson MO: McFarland & Company, 2014), 73–92.
Naisargi Dave, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012). 1380
Aniruddha Dutta, “Claiming Citizenship, Contesting Civility: The Institutional LGBT
Movement and the Regulation of Gender/ Sexual Dissidence in West Bengal, India,”
Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 1 (2012): 110–41.
Shohini Ghosh, Fire: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010).
Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Alok Gupta, “Englishpur ki Kothi: Class Dynamics in the Queer Movement in India,” in
Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, ed. Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan,
(New Delhi, India: Yoda Press, 2005), 123–42.
Kira Hall, “‘Go Suck Your Husband’s Sugarcane!’ Hijras and the Use of Sexual Insult,” in
Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall. (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 430–60.
Sherry Joseph, “Gay and Lesbian Movement in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 31, no.
33 (1996): 2228–33.
Ratna Kapur, “Multitasking Queer: Reflections on the Possibilities of Homosexual Dissidence
in Law,” Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 1 (2012): 36–59.
Shivananda Khan, “Culture, Sexualities, and Identities,” Journal of Homosexuality 40, no. 3
(2001): 99–115.
Subir K. Kole, “Globalizing Queer? AIDS, Homophobia and the Politics of Sexual Identity in
India,” Globalization and Health 3, no. 8 (2007). http://globalizationandhealth.biomedcen
tral.com/articles/10.1186/1744-8603-3-8 (Accessed 01/12/2015).
Pushpesh Kumar, “Queering Indian Sociology: A Critical Engagement,” CAS Working Paper
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