GENDER, SEXUALITY, DECOLONIZATION

This book presents a new approach to the understanding of non-normative

sexuality and gender transgressive modes in South Asia and South Asian dias-
pora. It reconceives sexual representation from the point of view of the theo-
retical, political and empirical trajectories of decolonization, provincialization
and neoliberalism to look at the role of historical contingency, postcolonial
sexual politics and gender and sexual diversity. The volume brings together
anthropological, historical, material and political analyses around South
Asian sexual politics by exploring a range of themes, including culture, class,
ethnicity, identity, intersectionality, migration, borders, diaspora, modernity
and cosmopolitanism across various local, regional and global contexts.
By using Southern/non-Western and subaltern theorizations of gender
and sexuality, the book discusses South Asian sexualities through issues
such as the sexual politics of indeterminacy; sexual subculture, iconography
and political decision-making; religious identity; queer South Asian dias-
pora; decolonizing the postcolonial body; sexual politics, gender and femi-
nist debates; discrimination and socio-political violence; the political
economy of empowerment; and critical appropriation of the 377 Indian
Penal Code. It also builds forms of dialogues to bridge the gap between
academic and development practitioners.
With diverse case studies and a fresh theoretical framework, this book
will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of South Asian studies,
gender studies, sexuality studies, sociology and social anthropology, politi-
cal studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial and global South studies.

Ahonaa Roy teaches at the School of Social Sciences at the Indian Institute
of Technology, Bombay, India. A social anthropologist, with MA and DPhil
(University of Sussex), she previously taught at the Delhi School of
Economics, Department of Sociology. She was previously appointed at the
Ministry of Health and has been member of the National Urban Health
Mission, Government of India. Ahonaa has been part of several projects
with the United Nations, USAID and Government of India. Her research
interests include gender and sexuality, medical anthropology, community
health and sexual health, anthropology of the body and embodiment, post-
colonial studies, postmodern feminist studies and Southern theories. Her
book The Making of the Cosmopolitan is forthcoming in 2021.
 This is an important and groundbreaking book which brings to-
gether scholarly work on gender, sexuality and sexual politics from
across South Asia and its diasporas. Interrogating the colonial and
postcolonial contexts as well as the possibilities for radical futures,
the essays demonstrate the power of ethnography in throwing new
light on sexual identity and politics.
– Katy J. Gardner, Professor of Anthropology, London School of
Economics and Political Science, University of London, UK

This timely anthology calls for a thorough recalibration of the

epistemologies through which we understand sexuality and sexual
politics in global South Asia. The essays critically engage postco-
lonial, transnational, and de-colonial critiques to ask a set of pro-
vocative questions around what it means to produce theory from
the south. The volume centres “trouble, breakages and ruptures”
to explore both political and aesthetic practices of negotiation and
subversion. With a firm accent on plurality, the anthology offers
new possibilities of negotiating racialized, sexualized, and gendered
forms of resistance. This will be an invaluable resource, not least
because it brings into conversation a remarkable set of interlocu-
tors engaged in the critical work of border crossing.
– Dina M Siddiqi, Clinical Associate Professor, Global Liberal
Studies, New York University, USA

There has been a surge of sorts in South Asian scholarship on

sexual and gender diversity, but this anthology is like no other: it
features an astonishing array of incisive contributions from across
the subcontinent that engage the reader with the latest in decolo-
nial, intersectional and radical thinking about sexual and gender-
non-conformity. A towering, once-in-a-generation achievement!
– Vanja Hamzić, Senior Lecturer, School of Oriental and African
Studies, University of London, UK
GENDER, SEXUALITY,
DECOLONIZATION
South Asia in the World Perspective

Edited by Ahonaa Roy

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Ahonaa Roy; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Ahonaa Roy to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this book are
solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those
of the publisher. The analyses and representations based on
research material are intended here to serve general educational
and informational purposes and not obligatory upon any party.
The authors and editor have made every effort to ensure that the
information presented in the book was correct at the time of press,
but the editor and the publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim
any liability with respect to the accuracy, completeness, reliability,
suitability, selection and inclusion of the contents of this book and
any implied warranties or guarantees. The editor and publisher make
no representations or warranties of any kind to any person, product
or entity for any loss, including, but not limited to special, incidental
or consequential damage, or disruption alleged to have been caused,
directly or indirectly, by omissions or any other related cause.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-90124-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02547-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Global, India
To my father
 CONTENTS

Contributors ix
Foreword by Gayatri Gopinath xiii
Acknowledgements xvi

Introduction 1
AHONAA ROY

PART I
Colonial knowledge and postcolonial multiplicities 21

1 Religion, ritual power, exclusion and marginality: Gender-

transgressive Shivashaktis in Telangana, Southern India 23
PUSHPESH KUMAR AND ARCHANA RAO M

2 Uncertain grammars, ambiguous desires: Towards a sexual

politic of indeterminacy in Sri Lanka 40
THEMAL ELLAWALA

3 Twenty-five years after Dominic D’Souza: What happens

when your queer icon refuses to be? 61
R. BENEDITO FERRÃO

4 The iconography of Hindu(ized) hijras: Idioms of hijra

representation in Northern India 84
ARPITA PHUKAN BISWAS

vi
 C ontents

5 “A normal person cannot be made queer”: The

immorality act (amendment) commission of 1968 in
apartheid South Africa 99
VASU REDDY

PART II
Transnational migrations and diasporic linkages 135

6 “I want a yaar”: Pakistani muslim American gay men and

transnational same-sex sexual cultures in the West 137
AHMED AFZAL

7 Decolonizing the postcolonial body in diasporic time

and space: South Asians in the Caribbean 160
KRYSTAL NANDINI GHISYAWAN

8 Intersectionality and South Asian non-normative

sexualities: The case of South Asian lesbians and
bisexual women in the United Kingdom 180
ANNA FRY, SURYA MONRO AND VICKI SMITH

9 Trans/queer South Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom:

Whose “Regimes of the Normal” does “Queer” critique? 198
SHAMIRA A. MEGHANI

PART III
Global economization of sexualities and
gender transgressing politics 207

10 Trans South: Practical bases for trans internationalism 209

RAEWYN CONNELL

11 On the limits and possibilities of LGBTI politics:

Contextualizing socio-political violence and political
transitions in South America 225
JOSÉ FERNANDO SERRANO-AMAYA

vii
 C ontents

12 Understanding gender in Nepal: Concepts and practices 246

GYANU CHHETRI

13 Operationalizing the “New” Pakistani transgender citizen:

Legal gendered grammars and trans frames of feeling 260
SARA SHROFF

14 The political economy of empowerment: Microfinance,

middle class and the sexual subculture in contemporary
Bangladesh 283
AHONAA ROY

Index 297

viii
 CONTRIBUTORS

Ahmed Afzal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the California State

University, Fullerton, USA. He completed his undergraduate education at
Vassar College, MSc in cultural geography at the London School of
Economics, and MPhil and PhD in cultural anthropology at Yale
University. He has taught at Colgate University, State University of New
York and California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of Lone
Star Muslims: Transnational Lives and the South Asian Experience in
Texas (2015). Afzal’s research interests include ethnographically grounded
research on globalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism; South
Asian American experience; gender and sexuality cross-culturally; and
the anthropology of mass media and digital media.
Arpita Phukan Biswas is a final year PhD candidate in the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay,
India. She completed her MPhil in planning and development at the
Indian Institute of Technology–Bombay and currently researching caste
and hijra.
Gyanu Chhetri is Associate Professor of Sociology at Tribhuvan University,
Nepal, and has been teaching for 23 years. She teaches a gender studies
course in the MPhil program at the Central Department of Sociology at
Kirtipur. She has served as the head of the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at Patan Multiple Campus. She has co-edited books pub-
lished by the Sociological and Anthropological Society of Nepal (SASON),
contributed chapters in edited books and has published research-based
papers in journals. Her research interests include issues and problems
related to Dalits and other occupational caste groups, community for-
estry and gender equality in natural resources management, societal per-
ceptions and practices on gender equality and understanding the multiple
genders in Nepali society and culture. She visited Cornell University
(spring semester 2013 with a fellowship from Global Faculty Grants
Program of the Open Society Institute, New York) to undertake a litera-
ture review-based study on the sociology of LGBTI.

ix
 C ontributors

Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita, University of Sydney, Australia, and

Life Member of the National Tertiary Education Union. She has taught in
several countries and is a widely cited sociological researcher and the
author of Gender & Power, Masculinities and Southern Theory. Her
recent books include The Good University and Gender: In World
Perspective. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages.
Raewyn has been active in the labour movement, the peace movement
and work for gender equality.
Themal Ellawala is a second-year doctoral candidate at the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, where he
studies gender-sexual ontic and discursive formations in Sri Lanka
through the optics of queer theory and postcolonial studies. His interests
lie in the intersection of cultural anthropology and literary theory; the
“anthropology of the inexplicable”; postcolonial theorization of negative
space that gathers categories of absence, silence, inaction and ambiguity;
and in exploring how the gender-sexual subaltern figure encounters the
state and neoliberalism in myriad ways at such sites.
R. Benedito Ferrão has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, North America
and Oceania. He is Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific
Islander American Studies at the College of William and Mary, Virginia,
USA, and a Fulbright–Nehru Fellow at the Xavier Centre of Historical
Research, Goa. Curator of the 2017–2018 exhibition Goa, Portugal,
Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, he edited a book of
the same title (2017) to accompany this retrospective of the artist’s work.
His scholarly writing appears in various international journals and edited
books, including Research in African Literatures and Places of Nature in
Ecologies of Urbanism (2017); his fiction and creative non-fiction can be
read in Riksha, The Good Men Project, Mizna, The João Roque Literary
Journal and other publications.
Anna Fry completed her PhD at the University of Huddersfield, UK, in
2019.
Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan is an independent scholar, and former postdoc-
toral associate at Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean
Studies, USA. Her undergraduate work in anthropology and South Asian
studies was completed at York University, Toronto, and her PhD work in
sociology at the University of the West Indies, in Trinidad. Her upcoming
book Erotic Cartographies: Mapping the Queer Caribbean Subject details
Trinidadian same-sex loving women’s cognitive negotiations with spatial
and social relations to discursively create safe spaces and community. The
book details subjective mapping techniques as queer decolonial method-
ology, offering new ways of understanding and depicting human experi-
ence that are not constrained by the discourses and ideologies of
coloniality. Her other research interests and published work explore

x
 C ontributors

women’s navigations of religious nationalism in the Caribbean, as well as

Caribbean and South Asian diasporas, social justice movements for sex-
ual rights and anti-bullying and Indo-Caribbean cultural and sexual
identities.
Pushpesh Kumar teaches sociology at University of Hyderabad, India. His
present academic interests include queer movements, queer pedagogy,
religion and queer issues, Marxism and queer theory, alternative families
and kinship. He has been a visiting fellow at the Department of
Anthropology at London School of Economics, UK; Department of
Sociology, Delhi School of Economics; and the Centre for Studies of
Social System, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. He was invited
by South Asia Centre, Syracuse University to speak on “Queering Indian
Sociology” in 2017. He has published extensively in leading journals on
gender, sexuality and pedagogical issues. He received the M. N. Srinivas
Memorial Prize for Young Sociologists in 2007 for his paper “Gender and
Procreative Ideology among the Kolams of Maharashtra” (Contributions
to Indian Sociology). He is a pro-feminist thinker and has written about
“men and feminism” in the EPW special volume on Men and Feminism
in India in 2015.
Shamira A. Meghani teaches postcolonial and related literature in the
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK, and publishes on queer
postcolonial and diasporic literary and film texts.
Surya Monro is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, University of
Huddersfield, UK.
M. Archana Rao is a Development Communication specialist and a social
activist with a master’s degree in mass communication from the University
of Hyderabad, India, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in communi-
cation. She has worked in the development sector for about 13 years with
various marginalized communities in India. She has attended summer and
winter schools at University of Tampere, Finland, and University of
Padova, respectively, during her PhD.
Vasu Reddy is Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities
at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research interests are gen-
ders, sexualities, poverty and HIV/AIDS. His publications include From
Social Silence to Social Science: Perspectives on Same-Sex Sexuality, HIV/
AIDS and Gender in South Africa (lead editor with Theo Sandfort &
Laetitia Rispel, 2009); The Country We Want to Live In: Hate Crimes
and Homophobia in the lives of black lesbian South Africans (co-authored
with Nonhlanhla Mkhize, Jane Bennett and Relebohile Moletsane, 2010);
Care in Context: Transnational Gender Perspectives (lead editor with
Stephan Meyer, Tammy Shefer and Thenjiwe Meyiwa, 2014) and Boldly
Queer: African Same-Sex Sexualities and Gender Diversity (with Theo
Sandfort, Fabienne Simenel and Kevin Mwachiro, 2015). More recent

xi
 C ontributors

publications are Queer in Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship and

Activism (with Zethu Matebeni and Surya Monro, 2018); Queer Kinship:
South African Perspectives on the Sexual Politics of Family-Making and
Belonging (with Tracy Morison and Ingrid Lynch, 2018) and State of the
Nation: Poverty and Inequalities (with Crain Soudien and Ingrid Woolard,
2019).
José Fernando Serrano-Amaya is Assistant Professor in the Department of
Languages and Cultures, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.
He has a PhD from the University of Sydney (2015) and received a Master
in Conflict Resolution (University of Bradford, UK, 2004) and a BA in
Social Anthropology (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1994). He has
developed his career as researcher, consultant and lecturer in youth vio-
lence, gender and sexuality, peacebuilding and social policies. He is cur-
rently researching the pedagogies and politics of reconciliation in
Australia, Colombia and South Africa. His most recent book is
Homophobic Violence in Armed Conflict and Political Transition (2018).
Sara Shroff is the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mark S.
Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto,
Canada. She holds a PhD in Urban and Public Policy from The New
School. As a transnational scholar, her work takes up the mutual constitu-
tion and collateral genealogies of race, coloniality, cultural memory,
affect, aesthetics and sexuality in contemporary South Asia and its dias-
poras. Her scholarship cuts across disciplines and includes transnational
feminist and queer of colour critique, postcolonial and decolonial eco-
nomics and South Asian public and counterpublic formations. She has
taught in global studies, economics and women, gender and sexuality
studies at The New School, New York University, and PACE University.
She previously worked in education policy, global philanthropy and social
finance for over 18 years.
Vicki Smith is Senior Lecturer, University of Huddersfield, UK.

xii
 FOREWORD

I write these words at a particularly perilous historical moment: both the

US and India are in the grips of a deadly pandemic fuelled by right-wing
nationalist leadership. It is also a moment when thousands are taking to the
streets to demand a reckoning with the inescapable fact that Black and
brown communities are systematically relegated to premature death. The
pervasive brutality of a system that deems some bodies essentially more
valuable and worthy of life than others (typically Black, brown, trans, queer,
female, poor) is laid bare for all to see. Queer, feminist activists in the US
have highlighted the systematic devaluation of the lives, and deaths, of
female, queer and trans people of colour in particular; this fatal devaluation
is also enacted by the very communities of colour that are under siege by
structural racism. In India, the current government enacts a similar devalu-
ation of the lives of women, queers, gender variant people, those who are
caste-oppressed, poor, and/or members of religious minorities. While the
deep-seated nature of systematic forms of structural oppression in the US
and India extend far beyond individual leaders, their mutually reinforcing
quality is evident in the close political and economic ties between the two
nations, as well as in the material and ideological support offered by South
Asian communities in the diaspora to the ruling party in India. One heart-
ening development in the US during these grim times has been that South
Asian progressive voices have powerfully called for analyses that link anti-
Black racism in the US—both within South Asian communities and in the
larger national polity—to the violence engendered by the current regime in
India. These voices also call for transnational forms of solidarity that make
the vital connections between Islamophobia, caste and class oppression in
India and anti-Black racism in the US.
As a queer diaspora studies scholar situated in the US, I am left grappling
with the question: What can a queer, transnational feminist frame offer at
this particular juncture in terms of both analysis and activism? The essays
in this collection, while not directly addressing the specifics of the historical
moment I lay out here, obliquely suggest an answer. The promise and pos-
sibility of a transnational feminist, queer studies project is that it allows us
to attend to the specificity of gender and sexual logics in particular

xiii
 F oreword

locations, while it maps lines of potential commonality across disparate

geographic sites. Now more than ever, we need this capacious vision that
makes apparent both the linkages between systems of oppression in seem-
ingly disconnected locations, as well as the transnational forms of solidarity
that this analysis may engender.
In framing this collection an engagement with “South Asian gender and
sexual diversity,” the editor squarely engages with the question of the
“region” in both its subnational and supranational senses. I have written
elsewhere about what I term “a queer regional imaginary”:

[A] queer regional imaginary…stands in contradistinction to a

dominant national imaginary that effaces nonconforming bodies,
desires, and affiliations. My turn to the region…as a fruitful con-
cept for both queer and diaspora studies stems from my dissatisfac-
tion with standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably
foreground the nation as the primary point of reference, as well as
with standard formulations of queerness that fail to grasp the tex-
ture of regionally inflected gender and sexual formations…[T]he
evocation of a queer regional imaginary suggests the possibility of
tracing lines of connection and commonality, a kind of South-South
relationality, between seemingly discrete regional spaces that in fact
bypass the nation. Thus, to foreground the category of the region
in queer diaspora studies …is to produce a new mapping of space
and sexuality; this alternative cartography rejects dominant cartog-
raphies that either privilege the nation-state or cast into shadow all
those spaces, and gender and sexual formations, deemed without
value within the map of global capital.
(Gopinath, 2018, p. 5)

Together, the essays in this volume produce a queer regional imaginary by

productively disorienting an area studies framing of the region of “South
Asia.” They do so, first, by identifying the resonances between queer
desires and embodiments in disparate diasporic locations (Trinidad, the
UK, the US, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh), thereby
expanding the supranational geographic terrain of “South Asia” to encom-
pass diasporic communities both within and outside the global South.
Second, the essays track the tremendous heterogeneity within the area
studies designation of “South Asia” in relation to gender and sexual for-
mations. This heterogeneity is evident not simply between different
nation-states, but within the nation-state itself: the essays explore the par-
ticularity of gender and sexual logics within the region as sub-nationally
defined (whether the region is Goa, Telangana or northern India, for
instance). Third, the essays enact precisely the South–South relationality
that I suggest is central to a queer regional imaginary. By placing different
locations within the global South in relation to one another, the collection

xiv
 F oreword

disrupts both the primacy of the nation-state as well as the primacy of the
global North as the inevitable locus and point of reference for discussions
of alternative genders and sexualities.
While each of the individual essays attends to the specificity of place, the
“place” of “South Asia” is multiply inflected through the local, the regional,
the national, the transnational, and the global. The strength of this collec-
tion is that it continuously situates gender and sexual formations in relation
to each of these spatial scales. This then is what queer studies can and must
look like at this historical juncture: it must be a project deeply invested in
dislodging the global North as the touchstone and measuring stick against
which all “others” are judged. It must pay careful attention to the intercon-
nections between different “Souths”, and take the global South, as Raewyn
Connell suggests, as the starting point for theorizing alternative genders and
sexualities. And finally, a queer studies project in this current moment must
be cognizant of the fact that there is nothing inherently transgressive about
non-normative gender and sexual formations: they can be conscripted into
nationalist projects (as illustrated by Arpita Biswas’s essay on how hijras
are folded into the Hindutva project in North India), even as they may also
challenge and rework both nationalist and internationalist discourses (as
Sara Shroff’s essay on trans disidentification with the global language of
human rights in Pakistan makes clear). Ultimately, these essays powerfully
speak back to the devaluation of trans, gender-variant and queer bodies and
communities; they attest to the myriad, imaginative ways in which those
who are deemed without value claim space and demand a world where they
not only survive but also thrive.

Reference
Gopinath, G. (2018). Unruly visions: The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora.
Duke University Press.

Gayatri Gopinath
Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis
New York University, USA

xv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing this book has been an intense exercise and a sustained endurance. I
am grateful to the many of you who provided revolutionary thoughts cul-
minating in a movement and ideas that started at the international confer-
ence titled “‘Framing another Politics’: Non-normative Sexualities and the
South Asian Rhetoric” at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay,
India, in January 2018. As aimed further, this politics of thought will even-
tually travel across South Asia and elsewhere in the global South and
beyond. To those eminent scholars who have given thought to this project,
especially Surya Monro, Vasu Reddy, Raewyn Connell, Gayatri Gopinath,
Svati Shah, Malathi de Alwis, Moon Chanaria and Nour Abu Assab, I am
forever grateful to you. To the conference participants, I appreciate your
engagement and scrutiny of gender/sexuality studies which has become per-
ilous to the global South’s inquiry. As the book emerged from those discus-
sions and presentations, I am evermore obliged to the participation of
eminent scholars, notably, Shohini Glosh, Mary E. John, Peter Aggleton,
Chayanika Shah, Anjali Arondekar and Ruth Vanita, as well as panelists on
South Asian cinema, notably Nandita Das, Onir, Aditya Joshi, Jim Sarabh
and Vrinda Grover. The conference would not have been possible without
the generous financial support from the United Nations Family Planning
Association (UNFPA) and the Regional Electrification Corporation Ltd.
(RECL, Government of India). And for their unwavering support, I am per-
sistently obliged to Venkatesh Srinivasan, the Director of UNFPA, New
Delhi and P V Ramesh, the then Director of RECL.
To my Department of Social Sciences at the IIT Bombay, and with the
sparkle and spirit of my students who have been the forerunners of this
project—you know this, albeit all anomaly—you made the conference resil-
ient. I want to especially acknowledge Abhijeet Dasgupta, Sohini Dutta,
Suman S. Nair, Rahul Sharma, Priya Sharma, Vinay Suhalka, Kanthi
Swaroop and Karan Nikam.
My sincere appreciation to the Director’s Office at the IIT Bombay for
liaising with the relevant government offices in New Delhi, a major errand
around logistics and seeking approval and border compliance. My sincere
appreciation goes to my colleagues at the IIT Bombay: Devang Khakkar

xvi
 A cknowledgements

(the then director), for his unquestioning support and his willingness to act
as the bureaucratic interceder in the process of liaising with New Delhi. The
unwavering abet of Vaishali Sansare, K. Narayanan, Mazhar Kamran and
Pushpa Trivedi—I have gathered memorable snug in the rolling writhe so as
to traverse.
The writing process for the volume was an even more challenging voca-
tion, especially the back-and-forth mass email mobilizations with inter-
locutors. I am beholden with appreciation to your magical empathy and
support with friendships that developed and traversed continents: Ahmed
Afzal, Sara Shroff, Gyanu Chettri, Pushpesh Kumar, Arpita Phukan
Biswas, Themal Ellawala, Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan, José Fernando
Serrano, Shamira A. Meghani and R. Benedito Ferrão. To our shared
exhilaration and over the years, your promise of support to build the
rabble-rousing essays written with perspicuity. And my roaring exuber-
ance in conceding appreciation to Sara, Ahmed and Vasu—this anthology
is an outcome of our collective efforts, and I would not have been able to
do without your support.
To Laura Merla and her generosity in offering a formal invite to the
Center for Gender, Family and Sexuality Studies at the UCLouvain,
Belgium during the summer of 2019. The two weeks with unobstructed
work space were perfect to work on this anthology. Finally, and again,
Nour Abu Assab—I am in your debt, now and always, for the selfless dedi-
cation and your altruistic drive that you have poured into our politics,
scholarship and ideas around the topics raised in this anthology.

xvii
 INTRODUCTION
Ahonaa Roy 1

Speak, for your lips are free;

speak, for your tongue is still yours.
Your upright body belongs to you;
speak, for your soul, still is yours.
Prescription for faithfulness
Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1980, p. 81; translation mine)

Sexual politics in the global South Asia: Framing the discourse

This volume builds on the intellectual labour of friends and collaborators
and their political and poetic imaginations across transnational spaces.
These spaces reflect the intimate workings of capitalism and coloniality in
everyday structures of life. Keeping in mind the pervasiveness of abandon-
ment, neglect and desolation of our worlds, we are committed to create,
dialogue and make space for new imaginations that centre multiplicity and
difference. For us, these affective bonds and scholarly camaraderie are nec-
essary steps toward rethinking studies of sexuality to build an intellectual
movement that centres rage, hope and everyday resistance.
This volume is a collective effort where we strive for resistance beyond a
binary reading of freedom and oppression in literature, activism, and the-
ory. This includes challenging the global/local, global/national, regional/
local, and communal/individual binary and universally unified gendered or
sexed categories (Spivak, 1988 p. 225). The destabilization in language and
rituals reaffirms the radical discursivity in “local” understandings of gender
non-conforming persons and everyday negotiations with a colonial and
capitalist understanding of racialized, gendered and sexualized selfhood
(Blackwood & Johnson, 2012).
The volume challenges the mapping of the global North gender and sexu-
ality theorizations onto the global South. Instead, we situate our interpreta-
tions and analytics in everyday intersectional interpretations of sexualities.
We highlight this alternate narrative to demonstrate the growing impor-
tance of localisms of political expression and the desire to resist exclusion-
ary neoliberal circulation of language as well as connect global South

1
 AHONAA ROY

geographies across space and time. This allows us to emphasize but not
stabilize subjectivity, space, experience, power and agency as it is being
negotiated and navigated in South Asia and the global South.
The following questions serve as guideposts for our volume: What does
centring South Asia and its diasporas mean to historical studies of sexuality
and sexual politics? How do the multiple local contexts make meaning of
sexual representations in South Asia and its diasporas? How do we under-
stand agency and the desire of individuals and collectives based on their shift-
ing narratives and also reconsider predetermined categories, frames and lens?
Do these narratives demonstrate a capacity to serve as symbols of sexual
expression and everyday negotiations? And finally, how do we re/interrogate
new epistemologies of gender and sexuality, and gendered politics of postco-
lonial South Asia within shifting impositions of new violent modes of nation-
alism, sovereignty and neo-imperial regimes?
Addressing these questions requires a turn towards subjectivity, as it pro-
liferates in nation state, law, religion and popular cultural discourses espe-
cially as sites of sexual governance and social control. Furthermore, the
market-based logics embedded in transnational political and economic
structures, especially the histories of economic liberalization, require we
pay close attention to capitalist cultures of individuation as they intersect
and govern sexual identities, desires, kinship and intimacies. Inevitably,
these deployments are situated within the heightened contestations around
the contemporary histories of the global health and international HIV/AIDS
discourses that have yielded a range of inequalities further complicating the
liberal normative notions of rights-bearing “sexual” citizens.
Given the discourses around HIV/AIDS in South Asia through which sex-
uality became a marker of identity and body politics further complicate how
sexuality, state and selfhood are being resisted, negotiated and reworked. In
Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle Over the Antisodomy Law in
India, Jyoti Puri (2016) argues that the state deploys sexuality as a means to
uphold its legitimacy and supremacy and as a way to maintain certain mor-
alized ideas of social order and population management. The state is able to
expand its reach given its functions through disparate and monolith means
through laws, policies, practices and policing. In this way marginalized
groups seeking redress from the state become implicated in upholding the
legitimacy of the very state they are resisting.
The deployment of biopolitics to govern the body and sexuality and pro-
duce sexual citizens also sustains capitalism (Blackwood & Johnson, 2012;
Chiang & Wong, 2017; Jackson, 2009a, 2009b). This echoes Paul Rabinow’s
conceptualization of “a circulation network of identity”, which manifests
itself in newer forms of governance, newer forms of social life and newer
truth regimes (Rabinow, 1995, pp. 102; see also, Rabinow, 1984, 1995).
The legacy of HIV/AIDS and the shifting cultural attitudes towards
homo(sexuality), queerness, non-normative genders and sexual desire
relates to a carcerality of citizenship, drawing to a specific governance

2
 INTRODUCTION

supplanted by corporations and nation states as structured within the ideal-

ized relationship of the subjugator and the subjugated (Miller & Stuart,
2017).
In addition, the deployment of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans)
activism in the 1990s as a political signifier and an identity marker gradu-
ally became the legible frame of reference around gender and sexual justice.
This deployment has also infiltrated epistemological meaning, represented
by the state, non-governmental organizations and civil society that attempt
to govern and “liberate” (sex)uality. This governance also necessitated a
complex multilayered alliance and structural shifts by networks of scholars,
activists, academics and artists, as well as policy makers to work across
borders and power politics. This alliance building and structural changes
complicate, borrow, resist and/or reproduce global North forms of sexual
identity, subjectivity and citizenship. The globalization of sexuality studies
has been a double-edged sword. It has sustained power structures that
maintain a hegemony of global North understandings and conceptualiza-
tions of queer identity, queerness and, in turn, queer studies. This volume
narrates the complex locally variant sex, gender and sexual imageries within
a shifting transnational vocabulary and identity framework while being
attentive to the global economic, political and social interconnectivity,
intensified social practices, identities and imaginaries.
Through highlighting multiple feminist voices and ideas around queer-
ness, this volume builds a framework that centres the vast histories and
shifting diversities of gender experiences and political struggles across
the postcolonial world. We aspire for a framework that can hold and
respect the multiplicity of understandings of sexuality and recognize
everyday life experiences of ‘local’ gender politics. A number of global
South and decolonial scholars have long argued that the coloniality of
gender and sexuality has been central to the racialization and regulation
of black and brown communities, bodies and desires (Lugones, 2007;
Mama, 1997; Quijano, 2000; Rigg, 2009). This was followed by pro-
cesses of neo-colonial “epistemic violence” (Spivak, 1988, p. 282) dis-
guised as a certain way of thinking about knowledge production within
globalization (Hountondji, 1997, 2002). Historically rooted in contem-
porary capitalism and coloniality, this “transnationalization of gender”
has also brought with it forms of colonial feminisms and hierarchies of
masculinities, often described as “cultural impositions” (Radcliffe, Laurie
& Andolina et al., 2004). This, in turn, has silenced and sidelined gen-
dered and sexualized everyday indigenous and native ways of living in
the global South (Connell, 2007a, p. 38; 2014; Hearn, 2014; Quijano,
2000; Radcliffe, laurie & Andolina et al., 2004.
Postcolonial theoretical interventions, however, have succeeded in cri-
tiquing the Eurocentric imperialist framework of sexual governance that
sought to undermine discourses of anti-colonial resistance (Adams, 1996;
Bhabha, 1994; Chatterjee, 1993a; Magubane, 2003; Spivak, 1988;

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Steinmetz, 2007). Frantz Fanon’s (1967, 1968) reading of the native and
local knowledge is important to note here, as it counters dominant narra-
tives, impeding the articulation of struggles, and culturally positioning the
native as a degraded “other”, vis-à-vis the colonizer. This decentring of
Europe and Euro-centric epistemologies is further analysed by Dipesh
Chakrabarty (2000). This decentring requires a provincialization of Europe
and its imperial ways of knowledge production to allow for different politi-
cal and theoretical approaches to emerge, offering different understandings
of post-nationalisms, post-colonialisms and global South resistance.
This call for ‘an-other knowledge” which is not centred on Europe and
imperial ways of knowing allows for the emergence of knowledge and writ-
ing that productively unsettles dominant and hegemonic sexual discourses
in South Asia and the global South. In this light, the volume offers an
account that centres the trouble, breakages and rupture of gender and sex-
ual identity and explores the political and aesthetic practices of representa-
tion, negotiation and subversion of gender as an ongoing political project.
The re-imagining and reworking of gender and sexual knowledge-making
subverts the dominant norms of the predetermined identity categories and
knowledge claims and seeks new possibilities of negotiating racialized, sex-
ualized and gender(ed) representations and resistances (Foucault, 1978).

Part I: Colonial knowledges and postcolonial multiplicities

To think of an-other knowledge and anti-coloniality is to rethink discourses
and imaginaries of gender and sexual justice through perspectives from the
global South. This, thus, becomes a decentring through which we can
amplify indigenous and native perspectives and centre them in the making
of complex and shifting discourses (Narayan & Harding, 1989). This
decentring allows for a diversity of traditions that have been sidelined by
hegemonic and often singular ways of knowledge production. In turn, what
becomes available is a worldview and grammar of relationalities, inter-con-
textual dialogue and plural practices already-given part of South Asian
sexual histories.
This volume presents diverse epistemologies of sexuality contesting
dominant colonialist universalized knowledge in order to challenge colonial
knowledge practices (Brown et al., 2010). As Marina Grzinic and Sefik Tatlic
(2014, pp. 129) call it, we adopt a “dissident feminist” stance, dismantling
binaries and dichotomies and reconfiguring gender(ed) and sexualized
borders. As such, dissident feminism seeks to question and problematize
Eurocentric “moralized” imaginaries and workings of gender, sex and
sexuality in South Asia as well as the Eurocentric definitions of gender itself.
Through this volume, we attempt to build an agency of space (Beebe et al.,
2012) through critiques of geopolitics and global capital. This understanding
of the agency of space is not apolitical. Rather, it enables us to think of
space as “spatial practice” and agency as an ongoing practice (de Certeau,

4
 INTRODUCTION

1984, p. 10). In so doing, we move beyond the singular geopolitical locations

and cultural landscapes of South Asia in order to tackle critical questions
around belonging, agency, space, morality, migration, exclusion, liminality,
ambiguity and contradictions.
This volume adds to interdisciplinary scholarship that emphasizes the
importance of unpacking script of the colonial encounter that has been
responsible for reinforcing sexual violence and the oppressive regulation of
sexuality (Boyce & Coyle, 2013, 2015; de Alwis, 2002; Karim, 2012; Khan,
2001; Narrain, 2007; Nisar, 2016; PUCL-K, 2003; Reddy, 2005; Vanita &
Kidwai, 2002). This is the same colonial script that has resulted in the sub-
jugation of non-heterosexual subjectivities through public violence and cen-
sorship. In addition to these factors, heteronormativity and conventional
masculinity have become a strategic locus of gender(ed) norm. This has
produced norms through which gender is governed by “the social relation
of sexual relations by means of kinship, biological and social production”
(Wieringa & Sivori, 2013, p. 10).
Nation states and nationalisms do not function outside this colonial
scripting and many postcolonial nation state processes continue to be a
constant negotiation with the laws laid out through coloniality. Furthermore,
in South Asia nationalisms, the technologies of violence were codified by
the British colonialism and made possible through the Indian elite, patriar-
chal understanding of religion and rituals and heteronormativity. Anne
McClintock reminds us that “all nationalisms are gendered, all are invented
and all are dangerous…in the sense of representing relations to political
power and the technologies of violence” (1993, p. 61). Similarly, Ashis
Nandy’s (1983, pp. 2) assertion in Intimate Enemy, maps the political econ-
omy of cultural British colonialism in South Asia as a way to express the
“cultural continuity” of the pre-colonial sentiments of the social conscious-
ness of the colonizer and the colonized and the adjoining dominant modes
and structures of class, caste, gender, sexuality and religious domain of
nationalism. Partha Chatterjee argues that these modes were seen as “clas-
sification of tradition” (1993a, p. 72) which allowed liberal modernists to
work in tandem with colonial counterparts to form the nation’s elite. In the
name of tradition and strategic alliances, the (post)colonial sentiments were,
in part, driven by the nationalist messaging to classify women as home-
bound (Rai, 2002).
Contemporary South Asian feminisms actively contribute to the reshap-
ing of political and cultural landscapes and challenge these nationalist read-
ings of gender and sexuality, culture and womanhood. In their works, South
Asian feminisms are faced with different types of violence as women and
sexual minorities who are webbed into a system of political patronage that
adds to their marginalization. Not different from feminisms elsewhere,
South Asian feminists have also contributed to reinforcing essentializing
identity-politics (Rajan, 2003). In addition, post-Independence feminists
became embedded within anti-colonial movements (de Alwis, 2009; Menon,

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2004a; Siddiqi, 2011). Yet, postcolonial South Asia is faced with multiple
concerns closely related to the intersections of class, ecology, caste, health,
structural violence, state-led repressions and religious fundamentalism
(Chatterji, 2019; John, 1996; Kabeer, 1994; Ray, 2012; Roy, 2012). Srila
Roy’s (2012) analysis of feminist politics in South Asia since the 1990s
sheds light on “NGO-ization” and neoliberal development that result in
connectivities and complexities among feminists and feminist ideals.
Metropolitan, educated, city-based women have become more involved in
trans(regional) networks and sought to build strategic alliances with the
global North, in the name of “development” and (transnational) autonomy
(Roy, 2015; Saida, 2014; Chaterjee, 2018).
The complex histories of South Asian feminist interventions have also
been an important part of the critique of the US empire and its accompany-
ing imperialist episteme (Grewal and Kaplan, 2001; Lugones, 2007;
Talpade-Mohanty, 1984, 2013). To undo this imperialist episteme requires
three moves. First, it requires a rethinking of episteme through an intersec-
tional lens in which class, caste and religion are central. Second, it requires
a destabilization of essentialist and binary assumptions about gender and
sexuality. Third, it requires a space to make visible identities that are not
already marked but rather remain and demand to remain in spaces of
ambivalence, illegibility and opacity through their own desire and agentic
pursuits.
It is helpful to understand gender as “a space of negotiation” where it is
wrapped up in ideas of “fantasy”, “pleasure” and “horror” that is always,
already “plural” (Hemmings, 2016). As such, this plurality puts into ques-
tion the circulation of universal queer (as well as feminist) discourses and
identity mapping that undermines shifting frames of indigeneity and calls
into questioning the whiteness that pervades our ideas of gender. For this
reason, it is important to continue to think of knowledge production about
gender and sexuality, as Donna Haraway (1988) suggests in terms of “situ-
ated knowledges” that are context-specific and situational. Plurality is also
highlighted in feminist literature from the global North (Butler, 1990;
Rubin, 1984; Scott, 2009a; Sedwick, 1990) and is referred to as the multi-
plicity of sites of resistances. This demonstrates that contemporary femi-
nisms, at the local and the global levels, resist the universalization of gender
as a singular frame.
Building on these complex feminist interventions we hope to shift the
debate in two ways. First, these radical politics of (un)becoming and/or
remaining unnamed provides a new way to think about feminist and queer
values beyond dominant prescriptive Eurocentric cultural hegemonization.
Second, this act of subversion and transcendence centres the everydayness of
life as a site of ontological authority, thus moving us toward the acknowl-
edgement and acceptance of multiplicity, difference and syncretism. As stated
earlier, this volume is an attempt to decentre dominant and hegemonic
knowledge production at the epistemic level.

6
 INTRODUCTION

In this section, we situate knowledges from, through and within South

Asia and the global South as a way of working towards epistemological
disruptions. The chapters by Pushpesh Kumar, Themal, Ellawala, R. Benedito
Ferrão, Vasu Reddy and Arpita Biswas Phukan engage critically in episte-
mological disruptions allowing space for self-representation across multiple
(sexual) provincial lexicons. Furthermore, this section speaks either directly
and circuitously to concerns that redirect attention to the epistemological
disruptions of sexuality’s knowledge. The chapters featured in this section
are diverse in their disciplinary and contextual lens: anthropological, philo-
sophical, literary/cultural studies, gender and sociological.

Part II: Transnational migrations and diasporic linkages

Postcolonial nations and South Asian nationalisms do not exist in isolation,
as their making was and has always been intertwined with liberal market
policies, foreign investments, privatization and international trade. These
factors have contributed to the production of transnational cultural prac-
tices, hybrid subjectivities and sexual identities. These factors call for a con-
ceptual shift in understanding gender and its many meanings in light of
globalization, migration and nation-making practices. In addition to that, a
globalized interpretation of gender was deployed to play out within geo-
politics. This deployment serves as a tool for the homogenization of the
capitalist world system with free citizens. In this view, third-world women,
queers, trans and marginalized communities of gender, caste and culture
become populations that need saving by the global North. Thus, a critical
transnational approach to gender, sexuality and nationalism requires we
think about nation and nationalisms as a complex working of gender and
geographies, in their formations, relations, identities and structures.
In addition to this transnational approach, we adopt a critical approach
to history, through which we interrogate the silencing and sidelining of par-
ticular subjectivities. This attempt to look onto the past is meant to under-
stand its impact on the present rather than glorifying a loosely defined
pre-colonial history. Here, we aim to challenge the singularity of nationalist
discourses in South Asia that have often drawn on Orentialized images of a
sensualized and idealized past and positioned postcoloniality as ill defined
for (European) modernity (Corbridge et al., 2005, pp. 9–11). Similarly,
global North historiographies of South Asian gender and sexuality have
been critiqued for reproducing imperialist and colonialist universalization
of women’s subordinate positions within dominant political and cultural
imaginaries through the portrayal of third-world women as oppressed and
submissive (Ghosh et al., 2008; O’Hanlon, 1988). This has in turn main-
tained political and social hierarchies, norms and structures, as these uni-
versalizations relied on reproducing South Asian and more broadly, women
in the global South as victims with little or no agency (Chatterjee, 1989).
Similarly, colonial interpretations of masculinity have also (re)produced

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“imperial social formations” of manhood since the nineteenth-century

colonialism in India (Kim-Puri, 2005; Chatterjee, 2004; Rai, 2005).
These nationalist discourses have often been accompanied by and are
complicated by the expansion of capitalist/market economies (Brown et al.,
2010). Nationalist discourse embedded in gender and sexual politics pro-
duced masculinized custodian gender hierarchies, contributing to the pro-
duction of a stereotypical “macho” masculinity (Mosse, 1996). This has
also extended to colonial and postcolonial analysis which to a great extent
share a national masculinity (read: men as protectors) confined within the
borders of the nation state. Within this masculinized discourse, women
became symbolic markers and reproducers of the nation and an authentic
singular cultural identity. In other words, nationalist politics in South Asia
used gendered identities to develop socially constructed ideas of masculinity
and femininity (Rai, 2002). The metaphors as “nation-as-woman” and
“woman-as-nation” position women as cultural and political custodian of
values, heterosexual morality, identity and purist forms of authenticity
(Nagel, 1998). This circulation of ideal femininity and masculinity has
mapped on to the diaspora in complex ways.
These complex gendered workings of nationalisms George Mosse (1996)
describes as “macho nationalism”, while Alexandre Jaunait et al. (2013)
call it “sexual nationalism”. Reflections emerging from this collection of
essays shed light on the diverse and disparate workings of gendered, mascu-
linized and sexual nature of nationalisms. This puts forward an argument
that national identities and sexual identities are historically and intricately
interlinked (Stoler, 1991, p. 68) with the making of a nation, its religious
sentiments and ideas of democratic freedom and economic progress both
within and outside its geographical borders. Globalization and the intimate
encounters of the “global” and the “local” demonstrate that these questions
remain central to the relationship of sexuality to the making of the nation
state in South Asia and its diasporas (Altman, 2002; Boellstorff, 2012).
People’s movement, displacement, enslavement and migration produces
new ways to explore the understanding of gender and sexuality (Rai &
Reeves, 2009a; Wesling, 2008). In Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas
and South Asian Public Culture, Gayatri Gopinath (2005) critiques the
framework of hegemonic nationalism in diasporic contexts. She argues that
globalization and transnationalism deploy a North American/Eurocentric
intelligibility of queerness that is then mapped onto conventional desires,
practices and subjectivities as a normative-nationalist logic. This logic is
then used to govern queer narratives of “coming out” reflecting white mid-
dle-class regimes within the diasporic/transnational non-normative sub-
jects. This obscures and erases other forms of same-sex desires and
desirability of the South Asian queer lives and identity formations, diasporic
subjectivity, Eurocentric nationalisms and regimes of whiteness.
Tom Boellstorff (2005), Mark Johnson (1997) and Gayatri Reddy (2005)
further assert how the global North gendered imperialisms work to

8
 INTRODUCTION

understanding queer Asian genders and sexualities through an ethnocentric

lens (see also, Peletz, 2009). The Asian queerness is homogenized and repre-
sented as a (feminized) “other” misreading the plural global South and
Asian homoeroticism and its contemporary manifestations. This misread-
ing erases and silences gender pluralism and the possibilities of multiple
gender and sexual models in specific cultural contexts and fossilizes how
gender and sexuality are being marked and managed transnationally
(Plummer, 2017).
Pointing to the literature in Asian queer studies, Megan Sinnott (2010)
builds on Gopinath’s argument and challenges this assertion of an “authen-
tic” homeland and a “liberating” diasporic space. Ethno-nationalist ideals
of masculinity and femininity from the homeland work with hegemonic
cultural intelligibility to often universalize queer identities in easily map-
pable and binary identity frames of as butch/femme, active/passive, and
effeminate/masculine. Furthermore, Badruddoja (2008) and Afzal (2015)
demonstrate how South Asians in the diaspora deploy frames of an authen-
tic homeland heteronormativity and other hierarchies leading to the erasure
of complex and shifting constructions of selfhood for queer diasporic com-
munities and individuals.
The essays in this volume by Ahmed Afzal, Shamira Meghani, Krystal
Nandini Ghisyawan, and Surya Monro and colleagues, add to understand-
ings of queer lives far beyond the boundaries of a single nation state (Besnier,
2002a; Sen & Stivens, 1998). For example, Monro and colleagues trace the
complex intersections between sexual identity, national identity, faith and
diasporic community amongst British South Asian lesbian and bisexual
women. These women agentically negotiate often conflicting sets of norms
and values across diasporic spaces. Addressing such processes as ‘transna-
tional space’ foregrounds the interrelated system of relationships across the
boundaries and borders (Stevenson et al., 2003). This involves remembering
Ong’s (1999) representation of “flexible citizenship” which is a way that
migrant subjects negotiate with self-narrativizing their diasporic identity
and citizenship that lies in the paradox of pleasure, melancholy, pain and
stability (pp. 5–6). These spaces require diasporic lives to be understood
through an intersectional analysis of the “local”, “regional”, “national”,
and “transnational” and disavows monolithic, stabilized and authentic
notions of culture and citizenship.

Part III: Global economization of sexualities and gender

transgressing politics
In this last section, we revisit gender, sexuality and the political economy of
citizenship in South Asia. We do this through an interpretative framework
based on the critical histories of capitalism and colonialism in South Asia,
elucidating the nature of colonial resistances and the afterlives of colonial-
ity (Bose & Jalal, 1998, pp. 6). We also critically assess meanings of

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democracy, emancipation, nationalisms, sovereignty and subjectivity. By

doing so, we also engage with dissidence as a tool for provincializing, as a
way of decentring and as a political stance against capitalism and its
machinery of dispossession and dehumanization. Modern South Asia has
been occupied with the formation of the modern nation state, relying on
nationalist narratives that derive their legitimacy from imagined ahistorical,
religious and cultural collectivities, and denying the subjectivity of those at
the margins.
The work of critical race and decolonial scholars is important for our
understanding of marginalized subjectivities and global processes of
racializations. For example, Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2011, p. 2) high-
lights that new forms of coloniality require new forms of anti-colonial
resistance and revolutions that take into account how theory, philosophy,
ethics and critique are co-constitutive. This is what he and others refer to
as the decolonial turn where hegemonic Eurocentric representations
demand constant challenging and decentring. (Escobar, 2004, p. 217).
Furthermore, “Black Critique” (Davis, 1989, pp. 10; Fanon, 2005, p. 23;
Mama, 1995, pp. 54–55; 2001; Mbembe, 2001, p. 11; Tamale et al., 2011,
p. 14), South American and Latina scholars (Grosfoguel, 2000; Lugones,
2007; Quijano, 2000) and South Asian interventions (Bhabha, 1994;
Chatterjee, 1993a, b, pp. 65–66; Nandy, 1983; Spivak, 1999, pp. 25–27)
together demand we de-universalize particular truths and realities. This in
turn creates room for multiplicities and pluralisms which function across
multiple intersectional axes of race, religion, gender, sexual, caste and
class. These theorists of resistances also compel us to situate ourselves in
our own theories and claims and make room for challenging our own
ways of seeing and studying our worlds. We attempt to avoid essentializ-
ing a singular native position or a singular reading of indigeneity by think-
ing through an intellectual and discursive space that challenges our own
attachments and desire to name and claim stable subjectivities through
identity politics (Parry, 1987, pp. 15).
Raewyn Connell and Jose Fernando Serrano’s arguments in this volume
are in line with critiques of neoliberalism and the globalization of gender and
sexual identities produced through global forms of governance and hege-
monic cultural universalizations (Flint, 2002; Connell, 2007b, 2014; Connell
& Dados, 2014). Euro-American projects emphasizing monolith and mono-
lingual gender(ed) identities and order (Cruz-Malave & Manalansan, 2002,
pp. 98–100; Ho, 2008) lead to the universalization of feminist and queer
politics under the banner of development and economic progress. Both
essays provide critiques of neo-imperialist sexuality studies that imports a
global North, Euro-American centric epistemologies onto the global South
where different and varying struggles are marked through the transnational
legibility under the rubric of “LGBT+” politics. This marking also leads to
setting a ceiling to political action or structural change by limiting it to the
bounds of individualized gender identity and sexual orientation as

10
 INTRODUCTION

“liberation”. These prepackaged struggles are produced and reproduced by

international cooperation agencies and NGOs by overemphasizing nominal
“identity” recognition and erasing structural, epistemic, bodily violence and
injustices.
A better understanding of gender and sexuality in South Asia prompts us
to move beyond presumed identity categorization into understanding the
lives of non-normatives through their eyes. Non-heterosexual subjectivities
have documented the violence they are subjected to in several works. The
work and personal narrative of Naan Vidya’s (2007) A. Revathi (2010),
Laxmi Tripathi (2015) and Manobi Bandhopadhay’s (2017) add multiple
dimensions to the understanding of indigenous understandings of gender
queerness in different places in India. The intimate life accounts and every-
day experiences; born male, effeminate in mannerisms; and with an
expressed desire to become women or women-like have highlighted the
intersectionality of their struggle and the different dimensions to their mar-
ginalization. Fleeing their parental homes to choose to become part of a
hijra community, a hijra gharana, meant that they were formulating new
forms of kinship patterns.
These autobiographies document hijra lives, including the marginaliza-
tion, violence and abuse they face from the police, their sex-work clients
and at times within the guru/chela (master/disciple) communal systems.
Legal recognition of gender-non-conforming persons in South Asia is an
official step towards recognizing gender beyond the traditional man-
woman binary (Jain & Rhoten, 2013). Kyle Knight (2017) argues that the
path for the inclusion and protection of sexual and gender minorities is
reflected in the progressive legislative environment of Nepal, as it recog-
nized ‘transgender’ as a discrete gender category and granted trans per-
sons equal citizenship in 2007. In the case of Pakistan, the state now
recognizes trans and khwajasira as a distinct category with deep historical
roots in official state documents (Nisar, 2016, 2017). The legal conscious-
ness exhibited an institutional discourse which opened doors to the sym-
bolic benefits and legal legitimacy to Pakistan’s non-normative gender
communities.
In Sri Lanka, the queer movement emerged in the late 1990s in line with
international efforts against HIV/AIDS (Gonzalez, 2019). This is similar to
the trajectories of queer movements across South Asia albeit with different
contexts and outcomes. It is currently illegal to be “gay” in Pakistan and Sri
Lanka under the laws inherited from the country’s colonial past, commonly
referred to as “sodomy laws” which penalize same-sex acts (Human Rights
Watch, 2016; Lennox & Waites, 2013). In Sri Lanka, however, Rosanna
Flamer-Caldera, the executive director of Sri Lankan LGBT rights’ group:
EQUAL GROUND, explains the government’s commitment to reforming
the penal code and amending the constitution for the sexual minority’ rights
on the grounds of non-discrimination (Gonzalez, 2019; Human Rights
Watch, 2016; Panditaratne, 2016).

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In Exceptional Sexuality in the Time of Terror, Dina Siddiqi (2019)

argues that Bangladesh’s non-normative sexual politics reflects on the rep-
resentations on violence against queer bodies who are also Muslim. As
Siddiqi claims, the (sexual) secular voice is silenced by certain radical reli-
gious extremism—signalling a fragile democracy that lay paradoxical to the
postcolonial nationalism and the promise to freedom in its nation-building
project. Furthermore, Siddiqi’s argument is poignant, as it speaks to the
peculiar prominence of Islamophobia that takes on a particular excrescence
to categorize the imagined order on global paranoia with Muslim terror.
This religious extremism taints the secular voices of the sexual and gen-
dered rights’ claim and places queer bodies in Bangladesh in a state of
“exceptional” precarity.
Despite the fact that the Awami League government chaired by Prime
Minister Sheikh Hasina has been announcing plans to provide welfare to
hijra communities in Bangladesh, including granting access to health care,
education and employment, and the right to vote since 2009 (Wallen, 2019),
this inclusive policy has not prevented violence toward hijras. This recogni-
tion of the cultural status of hijras as a third gender has not prevented the
murder of two Dhaka-based gay rights activist in 2016.
Next, I turn to kothi and hijra politics and sexual minority politics in
South Asia. Kothis is a term used often for working-class men who receive
sex in male-to-male sexual encounters (Khan, 2001; Narrain, 2007; Reddy,
2005). Within the NGOization of LGBT and HIV/AIDS politics in India,
kothi became an identity category of gay men/transwomen, whose class,
sexuality and caste made them ideal recipients for funding. Situating a par-
ticular kind of homosexual and sexualized male body with feminine traits
allowed funders to claim kothi as a success story to glorify the global South
sexual minority through the political technology of “othering”. In essence,
philanthropy was saving the kothis of India (the homosexual man who likes
penetrative sex) without understanding the complex ways in which kothis
function alongside and within histories and structures of gender, sexuality,
sex, desire, pleasure and marginality.
Hijra politics is becoming increasingly complicated as hijras become
increasingly legible through an epidemiological gaze. Moreover, the por-
trayal of indigenous “transgender” population as sex workers makes them
a legitimate target population as they are perceived to be more at risk of
sexually transmitted diseases. This speaks to the legacies of the HIV/AIDS
funding in South Asia where certain bodies were seen as bodily syndrome
of disease through the politics of victimhood without any respect or under-
standing of agency and the complex ways we come to perform and live our
personhood. As such indigeneity becomes defined and reaffirmed through
so-called progressive frameworks of civil society organizing and legal rec-
ognition. Within this structural approach, the hijras’ existence is devalued
and their agency is denied, reinstituting their marginalization within the
axes of benign (health) intervention strategies.

12
 INTRODUCTION

The politics of kothi and hijras is playing out in complex ways across
South Asia, a region with overlapping colonial histories. The current insti-
tutional paradigm deployed by the state and NGOs maps and attempts to
variously incorporate complex hijra, kothi, zenana, khwajasira and other
non-normative categories. The circulation of trans and transgender further
complicates how it is being deployed by the communities themselves as a
site of resistance, legibility and dignity. The shift from hijras to transgender
homogenizes non-normative diversities through the rhetoric of develop-
ment and empowerment that leads to an “othering”. “Trans”, being an
English term, further complicates who has access to its usage given that
English continues to be the language of power in South Asia and a language
accessible only to those with cultural and linguistic capital, mainly South
Asian middle-class and the upper-class elite. This creates a further divide
between individuals who have the ability to be legible in certain spaces,
global forums and NGOs and others who remain invisible. This speaks to
structures of oppression, marginality and violence created through the dis-
course and practices of global gendered governance, International funding,
and NGOization.
Finally, Gyanu Chhetri, Sara Shroff and my essays reflect on queer poli-
tics and trans rights in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively. These
critical engagements analyse the ways in which newer rights-based citizen-
ship is being defined and deployed by the state. For example, Sara Shroff
looks at The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 and shift-
ing gendered grammars and legacies of trans and khwajasira activism in
Pakistan. Over the last several decades, Pakistani trans activists have
deployed intersecting intimate, Islamic, and inventive logics for self-making
as part of their negotiations with the state. Shroff argues that Pakistani
state’s operationalization and claims of “ownership” of 2018 transgender
law must be read within the knotty geopolitical politics of national security,
nation-making, postcoloniality and colonial legacies of gender and sexual
regulation. The essays in this section pay close attention to the entangle-
ments of policy change, transformative activist politics by the communities
across South Asia and its diasporas and the sexual nationalisms of the
nation state.

Conclusion
One of the major contributions of this volume is to offer critical reflections
on feminist, queer and trans politics in South Asia and its diaporas that
speak to the necessary tensions emanating from the movements on the
ground. The volume provides a critique and a challenge to the deployment
of identity-based politics within gender and sexuality studies. The work
sheds light on the historic exclusion of diverse and minority-politics since
colonial South Asia, manifested in violence and authority legitimized by law
closely associated with progressive elite groups (Chatterjee, 1993a, 1993b;

13
 AHONAA ROY

Chatterjee & Jegannathan, 2000, p. 10). In Reading Subaltern Studies,

David Ludden (2002) demonstrates how South Asian subaltern popula-
tions fall under the categories of “idiosyncrasy”, “passivity”, and “even
indifference”, due to the way they have been portrayed in imperialist schol-
arship. The colonial state imposed its own “historicist” and “modernist”
accounts with regard to the formation of nationalism and the nation state,
assigning imagined geographies on spaces and controlling discourses-mak-
ing (Benedict Anderson, 1983). Fredric Cooper (2002) in his essay “Conflict
and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History” addresses the
European ideology of modernity, liberalism and citizenship, which appro-
priated nationalism to guarantee autocratic rule.
The contemporary dynamics of gender and sexuality in the post-colonial
context is itself a product of colonialism which imposed certain morality
regimes and regulatory frames (Nagel, 1998; Epprecht, 2004; Lugones,
2007; Mbeki, 2009). This is what Connell (2014) calls ‘imperial patriarchy’
and Maria Lugones calls “coloniality of gender”. The homogenizing feminist
and queer vision of the global North is detrimental to individual dignity and
community-based politics, in the global South (Tambe, 2010). Thus, this vol-
ume rejects utopian ideals and instead works towards a political movement
that demands new configurations of transgressive politics and academic
theorizing that challenge predetermined identity categories. This allows us to
create a space for dialogue and deliberation that does not dissolve agency
and autonomy but rather works with a plurality of sex and sexuality’s dis-
courses and deployments in the making to rethink agency and autonomy.
This volume is committed to the movement of anti-hegemonic transnational
struggles, subversions and antagonisms and offers a critical reading of sexu-
ality from and of South Asia and the global South that centres sexual fluidity,
pluralism and different narratives of self-representation and indigeneity.

Notes
1 I am hugely thankful to Nour Abu Assab and Sara Shroff who provided impor-
tant insights on the earlier drafts of the Introduction chapter. I am grateful for
their labour, friendship, care and generative feedback.

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20
 Part I

COLONIAL KNOWLEDGE
AND POSTCOLONIAL
MULTIPLICITIES

21
 1
RELIGION, RITUAL POWER,
EXCLUSION AND MARGINALITY
Gender-transgressive Shivashaktis in Telangana,
Southern India

Pushpesh Kumar and M. Archana Rao

This volume is concerned with decolonizing the knowledge and discourses

about sexualities in the southern peripheries. The necessity for such alterna-
tive discourse arises in view of the western epistemic hegemony construct-
ing the non-Western sexuality either as conservative and anti-liberationist
suppressing diverse marginal erotic subjects (Kole, 1997) or projecting it as
geographies of uncivilized sexual promiscuity lacking respectable morality
and accountability of the of the civilized, enlightened class of the white
Western bourgeois (Ahlberg, 1994). Emphasizing on the existence of diver-
sity and multiplicity of gendered forms not at an individual but at a societal
scale in pre-colonial southern world, Connell (2014) is joined by her Indian
colleagues like Chatterjee (1999, 2012), Pande (2005) Orsini (2007) and
Vanita and Kidwai (2008) in blaming colonialism for the violent intrusion
through legal, administrative and Christian moral codes distorting, altering
and misrepresenting sexualities in the southern peripheries. Chatterjee
(2012), for example, introduces “monastic governmentality” as a term to
describe early Indian medieval subcontinental territorialities constituted
through grants of land and tenants, ritualized initiation-consecration, ordi-
nation and mind–body exercises (yoga, mantra and tantra) and teaching
lineages and its adherents. In the monastic order, discourses on knowledge
and learning of the cosmos and grammar were permeated with reflections
on body and desire beyond Freudian Oedipalized heterosexuality. Chatterjee
(2012) mentions medieval Kashmiri scholars referring to Shaiva-disciple
scholars who could write weighty grammars and commentary in Sanskrit as
well as discuss the comparative advantage of “third gender” (tritiya prakriti)
person over a female lover. She further mentions monastically trained lite-
rati such as Ksemendra in the eleventh century, who apparently appreciated
the perspective of the male lover of such third persons, for he even wrote
their advantages when it came to lovemaking: they could be clasped tighter
for not having breasts, they offered no menstrual disruptions and they

23
 P us h pes h K umar and M . A rc h ana R ao

suffered no diminution of beauty by pregnancy (Chatterjee, 2012)! In

another writing on Nizamat polity in nineteenth-century Bengal, Chatterjee
(1999) demonstrates how androgyny and gender ambiguity remained a
political attribute with the presence of salaried high-ranking “eunuch” offi-
cials as more trusted servants of the king. As the eunuchs could not produce
through their own body, they had no personal interests in (mis)appropriat-
ing the royal property and/or vie for succession to the throne and hence
could fully identify with the interests of their respective patrons (ibid).
Second, in the medieval polity, the divinization of emperor’s body and
ritualization of court were mediated through eunuch’s presence as they
were neither fully male nor fully female, neither considered infant nor
fully adult, neither fully human nor fully divine, and it is these ambiguities
which qualified them for the task. The transphobic, patriarchal East India
Company officials could not appreciate the existence of eunuch officials as
the former’s subsequent interference and control over the Nizamat polity
resulted in the removal of the latter. The further integration of India to
British crown resulted in homophobia and heterosexualization (Vanita
and Kidwai, 2008) which was reiterated through reformist agenda of
indigenous intelligentsia who considerably internalized colonial morality
holding sexual degeneration of natives as a reason for political subjuga-
tion (Srivastava, 2007). Though colonial modernity implanted a shame
culture around non-conforming sexualities and genders which continued
through postcolonial India, such practices of sexuality did not disappear
but went underground (Vanita and Kidwai, 2008). There are, however,
places and practices which escaped the direct heterosexist gaze of colonial
and post-colonial governance and reforms and continued without much
modification and change. This was probably possible due to the embed-
dedness of such practices in local religiosity and ritual practices in South
Asia. Although the existing scholarship on Indian subcontinent highlight-
ing and celebrating pre-colonial sexual and gender diversity focus mostly
on elite and Sanskritic traditions, the present chapter ethnographically
maps the local gender-transgressive Shivashaktis within the religious prac-
tices of Dalit-Bahujan communities in Telangana in the southern part of
India. The Supreme Court 2014 verdict, popularly known as NALSA judg-
ment and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights; TGP) Act, 2019,
extends citizenship to transgender communities. However, they fail to
engage with gender-transgressive (GT henceforth) religious identities like
that of Shivashaktis. In order to avail any facilities and schemes under
TGP Act 2019, the GT Shivashatkis have to officially identify as transgen-
der (female/male).
Shivashaktis are integral to certain religious and ritual practices in
Telangana which is the subject of discussion here, but they are also visible
in bordering districts of Maharashtra and Karnataka. As outlined earlier,
the chapter attempts to delineate the (ritualized) power cementing the exis-
tence of the GT Shivashaktis, who embody religiosity and remain central to

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certain rituals of Dalit-Bahujan communities in the Telangana region of

southern India. It reflects on the socio-political and economic marginalities
of the Shivashaktis on account of their lower class and caste positions,
along with their sex and gender ambiguities. The gender ambiguity embod-
ied by transgender Shivashaktis is simultaneously empowering in ritualistic
and religious contexts, as it forms the basis of their acceptance among these
caste groups and communities who believe in their special power to com-
municate with the deities.1 However, this embeddedness in (hetero)norma-
tive family and community life and religious practices constrain and regulate
their (homo)erotic desire.
Despite the modern Indian sexual cultures marked by shame and disgrace
towards gender ambiguities and sexual transgressions, Charu Gupta (2002)
express a word of caution in considering these changes as a linear process
signalling the final triumph of sexual puritanism. It appears that the cultural
and religious traditions around gender and sexual ambiguities, although
faded away from by the elite and middle-class milieu, continued to survive
among many Dalit-Bahujan and subaltern communities, particularly in
their religious and ritual practices (see Ilaiah, 1996). I begin this chapter by
elaborating on the Shivashakti identity and the ritual power they enjoy
through possession by deities and their ability to communicate with gods
and goddesses ending in prognostications and solving mundane and every-
day concerns of people including health, infertility, business and others. The
last section of the chapter attempts to chart out the socio-political and eco-
nomic marginalities of GT Shivashaktis based on their caste, gender and
sexuality.

Shivashaktis, gender transgressive Shivashaktis and Dalit-Bahujan

traditions
The term Shivashakti is composed of Shiva (one of the male trinities of
Hindu cosmos) and goddess Shakti (the embodiment of energy and creative
power). Shivashaktis are believed to have the power to bless and prognosti-
cate which is mostly executed through their ability to get possessed by local
deities, viz. Renuka Yellamma, Lord Rajarajeswara, Ailoni or Komaravelli
Mallanna, Pochamma, Maisamma, Edupayala Durgamma and Medram
Sammakka, Sarakka and few other (female) deities. These deities belong to
the religious beliefs and practices of mostly Dalit-Bahujan non-Brahmin
communities. These different gods and goddesses of non-Brahmin religious
belief system have their temples and shrines across Telangana and certain
bordering areas of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Although Shivashaktis can
be visited on by any of the deities listed earlier, in practice, they communi-
cate mostly, if not exclusively, with female deities: Goddesses Renuka
Yellamma, Peddamma, Pochamma, Maisamma, Durgamma, Kali and
Sammakka and Sarakka. Shivashaktis themselves are mostly drawn from
non-Brahmin communities. There is no written record of how the rituals

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 P us h pes h K umar and M . A rc h ana R ao

and traditions incorporating Shivashaktis began in Telangana and other

surrounding regions, but the latter (the Shivashaktis) traces their earliest
existence back to Kakatiya dynasty2 when they were part of “Oggu
Kathalu”,3 a Telugu ballad performance originating among Yadav (Golla-
Kurma), a non-Brahmin pastoral community and was also patronized by
the ruling elites of this dynasty. As mentioned earlier, most of the Shivashaktis
belong to Dalit-Bahujan castes and communities, viz Mala, Madiga,
Lambadi, Mudiraj, Kapu. Lodhi, Boi, Yadav and others. However, all
Shivashaktis claim their belonging to one caste which doesn’t have hierar-
chy called “Bandaru kulam”; Bandaru is the holy turmeric which is used in
the Shivashakti tradition on the foreheads. Sometimes, it is also used as a
healing powder and is taken as prasad in little quantities. It is believed that
it protects from ill health and the evil eye. This holy powder, bandaru, is
stored in a sling bag which is worn across by the Shivashaktis and is pre-
sented by the guru. The bag called Bandaru Sanchi (turmeric sack) is
adorned with seashells all over.
The association of these Gods and Goddesses with Dalit Bahujan tradi-
tions is also emphasized through certain myths. According to one such
myths, the god Mallana, whose temple is at Komuravelli in Siddipet district
of Telangana, is believed to have married two women—Golla Ketamma
from the Golla-Kurma caste and Marladevi belonging to the Balija caste,
showing the proximity of the god Mallana with non-Brahmin myths and
religious worldview.
There are male and female Shivashaktis, and there are those who identify
themselves as neither male nor female and are aware of in-betweenness of
their gender identity.4 These latter, the GT ones (invariably men experienc-
ing femininity within), are the most visible bodies during religious and rit-
ual performances around temples of the local deities. The GT Shivashaktis
claim authenticity to their bodies vis-à-vis male and female Shivashaktis by
highlighting their combined power of masculine (Shiva) and feminine
(Shakti). Whereas male and female Shivashaktis are not absent and they are
also visible during temple rituals and jatras,5 their unidimensional gender
attributes do not uphold the combined duality of maleness and femaleness
incorporated in the term Shivashakti, and hence, the bodies representing
this combination derive more legitimacy and have a larger presence in ritual
performances of Bonalu6 and Batukamma.7 These performances emerge on
occasions when a particular deity is propitiated either on certain festive
occasions or during a carnivalesque religious fare (Jatras). Many times, a
family arranges Bonalu performances in Jatras in accordance with the vow
made to a deity. The member, or members, of a family pleads a deity to
bestow welfare and prosperity or anything that benefits all members or a
particular member in a family. Upon fulfilment of the prayer, the deity is
propitiated by offering ritual food (bonum) carried on the head in a pot
decorated with turmeric, vermillion dots and the neem leaves tied to the tip
(of the vessel). Each of these families seeks the services of a Shivashakti to

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carry the ritual food to a deity during the Jatras. The Jatras thereby witness
a larger presence of Shivashaktis carrying the bonum to the deity on behalf
of different families. Endowed with special power to get possessed by dei-
ties, the Shivashaktis are thought to be more qualified to carry the ritual
food to deity than others. GT Shivashaktis can traverse the crowd of male
and female devotees better8 than those Shivashaktis who are either male or
female, and hence, the Jatras have a greater presence of them. Amidst the
rhythmic drum beats these Shivashaktis surrounded by men and women
dance with bonum on their heads as the crowd proceed towards the temple
in procession.9
The GT Shivashakti’s identity configures in two ways: the first is the more
conventional category of Shivashaktis who lead the life of a (GT) Shivashakti
as well as marry heterosexually, raise a family with children and officially
take on a male gender identity.10 Their gender ambiguity is known and
accepted within family and community contexts, with their femininity
allowed to be played out during ritual occasions, but their same-sex erotic
desire has to be sublimated to meet the public expectations of sanctity and
purity of bodies which are visited by the gods and goddesses. In the perfor-
mance of gender, these Shivashaktis have to balance between their mascu-
linity and femininity in intricate ways. They are father, brother, son-in-law
and husband working in public offices and institutions in petty jobs or
engaged in manual labour as men. These multiple masculine identities dis-
courage them to openly play out their feminine self to others except to the
men they are close and (erotically) intimate. But there are other GT
Shivashaktis who have undergone castration and emasculation, openly
cross-dress and take feminine names and are very public about their femi-
ninity. As regular cross-dressers, they are not burdened with marrying het-
erosexually, raising a family and children and running a family. Their needs
are taken care of by their respective natal families. But they are not “privi-
leged” to seek employment and earn their livelihood unlike the first cate-
gory of GT Shivashaktis. The most visible way to distinguish these two
categories of Shivashaktis is sartoriality both in everyday life and during
ritual performances. The GT Shivashaktis who also perform masculine gen-
der have to dress up like men as they are not expected to play out femininity
very openly except when they are with other Shivashaktis and close friends,
and their sartorial choice is restricted as they cannot cross-dress in everyday
life: cross-dressing is allowed for ritual performances like Bonalu and
Bhatukamma and other temple rituals. The cross-dresser emasculated
Shivashaktis don feminine costumes and conduct themselves as ascetic
feminine in public. The sartorial difference appears between the two even
during festive and ritual performances where a GT yet masculine
Shivashakti dons half-feminine and half-masculine robe whereas the GT
and feminine Shivashaktis are in full feminine garbs mostly in saree and
blouse with long hair parted and braided similarly to the Telugu women of
the region. These emasculated cross-dressing Shivashaktis emerged and

27
 P us h pes h K umar and M . A rc h ana R ao

were assimilated within Shivashakti tradition much later within Shivashakti

tradition: earlier, emasculation was not an accepted practice among the
Shivashaktis as they are embodiment of both Shiva and Shakti and hence
were not expected to part with their phallus, the symbol of masculinity,
even if they wish to play out more femininity.

Figure 1.1 Kalyanam (ritual wedding of god and goddess) on the third day during
the initiation rituals.
Source: Photograph by Archana Rao M.

GT Shivashakti who are not emasculated and articulate masculine public

identity in mundane and everyday life. Their sartoriality during a perfor-
mance reflects their partial feminine form. The upper garments remain a
male kurta and T-shirt, respectively, while the lower garment of these
Shivashaktis are sarees. Nose rings and toe rings are feminine while don-
ning mustache is masculine. The larger presence of trans-Shivashaktis in
Jatras and Bonalu performances is explained in terms of the restraints and
inhibitions of female Shivashaktis in withstanding the proximity of male
bodies during Bonalu performances; men are found to dance closer and
sometimes encircle a Shivashakti while the latter proceed to offer bonum

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R eligion , R itual P ower , E xclusion and M arginality

to the deity in a procession. Many times, the crowd gets unruly with the
presence of many drunken (male) adventurists filling the crowd. The GT
Shivashaktis, although amusing on such occasions with their feminine
adornments, are better in grappling with the male and female proximities
and hence provide the most conspicuous site during Bonalu performances
in Jatras. Male Shivashaktis are far fewer while female Shivashaktis are
tacitly inconspicuous, although not fully absent during Bonalu and Jatra
performances.

Becoming a Shivashakti
There is no difference in the process through which a person irrespective of
gender identity attains Shivashaktihood. The family and community believ-
ing in Shivashakti tradition identify a child with certain traits as an inkling
of s(he) being a potential Shivashakti. A lack of sleep; sleep-talking; reduced
appetite; a tendency to withdraw from everyday interaction with family
and kin; an inclination to participate in religious rituals and worship; fre-
quent application of turmeric (haldi) and vermillion (kumkum) on face,
turmeric on the legs and hands; and screaming and gritting teeth in dreams
are perceived as indicators of the child being closer to divinity and away
from the mundane and material world. Despite these perceptible signs, the
family would first consult medical practitioners before arriving at a decision
to consult a Shivashakti mentor (guru). Upon a series of medical consulta-
tions failing to show results and when the child continues to show similar
symptoms of sleeplessness, gritting teeth and others, the family decides to
take the child to a Shivashakti guru. A guru who is the senior Shivashakti
known to the family initiates the child into Shivashaktihood through invo-
cations and rituals. The guru teaches the rituals, recitals and songs to a
Shivashakti chela (student or disciple). After a guru is satisfied with the
chela Shivashakti’s learning the rituals, the latter is allowed to proceed with
the final rite, Devuni laggam (Wedding of the God), completing “her” tran-
sition into Shivashakti. Devuni laggam is the marriage of God and Goddess
on patam, a decorative sketch drawn with colour powders imbuing the
backdrop with religiosity and ceremoniousness. The patam of each god or
a goddess has its own unique pattern and design. None of them resembles
each other. The guru will tie a rudraksha seed (Elaeocarpus; prayer bead
primarily of Shaivism) or a dry turmeric rhizome tied to a thread around
the neck of the chela (disciple) affirming the guru–chela (mentor–disciple)
relationship of the Shivashaktis. A silver amulet called Bedi in local dialect
is worn by the Shivshakti after the rituals are completed. The ornament has
holy letters engraved on it which denote the beeja mantras of the god or
goddess with whom the Shivashakti is possessed.
The initiation ritual consisting three days begins with cleaning the ritual
premise where the deities reside in the household of the person initiated
as Shivashakti: the deities are then placed on rectangular-shaped colorful

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 P us h pes h K umar and M . A rc h ana R ao

design pattern drawn on the ground, which is filled with rice and jowar,
where Oggu Katahlu singers perform to ward off the evil eye. On the sec-
ond day the deities—gods and goddesses—are taken for a ritual bath
(Ganga Pooja) in the nearby pond or river. While returning, the deities are
halted near a snake burrow; the family and kin accompanying the ritual
procession collect some holy mud to build gadde on which the deities are
placed with honour. The people then spend the whole night singing devo-
tional songs. The next day, everyone takes bath, a heap of paddy is thrashed
with the rokali (wooden pestle) and the hand-pounded rice is used for pre-
paring the bonum (sweet rice) called Surya bonam for the Sun God. In
front of the house on the colourful sketch (sadaru patamu), the god and
goddess are ritually married to their spouses—Goddess Pochamma and
Durgamma are unmarried. There is no marriage for both of them. The feet
of the senior-most members of the host family are then washed with
Panchamritam, a liquid mixture prepared with a combination of curd, cow
milk, honey, coconut water and ghee by the Oggu Katha performers. The
Surya Bonum (ritual food for the Sun God) is offered to the Sun God at the
end of the Kalayanam (marriage of deities). This initiates a teenaged person
into Shivashaktihood.

Claiming power: Ability to prognosticate and medico-ritual

healings
The power of a Shivashakti is called “Shivashantiyam” denoting his or her
ability to sense and identify the effects of evil spirit and black magic and use
the “intrinsic” healing power a Shivashakti is supposedly endowed with to
cure the effects of this evil eye. GT Shivashaktis, like other Shivashaktis,
cannot be liberal in consuming alcohol and non-vegetarian food and cannot
engage in sex quite freely. They feel that the hijra women are free to engage
in sex work and are neither restricted through rituals and religious taboos
nor obliged to perform sacredness to their customers in and through sex
work.11 Since the communities seek ritual services and consultancies on
health and many other mundane matters from the Shivashaktis due to the
latter’s spiritual power, bodily sanctity and purity are expected from the lat-
ter. As different deities choose to speak through Shivashaktis and people
seek ritual services on certain religious and festive occasions, viz. Bonalu,
Batukamma, Agnigundalu (fire-walk), Sadarapatalu and Bhavisyavani
(prognostication) certain respectability and honour configurate on a
Shivashakti’s body.12 The proximity to a deity as a Shivashakti’s prerogative
simultaneously demands certain taboos and avoidance. The non-observance
of these minimal taboos and avoidance can affect not only the power of
Shivashaktis but would also compromise their public image and delegiti-
mize their ritual and religious performances. During Ashad Masam (begin-
ning of monsoon season) and Navratri, of Dussehra (Hindu sacred months),
Shivashaktis are not expected to use footwear and have to observe fasting.

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A Shivashakti is also not expected to accept food from the households

which have recently witnessed the death of a member or where a woman is
pregnant, the cradle ceremony of newly born has been performed and if a
girl has just attained puberty. During Navratri, he/she should not visit oth-
ers’ houses.
Shivashaktis are known to predict and answer people’s questions about
uncertainties in the possessed state; while in trance, a possessed Shivshakti’s
body is a vehicle for a goddess to communicate with people who express
anxieties and uncertainties, both real and imagined, with the former
responding and suggesting mechanism to deal with these rather pressing
mundane issues. There are occasions during which a Shivashakti can invoke
possession seated on a peeta (a sacred wooden table). While seated on peeta
and being possessed a Shivashakti foretells the future on certain important
matters and concerns of the family and “individual”. The body of the
Shivashakti shivers during possession, the eyes zooming around, and with
her tongue intermittently outstretched, she keeps chanting mantras in
Telugu and speaks out the names of the goddesses visiting her body.
During a Jatra around a god’s or goddess’s temple, devotees witness a
mass possession of Shivashaktis. In a Jatra, Shivashaktis, particularly, the
GT ones gather in hundreds to offer bonalu (ritual food) on behalf of devo-
tees. With several thousands and sometimes lakhs of devotees thronging in
the spot to participate in Jatras, one of the dramatic moments is witnessed
during the mass possession of Shivashaktis. Medaram Sammakka Sarakka
Jatra,13 Komarelli Mallanna Jatra14 and Edupalaya Durgamma Jatra15 pro-
vide such a spectacle, during which several Shivashaktis get possessed
together. During the Medaram Sammaka, Sarakka Jatra, the two female
deities, the mother and the daughter as both forest goddesses, are believed
to arrive to bless the devotees from the nearby hilltop “Chilakala Gutta”
where the temple is located. All the Shivashaktis camp at this hilltop during
the Jatra. A local Adivasi family is identified as a special devotee of these
Goddesses and a teenage boy from this family is allowed to carry turmeric
and vermillion from the hilltop to the Gadde (throne) downwards to where
the deities are kept for sacred views of the devotees. During this sacred pro-
cession from hill to the Gadde on the plain, it so happens that any one
Shivashakti get possessed which is followed by several of them getting
simultaneously possessed making the sacred procession further hallowed
and consecrated. The whole pathway from hilltop down to the Gadde is
spectacularly performative with the possessed bodies in trance dancing and
veering around and, at times, allowing themselves to slide downward while
approaching the deity. The trance state continues while the Shivashaktis
enter the Jampanna stream for a holy dip. In colourful costumes, the
Shivashaktis with different props ranging from a trident (trishul), a divine
rope (verragolla), a sword (talwar), a garland made of shells (gavvala darsa-
nam), neem twigs, and a sling bag with shells that has bandaru or turmeric
add to the colour of the festive occasion. Many Shivashaktis also walk on

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 P us h pes h K umar and M . A rc h ana R ao

fire, agnigundalu. These religious performances reaffirm the ritual power of

the Shivashaktis in popular understanding.
Like other Shivashaktis the GT Shivashaktis affirm their power of heal-
ings through their narratives centred on stories of curing others in the fam-
ily and community. A is a self-identified Dalit GT Shivashakti who is also
educated, married heterosexually and the father of two school-going chil-
dren. Staying in a joint family, (s)he manages to speak English. Her claims
of healing represent almost every Shivashakti’s narratives. A explains:

I have experienced Shivashantiyam (special power) within me on a

number of occasions. My younger sister is a bipolar disorder
patient; she used to have fits and attack of mood swings. My
younger brother who used to attend her was unable to control her.
I would perform certain rituals every time when she is disturbed
and put haldi (turmeric) and kumkum (vermillion) on her forehead
following which she will be alright. After repeating this a few times
her bipolar disorder was gone. This gives me a sense that I am
blessed with some special power.

A shares other stories of healings, which are in order:

1. “Meera and Rajsekhara (pseudonym), the couple were childless even

after eight years of their marriage. They visited many fertility clinics.
While Rajsekhara works in a private office, Meera is a housewife. The
family, friends and office staff used to pursue Rajsekhara to get remar-
ried to overcome the stigma of being childless. They took many pil-
grimages in aspiration of a child and approached quacks and Ayurvedic
doctors but failed in their attempts. One of my clients Kuntamma
(pseudonym) who has benefitted through my consultancies on certain
matters told them to visit me for solving this problem. They paid a visit.
I told Meera that she will definitely conceive after performing a few
rituals and prescribed that she should not consume bottle ground till
the baby is born and grows. This prescription should be maintained till
the baby is able to eat by herself. As per Shivashakti’s perspicacity,
Meera was afflicted with “Balagrahadosham”. For such ailment the
devotee is supposed to offer sacrifice of bottle gourd; she is not sup-
posed to consume bottle gourd either raw or cooked during her life-
time. Meera said she liked bottle gourd very much but decided to
sacrifice that for the sake of conceiving. I performed rituals and wor-
ship of Renuka Yellamma Mata by sacrificing bottle gourd. A dried
bottle gourd is then given to the client and she is expected to worship
this along with the Yellamma’s photo. After this ritual and continuous
worship of Yellamma thereafter, Meera conceived and gave birth to a
girl child. The couple named the child as Renuka. They are very happy
to have a child as they could overcome the stigma and discrimination

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on account of childlessness”. The sacrifice of the bottle gourd is consid-

ered as a sacrifice of the first child.
2. Another devotee Praveen (pseudonym) from Utter Pradesh belonging
to Marwari community who runs a finance business offering loans
against gold in a slum of the Hyderabad city was not able to run this
business properly which incurred continuous losses. A Muslim boy,
Abdul (pseudonym) who had benefitted through my guidance when he
suffered from metal ailment brought Omkar to my place. I told Praveen
that there is an evil eye disturbing his business. I performed a ritual
called “Naraghosha” pooja which has to be performed on Amavasya
(dark moon night). “Naraghosha pooja is performed to avoid or to
remove the evil eye on the business or beauty. It will remove all the
negative influence of evil eyes. I also gave him a copper plate to hang
on the wall of his shop. This copper plate will absorb all the evil eye
and black magic. His business picked up slowly. He was very happy
and gifted me a silver armlet.”
3. Lalakrishna (pseudonym), another devotee brought his younger brother
who was in his mid-twenties and was suffering from some mental ail-
ment. Lalkrishna and his family-owned farms which grew Bengal
grams. This brother used to sleep in the farm to safeguard the crop
from the attack of wild bores. In due course he began to hallucinate
frequently. One day he did not return from the farm. The family reached
the farm to notice this hallucinatory behaviour where he appeared to
be mad. Thinking that he is under the influence of evil spirit, the family
took him to a healer in a Sufi Dargah (Sufi Shrine) where he was left for
45 days for treatment in the supervision of the Sufi healer. This did not
fetch any result. This man was then brought to me. I am aware that
black hens are inclined towards people controlled by an evil spirit and
in turn sacrificing a black hen appeases the evil spirit. The blood of
black hen pacifies the evil spirit. After sacrificing a black hen. the man
was back to his normal. He sought the blessings of the whole Shivashakti
community. Now he is getting married. The family gave me money and
rice as a gift.
4. Maulana Saeed khan (pseudonym) has three wives. The eldest wife
Zubaida, who is the mother of seven children, was under the control of
evil spirits over the past three years. She was also in the grip of
Bhanamati (sorcery). She would shout at, beat and bite people. An auto
driver, Pavan brought Saeed and his wife to me. I performed few rituals
to pacify Bhanamati. On new moon day freeing an owl which is kept
hostage in a cage by the captors helps in such cases. If you let this owl
free from the cage, through performance of rituals, the evil spirit flies
along the freed owl. This process is accompanied by goat sacrifice and
breaking of coconut and throwing lemons. Within three–four days the
evil spirit left her body and she was back to normal. The family gave
me clothes and good amount of money.

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 P us h pes h K umar and M . A rc h ana R ao

The preceding narratives reflect the special magical and ritual power which
are almost intrinsic to a Shivashakti irrespective of his or her gender iden-
tity. Sometimes, people also fear Shivashaktis as the latter are believed to
hold this special power and can harm a person who is unfriendly and make
a Shivashakti rattled.

Sexuality, precarity and marginality

Gender ambiguity enables GT Shivashaktis to be incorporated and occupy
more space in Shivashaktis tradition as brought out earlier. As against the
hijras’ exclusion from the mainstream family and community life, the
Shivashaktis are accepted within heteronormative families and community
of Dalit-Bahujans. But these acceptances pose limitations on their erotic
life. Being the embodiment of Shiva, they are expected to perform masculin-
ity which compels many of them to marry heterosexually and produce chil-
dren. Shivashaktis who experience femininity within feel trapped into this
heteronormative structure and find no choice than to downplay her same-
sex erotic desire. Most of these Shivashaktis are either illiterate or semi-
educated and are unable to find a secure and good job. The income from
temple and other rituals and prognostication is very low and far too meagre
to sustain a family, pushing them further into poverty and precarity. Most
of these Shivashaktis are into manual labour and petty jobs. To balance
their masculinity against their femininity, GT Shivashaktis are not expected
to undergo emasculation. With their (male) sexual organ untampered, they
are expected to marry women. To escape this compulsion, many Shivashaktis
have undergone emasculation and have decided to play out their feminine
selves. They have also challenged the heteronormative marriage norms and
are not burdened with producing children and sustaining families. These
Shivashaktis are not thrown out of their families and homes, but their trans-
feminine identity does not allow them to take up jobs in the market, and so
they remain mostly unemployed unlike male, female and other transgender
Shivashaktis who manage to get some job by their acceptance of heteronor-
mative social norms. The transfeminine emasculated Shivashaktis have to
earn their livelihood either through ritual performances during Bonalu and
Bhatukhamma, or through offering remedies to some mundane problems.
Sometimes they are compelled to take up sex work to sustain themselves.
Sex work, however, may not be easy for the emasculated feminine
Shivashaktis because of their embeddedness in religion and rituals. The
bodies which become the vehicles for gods and goddesses cannot be defiled
through sex work in the public perception. Whereas hijras earn and sustain
lives through sex work and begging, Shivashaktis cannot opt for sex work
due to her religious roles; begging is limited to a few identified houses dur-
ing rituals and festival months. Some of the emasculated Shivashaktis are
married to men from the Gollakurma caste men; among this caste group,
marrying a GT Shivashakti is an accepted norm for men. In such cases, the

34
R eligion , R itual P ower , E xclusion and M arginality

Shivashakti wives have allowed their husbands to marry other women for
the continuation of the family line. The man looks after both his female
wife and Shivashakti wife.
Heterosexually married GT Shivashaktis feel constrained in establishing
intimacy with other men, but many men believe that the Shivashaktis are
closer to the divine, and intimacy with the latter is a matter of privilege.
This creates the window for such Shivashaktis to enter into intimate rela-
tions with such devotee men. Many Shivashaktis manage their erotic life
within these realms of sacred-erotic intimacies without being open about it.
The secrecy is also maintained by the men who get intimate with the
Shivashaktis as they fear the magical and shamanic power of the Shivashaktis;
many revelations and opprobrium can rattle Shivashaktis, who can curse
and bring misfortune to the one with a bad mouth Moreover, Shivashaktis
say that they get intimate with men as a result of genuine love and not
because of lust and money. In other words, their relationships and intimacy
with men are not commercial but reciprocal, romantic and spiritual.
During the Jatras when Shivashaktis dance with bonum on her head, men
draw close and dance in excitement while whistling and whooping, creating
a sacred and erotic ambience. With lots of toddy shops spread out around
the sacred Jatra space, many drunken men fill the crowd and dance to drum
beats around the transgender Shivashaktis who are dressed elegantly in
colourful carnival regalia. Many other effeminate transgenders (Kothis)
stand outside, a little away from the Jatra spot to solicit customers for sex.
These Kothis are easily identified by Shivashaktis, who differentiate their
own asexual sacred body in the Jatra from the commercialized sexual bod-
ies of the Kothis.
The sacredness of the Jatra and the centrality of bonalu performance of a
dancing Shivashakti dramatically enhance and elevate her power. But the
ritual and healing powers do not translate into socio-political and economic
empowerment of Shivashaktis, in general, and GT Shivashaktis, in particular.
Due to the lower caste and class position of Shivashaktis, they feel that they
are cornered in decision-making bodies of the temples around which the
Jatras materialize. The temple trusts are managed by the government of
Telangana, in which members of the trust are invariably drawn from better-
off caste and class positions. Many a time, the Shivashaktis are indifferent to
institutionalized education because they need to spend times with their men-
tors to learn many rituals and poojas which are indispensable to attaining the
Shivashantiyam (the power of a Shivashakti). This may be the reason for their
educational backwardness furthering their socio-economic marginalities.

Conclusion
One of the efforts in decolonizing sexualities and gender practices in the
global South is to locate the indigenous practices that inform gender and sex-
ual fluidities, and de-oedipalized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) carnivalesque

35
 P us h pes h K umar and M . A rc h ana R ao

performances integrated into the socio-religious and cultural practices of

certain communities. Those indigenous practices and performances of gen-
der transgression that could escape the colonial and postcolonial puritanism
and continue in the contemporary period need to be discussed and docu-
mented before they transform/disappear or go into oblivion. Although liter-
ary nuances from precolonial India depicting gender fluidity and the
spectrum of erotic sensibilities are prodigiously captured and eloquently
illustrated in the anthology Same Sex Love in India compiled by Vanita
and Kidwai (2008), we equally need to anthropologize similar customs
without orientalist romanticizing or evolutionist primitivizing; simultane-
ously we need to engage with the materiality of these sexual practices and
enabling/disabling components build into such practices. This framework
informs our present ethnographic engagements with GT Shivashaktis in
Telangana. Although we appreciate the embeddedness of Shivashaktis in
community lives and the religious practices of Dalit-Bahujan communities
in Telangana, we are equally aware of the socio-economic marginalities
and precarities confronted by the Shivashaktis in everyday life. The accep-
tance of ritual power and gender fluidities do not necessarily translate into
economic securities and reasonable material life. The answer lies in the
fact that most of these Shivashaktis belong to marginal caste–class families
and their initiation in Shivashaktihood demands an investment of time and
energies to learn skills and rituals to qualify as a member of the commu-
nity. This skilling through ritual knowledge and practices in the company
of their respective mentors engenders simultaneous deskilling as the young
disciples (to be initiated Shivashaktis) cannot afford to allocate full time to
education and learning. Besides, gender transgression valued and drama-
tized through ritual moments and carnivalesque performances may be
devalued in broader heteronormative society beyond the immediate com-
munity contexts and in the phallocentric economy where in-betweenness
(Butler, 1997) is rated low and disgraceful. It is important to explore the
history of the patronage system within which Shivashakihood flourished,
what the material conditions were of this gender transgressive group of
ritual experts and how that system weakened, leading to shift and fall in
economic securities while continuities in ritual and performative domains.
This may be another project which will complement the present study.

Notes
1 In the Telangana region, many Dalit and Bahujan communities believe in
Shivashaktis’ possession of special powers to communicate with the local dei-
ties. The chapter subsequently lists out most of these deities. These deities, in
turn, belong to the Dalit-Bahujan religious “worldview”.
2 Kakatiya dynasty was in existence from twelfth to fourteenth centuries in
Andhra Pradesh. Its capital was Orugallu, which is present-day Warangal city in
Telangana state. The Kakatiya rulers belonged to Yadava community, a non-
Brahmin caste in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

36
R eligion , R itual P ower , E xclusion and M arginality

3 Oggu Katha is a folk narrative of pastoral community of Yadav (Golla) and

Kuruma associated with praising and narrating the stories of local deities like
Mallana and Yellama belonging to Dalit-Bahujan religious “worldview”. See
Bhikshu (2015).
4 Judith Butler (1997) mentions a lack of in-betweenness of gender identity in the
heterosexist cultures and languages of the west creating the problem of intelligi-
bility of such identities.
5 Jatras are travels and religious processions marked by festivities and perfor-
mances organized around temples and pilgrim places. The famous Jatras of
Telangana include Vemulawada Jatra around Raj Rajeswara Temple, Medaram
Jatra which draws lakhs of devotees particularly from the Adivasi communities
and Komuravelly Jatra around Mallana Temple in the Siddipet district on the
hill. These jatras can include Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical performances
while any performance can include elements of Brahmanical and non-Brahman-
ical cultures (see Rege, 2000).
6 Bonalu is very specific to Telangana. It literally means “feeding the goddess”.
Occurring in the months of June and July and sometimes in other months too,
the festival honours the goddesses of neighbourhoods and families and invokes
their powers for the days and months ahead. See Clothey (2006) for more
detailed discussion.
7 Bathukamma is the floral festival celebrated in September and October by
Hindu women in Talnagana. Bathukamma celebration is associated with Mother
Goddess who is worshipped as the life giver.
8 See Indrani Chatterjee (1999), who mentions how “gender ambiguity” was
regarded as privilege within the Nizamat polity of Bengal. She elaborates on the
ritualization of space and divinization of the king which was mediated by those
who were neither male nor female, neither child nor adult, neither god nor
human. These in-betweenness were embodied by eunuchs, and hence, the latter
occupied a significant place in the Nizamat polity of Bengal before the East
India Company took over the governance by substantively reducing the power
of the Nazims (the monarch) through a series of treaties.
9 A jatra holds for several days ranging from 3 to 15 days. The families gather in
advance, camp there either in a tent or rent a house. The family which has decided
to offer ritual food (bonum) to the deity has invariably consulted and has
arranged to bring a Shivashakti along. Every such family takes care of the travel
and stay and other requirements of the Shivashakti who has come along. A
Shivashakti is also paid by the family. I am told that generally, a family consults
and avails the services of a Shivashakti who is known and familiar, and some-
times the Shivashakti may belong to the same family. In the latter case, the ques-
tion of getting paid, among others, does not hold. One can witness hundreds of
Shivashaktis gracing and adorning a Jatra, adding a special aura and spirit to the
occasion both through their carnivalesque appearance and ritual performances.
10 These Shivashaktis’ public identity is male; on every official document, they are
listed as male; their official identity cards mark their male identity. But they are
considered as a combination of both masculine and feminine features by their
followers and devotees, in their neighbourhood and within their community con-
text. In their personal realm, they think of themselves as transgenders and not
men. So gender becomes consciously performative for these Shivashaktis, and
they perform multiple gender identities depending upon the context and the audi-
ence. If they are in their respective workplaces, they try to play out their masculine
self; in religious and ritual contexts, they try to balance their masculine and femi-
nine performances mostly through their specific sartoriality with the apparel on
the top remaining masculine while the lower garments being invariably feminine.
This marked distinctiveness has been described in the subsequent parts of the text.

37
 P us h pes h K umar and M . A rc h ana R ao

11 The hijras who live in traditional hijra households (havelis) are expected to lead
an asexual life due to the sanctity of the haveli as a sacred and honoured space.
Sexual conducts of the inmates of the haveli might bring dishonour and hence
the authorities of the haveli like nayaks and senior hijra gurus (mentors) enforce
strict discipline within the haveli space (see Reddy, 2000).
12 Although these honour and respectability are limited to religious and ritual
domains. In mundane and everyday, a Shivashakti is indulged in petty jobs and
manual labour. Transgender Shivashaktis who are emasculated are sometimes
forced to take up sex work to sustain themselves due to a lack of accommoda-
tion of cross-dressers in the job market. Sometimes these Shivashaktis lack cer-
tificates with transgender identity and are unable to apply for jobs even when
they are educated.
13 Sammakka Sarakka Jatra is an Adivasi festival being celebrated in Medaram
village of Warangal district in Telangana. The Jathra holds for four days in the
Magh Masam (January–February), when devotees gather in large number to
worship Sammakka and Sarrakka—the Adivasi goddesses. This festival is asso-
ciated with the mythical stories of the goddess Sammakka, who saved the Koya
Adivasis from the attack of Kakatiya chiefs. The Jatra draws a large number of
devotees from across the country and regarded as the Kumbh Mela of the adi-
vasis. The rituals are non-Brahmanical and many Dalit-Bahujan communities fill
the crowd. See https://www.religionworld.in/story-medaram-sammakka-sara-
kka-jatara-a-religious-gathering-of-10-million-people/ (retrieved and accessed
November 13, 2018).
14 Komuravelly Mallana temple is located in Komuravelly village in the Siddipet
district of Telangana. The primary deity is Mallana or Mallikarjuna Swamy who
is an incarnation of Lord Shiva, the Hindu god. The deity is called Khndoba in
Maharashtra. The Jatra might continue over a few months. See https://www.
thehindu.com/news/national/telangana/komuravelli-spruced-up/arti-
cle8047939.ece (retrieved November 13, 2018).
15 This is a three days Jatra of goddess Vanadurga during the Shivaratri Festival in
Nagasanpalli of Pappanapet Mandal of Medak district. Edupayala Durgamma
Devsthanam is the place where seven rivulets meet. Some twenty lakh people are
expected to gather every year during the Jathara. http://www.edupayalavanadu-
rgatemple.org/

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Clothey, F. (2006). Religion in India: A historical introduction. Routledge.
Chatterjee, I. (1999). Gender, slavery and law in colonial India. Oxford University
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Chatterjee, I. (2012). When “sexuality” floated free of histories in South Asia. The
Journal of Asian Studies, 71(4), 945–962.
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Reddy, G, (2000). With respect to sex: Negotiating Hijra identity in South India.
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Rege, S. 2000. ‘Understanding Popular Culture: The Satyashodhak and ganesh Mela
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ture. Penguin.

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 2
UNCERTAIN GRAMMARS,
AMBIGUOUS DESIRES
Towards a sexual politic of indeterminacy in
Sri Lanka

Themal Ellawala

One evening in the summer of 2016 found Amal,1 a young man in his early
twenties, and I at a mutual friend’s house talking frankly about anonymous
sex. I was in Sri Lanka conducting an ethnography on queer desires, and
Amal was one of the informants I had such candid discussions with. From
experiences of homoeroticism in stiflingly heteronormative all-boys schools
to cruising at elite hotels in Colombo, he readily and gleefully described, in
vivid detail, his sexual encounters. After hearing stories of multiple risqué
sexual escapades, I asked him what thoughts or feelings would run through
his head during the actual sex act. This question appeared to stymie the
erstwhile garrulous Amal. He paused in contemplation and then responded,
“Hmm, it’s… tough to turn into words. Really… I don’t know how to think
about it (pause). Honestly, it’s tough to put into words (pause) There aren’t
words, because (trails off)”. After this hiatus, the tempo of our conversation
resumed its earlier, consistent flow.
I return to this, seemingly innocuous and banal, juncture of our conversa-
tion as I believe that, embedded in the architecture of this moment, of his
words, lies a crucial understanding of queerness.2 It is possible that Amal’s
uncharacteristic inability to respond to this question speaks to the dynamics
of the researcher-informant encounter (a point I return to later) or the
impossibility of responding to such an abstract question or recalling ephem-
era from an erotic past. It may also gesture to a failure of language, which
Amal could be indexing with his insistence that “there aren’t words”.
Perhaps it was an inability to rationalise erotically charged moments that
motivated this non-response. All these explanations offer unique possibili-
ties and, more relevant to the conceit of this chapter, are animated by a
common feature.
This ethnographic moment coincides with a broader phenomenon
I apprehended throughout my fieldwork, namely a sense that ambiguities

40
 U ncertain G rammars , A mbiguous D esires

and uncertainties haunted myriad dimensions of the queer, frustrating the

ability to declare with certainty. My fieldwork was conducted over three
months of 2016 across various parts of Sri Lanka and consisted of conver-
sations about queer desires, fantasies and sexual experiences, as well as
observations of queer performances in public space. It appeared to me that
questions that attempted to (over)determine and explain queer experiences
could not achieve neat, coherent responses—being met with pauses, ambiv-
alence or answers that disturbed more than resolved. I, too, was rendered
speechless by the ineffable nature of what transpired at the ethnographic
confessional. In her ethnographic exploration of the violence of the Khmer
Rouge, Darcie DeAngelo suggests that often “the listener is trapped and
unable to formulate an opinion of the speaker or story, or to mediate reality”
(2019, p. 49). Similarly, I found myself unable to think or speak through the
unexpected and uncertain testimonies that were tentatively proffered, incom-
pletely languaged and stubbornly ephemeral. To DeAngelo, silence and
absent-presence are analytics and methodologies for excavating the evanes-
cent. We are united in our interest of negative space—a category coined by
post-colonial studies that attends to the background of cultural objects in the
form of silence, absence and inaction (see Hill, 2014; Odin, 1997; Seshadri,
2012; Winnubst, 2004) – as a central ontological principle. As a meditation
on indeterminacy, this chapter is the first of several inquiries into the rela-
tionship between queerness and negative space I have in mind.
I seek to engage, vis-à-vis a Sri Lankan context, a long-standing debate on
sexual subjectivity in South Asia—contested between discourses of “LGBT
(lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender)–ness”, Men having Sex with Men
(MSM) status, and “Indigenous” ontologies. Circumscribed as it is by
Indian cultural borders, this debate has not actively reckoned with non-
Indian subcontinental contexts, although its implications for sexual subcul-
tures in the region are undeniable, given the legitimation of certain
autochthonous as sexual identifiers in Bangladesh and Pakistan (Boyce,
2007; Cohen, 2005). In contrast to the ordered and clearly demarcated
interiorities, desires and behaviours that these models presuppose, in the
narratives my informants shared with me emerged tensions between con-
flicting phenomena and uncertainties and betrayed a hesitancy in commit-
ting to any one position (discourses of identification, opinions or beliefs). A
closer look reveals that idioms of indeterminacy3 mark many dimensions of
the queer erotic economies that my informants are both entangled in and
fashion. In the nascent and exploratory discussion that follows, I argue that
the very uncertainty that marks the sexual for these individuals highlights the
precarity of any project aimed at arriving at simplistic and totalising under-
standings of sexual subjectivity. An open-ended and capacious engagement
with such moments, rather than resorting to the customary dismissal of com-
plexity through a footnote on “fluidity” or “nuance” that one encounters in
reductionist theorisations, enables us to imagine queer potentialities in sites

41
 T hemal E llawala

and contexts that lie outside of the axioms of the Western sexual imaginary.
Through this argument, I seek to articulate a sexual politic of indeterminacy
that we must contend with when exploring sexualities in Sri Lanka and
perhaps more broadly. In the remainder of this chapter, I trace the contours
of the theoretical debates on indeterminacy as a conceptual category, sketch
the theoretical terrain on sexual subjectivity in South Asia, delve into the
ethnographic details of narratives that inject a sense of indeterminacy to
schemas of sexual signification and demonstrate the necessity of theorising
indeterminacy as a vector or paradigm of sexuality studies.

Determining indeterminacy(?)
The theoretical category of indeterminacy bears several academic lineages.
On one hand, it has emerged from obscurity to become a fairly well-known
debate in metaphysics, centred on notions of ontological vagueness (see
Akiba & Abasnezhad, 2014; Barnes & Williams, 2011; Hyde, 2016). A
somewhat tortured debate at best, due mainly to the lack of a definition for
ontological vagueness that does not merely restate the logical arguments in
support of it (Barnes, 2010), one of the few premises that philosophers are
able to agree on are that there are primarily two types of indeterminacy: (1)
ontological indeterminacy (the world is in and of itself vague, and if a sin-
gular term is vague, then its referent itself is vague) and (2) semantic inde-
terminacy (the Quinean thesis that there exist multiple objects that a given
term may satisfactorily refer to; Eklund, 2008). Similarly, consensus sug-
gests that, given the vagueness that inheres to all language, a given example
may exemplify both ontological and semantic indeterminacy (Barnes, 2010,
p. 605).
Such philosophical musings on ontological vagueness may very well be of
relevance to my argument, in considering the vagueness that inheres to the
sexual subject and attendant metaphysical dimensions, such as desire.
However, I do not situate this intellectual exercise within the parameters of
this philosophical debate for several reasons. First, philosophers dispute the
fact that indeterminacy can in and of itself constitute an ontological state.
As Barnes states, “intuitively, [object] p’s indeterminacy shouldn’t just be
another way things could be—a third option between p and not-p. p’s inde-
terminacy should be things being somehow unsettled between p and not-p”
(2010, p. 612). The use of classical bivalent logic as the modus operandi in
substantiating arguments for ontological vagueness limits such exercises to
binary outcomes, which cannot adequately accommodate the plethora of
ontic possibilities available to the sexual subject, as I will demonstrate pres-
ently. Second, to attempt to pin the indeterminacy my informants performed
and narrated before me as ontological vagueness or semantic vagueness is
to overdetermine subjectivities much like current sexual discourses, which
runs counter to the epistemological and political thrust of this chapter.
It is of value to recall Derrida’s critique of philosophical rationality, which

42
 U ncertain G rammars , A mbiguous D esires

exposes knowledge acquisition as a system of mastery animated by the

speaking subject, operating through the metaphysical logos to negate and
nullify any other mode of thought as impossible, unphilosophical, and
meaningless (Derrida, 1982; Derrida, 1997). From such an epistemic posi-
tion, a critique of the disciplinary technologies of sexual discourses must
invariably grapple with claim to philosophical truths and the hegemonising
will of the metaphysical logos.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the imprecise nature of language
coincide with the debate on semantic indeterminacy as well as my own
epistemic aims. Grappling with the use of language to describe phenomena,
Wittgenstein says that “you don’t know what it would be right to call a
description. For you would not acknowledge the most exact photograph as
an exact representation of your experience. There is no such thing as exact-
ness in this language-game” (1980, para. 1080). The act of describing,
Wittgenstein (1968) says, is an exercise in translating a subjective viewpoint
into a statement of a unique but indefinite set of characteristics. There may
not be an exact description of a given object, but that does not preclude one
from offering what is simultaneously an inexact and meaningful characteri-
sation. Imprecision, to Wittgenstein (1980), rises naturally as a response to
the particular context in which a phenomenon occurs. Yet we are chal-
lenged by this very indeterminate character of language because we will
apply description to mirror the world as it is, not as how we see it. On this,
Wendy Lee-Lampshire states that “Wittgenstein’s point… is to portray how
the desire for intelligibility underlies our insistence that things have essences,
how the desire for order is mistaken as a symptom of the real or essential”
(1995, para. 40). Likewise, the grammars of sexuality that circulate in the
subcontinent are driven by a desire for intelligibility that assumes certain
real or essential ontic natures of the sexual subaltern (Boyce, 2007; Khanna,
2013; Reddy, 2005). Situated within the interstices of these competing dis-
courses, I suggest that the queer figure grapples with the very indeterminacy
that arises from expressing situated knowledge as a description of a sexual
self. The indefinite nature of such a description thwarts exactitude, fail-
ing to locate this figure neatly within the boundaries of any one particular
discourse.
Michel Foucault builds on this thesis of imprecise language-games that
exert formidable control over sociality by suggesting two additional and
complementary forces that constitute indeterminacy in our world. One such
dynamic, Foucault (1970) suggests, is the self-reflexivity of contemporary
knowledge-production practices. As the human became both the subject
and object of analysis, classical frameworks had to be rejected in favour of
ever-greater analytical efforts that continually fail to deliver total compre-
hension. Along with the historical development of the human as subject/
object, Foucault maintains, modernity discovered a historicity linked to
humans. Far from producing a desired History, this understanding of histo-
ricity is inherently ambiguous as it can only apprehend human actions as a

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 T hemal E llawala

deeply situated phenomenon, against the multiple other actions and con-
texts that the individual exists in. As Jacqueline Best describes it,

[t]ogether, these three elements of modern knowledge also under-

pin its ambiguity: the imperfections of modern language—its resis-
tance to fixed meanings—make such slippages and ambiguities
inevitable; the self-reflexivity of modern knowledge means that it is
always somewhat subjective… the historicity of knowledge, finally,
ensures that meaning is always be [sic] contingent on a multiplicity
of contexts.
(2008, p. 362)

While these three elements produce modern knowledge as we recognise it,

the indeterminacy that inheres to their form and function also generates the
limits of said knowledge.
A number of scholars have charted the coordinates of indeterminacy across
multiple conceptual terrains, highlighting the pervasive and ubiquitous nature
of this category. Covering questions of the effects and affects of exposure to
toxicity (Murphy, 2006; Yusoff, 2017), the limitations of Alzheimer’s bio-
marker detection (Lock, 2013), queer animal studies (Chen & Luciano,
2015), the incommensurability of radical worlds (Povinelli, 2001), the inter-
dependencies of architecture and philosophy (Grosz, 2001) and re-conceptu-
alising “access” in disability studies (Titchkosky, 2011), indeterminacy has
often been invoked in response to the overdetermining and exclusionary
force of social hegemonies. Jacqueline Best (2008) proposes the argument
that ambiguity permeates the structures and practices of international finan-
cial governance and global governance, more broadly. Best substantiates this
argument by reading John Maynard Keynes against the grain of early inter-
pretations of his work, suggesting that he acknowledged the “inherently
social and intersubjective nature of economic activity… in which value itself
was produced when enough believed in it, and in which expectations, whether
positive or negative, were often self-fulfilling” (2008, p. 364). Best contrasts
this radical centring of indeterminacy to the contemporary neoliberal rejec-
tion and containment of ambiguity. Within neoliberal logic,

social aggregates have no independent, ontological standing.

Individuals are the only real economic actors. Moreover, they are
blessed with rational expectations—each individual having an
accurate model of the economy and able to predict the likely
impact of any government action.
(2008, p. 365)

Risks, as they exist, are shifted from public to private actors and are securi-
tised in the hope that the efficient market will manage such indeterminacies.
The tension between neo-liberalism and indeterminacy is salient to my

44
 U ncertain G rammars , A mbiguous D esires

argument in highlighting how the neo-liberal logic of the rational, self-

actualising subject underpins frameworks of sexual subjectivity and how
indeterminacy may operate as a counter-narrative within such schema.
These theorisations of indeterminacy converge on my project of tracing
the course of this category through the capillaries of ethnographic narra-
tives I amassed during my fieldwork. The indeterminacy that permeates
these disclosures implies a form of negation insofar as the discourses of
signification demand total acquiescence. Thus, indeterminacy can situate
the queer figure in a nebulous site of recognition-denial as a legible sexual
subject. Implicated here are both questions of ontological open-endedness
and imperceptibility, both of which have generated interest within queer
and trans studies (Crawford, 2008; Grosz, 2002; Millet, 2005/2006). I turn
to explicating the various discourses of sexual subjectivity that circulate
through the subcontinent to illustrate the overdetermining impulse of vari-
ous interpellative forces that attempt, and inevitably fail, to fully capture
the queer figure and discipline the unruliness of indeterminacy.

Dis/ambiguating South Asian sexualities

One of the earliest queer South Asian newsletters to be published was
named Anamika, which means “nameless” in Sanskrit (Shah, 1998). While
referring to the dearth of names in South Asian languages for the relation-
ships between two women—which indexes an indeterminate queer position
in the lexicon—this title also gestures to the political possibilities of open-
endedness that a nameless/nounless position enables (Bhabha, 1992). Much
of queer activism in South Asia has since abandoned this ambiguity—in
part motivated explicitly or not by the neoliberal logic of the atomised, self-
actualising citizen—in favour of a perpetual search for names. Debates on
sexual subjectivity in South Asia have been occurring since the 1990s and
have largely focused on specific Indian cultural and institutional politics.
For the sake of brevity, I summarise these debates through a truncated dis-
cussion of three grammars of sexuality that have been posited and fiercely
contested: MSM, LGBT, and kothi/panthi (for a more detailed history, see
Cohen, 2005).
One of the myriad effects of the HIV/AIDS industry’s rapid prolifera-
tion through urban India—in the form of a translocal matrix constituted
by the state, international development agencies and community-based
organisations—was the ossifying of “a transnational governmentality,
producing, simultaneously, complex mechanisms for the surveillance of
bodies and for the production of subjectivities and identities” (Khanna,
2013, p. 128) such as ‘Men who have Sex with Men’ (MSM). The initial-
ism was coined by Glick et al. (1994) as a recognition of the subjective nature
of sexuality and to draw awareness to the demographics of men who engage
in sex with men and yet do not self-identify as gay or bisexual. Its deployment
in India, however, runs counter to this originary purpose. Several scholars

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and activists have demonstrated how its use in public health and public
policy conflate identity and sexuality, with MSM used as a reference to a
state of being (Asthanaa & Oostvogels, 2001; Khan & Khan, 2006).
Similarly, the Ms in the term have emerged as a contested site, with scholars
rightfully critiquing the reductive logic that has come to prevail, of captur-
ing a range of gendered ontologies within ‘Men’, based on overdetermined
physiological features (e.g. the possession of “male” genitalia).
Like MSM, LGBT formations, too, have filtered in through the capillaries
of power into local cultural milieux. Dennis Altman (1997) theorises how
the convergence of transnational HIV/AIDS activism and neo-liberalism
has succeeded in reproducing a specifically US American assemblage of gay
identifications, allegiances and institutions globally. There exists a univer-
salising imperative that underpins grammars of “lesbian”, “gay”, “bisex-
ual” and “transgender”, which assume ontological validity across contexts,
cultures and local specificities. To this interpellative matrix, scholars would
add the dynamics of LGBT human rights discourse, which Akshay Khanna
(2013) documents as emerging in tandem with the HIV/AIDS industry.
Exemplified by statements such as in then secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s
iconic speech of “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay
rights” (Lavers, 2015), LGBT rights have been folded into the broader
human rights paradigm and institutionalised in familiar ways.
However, transnational discourses are not the only narratives of gay
identity that circulate in South Asia. Lawrence Cohen (2005) discusses how
Ashok Row Kavi, the prominent “LGBT” activist in India, instituted an
understanding of sexuality as a complex web of identifications and prac-
tices, in which “gay” men are enmeshed. Most important for Kavi, who
recognises gay as an elite category, the best way to “protect nonelite MSMs
is to make them gay, to put them in a position of power” (Cohen, 2005, p.
295). The category ‘gay’ is mainly instrumental, one which allows Kavi and
his Humsafar Trust–centred network of organisations to pursue a project of
empowerment and equity. In summarising additional aspects of Kavi’s
political stance on gay identification, Ruth Vanita (2002) suggests that Kavi
recognises the importance of not alienating gay-identified men from his
work as they play a vital role as activists in reaching out to other popula-
tions at risk of HIV, while the popularisation of the term through Indian
media has created access for urban, bilingual populations who hold consid-
erable sway over state and public politics. Thus, while the site of gay iden-
tity is recognised as being structured by transnational and elite discourses,
this very nature enables the likes of Kavi to subvert the category for differ-
ent ends.
Not everyone was convinced by Kavi’s argument. Critics maintained that
signifying those in the non-West as gay is inherently problematic and sug-
gested the need to look to local subcultures, lexicons and practices to under-
stand what was really going on in sexual subcultures. Through this logic
emerged the kothi/panthi model as a putatively locally situated, Indigenous

46
 U ncertain G rammars , A mbiguous D esires

and culturally inherent framework of gender-sexual subjectivity (Asthanaa

& Oostvogels, 2001; Khan, 2004; Pappas et al., 2001). Proponents of this
model suggest that the sexual practices of non-elites in India (but also the
subcontinent more broadly) are conceptualised within a gendered semiotic
framework in contrast to the exclusive focus on sexuality that gay identifi-
cation suggests. Men who fulfil obligations of procreative heteronormativ-
ity—marriage to a woman and reproduction—tend not to suffer grave
blows to their masculinity for engaging in sex with male-bodied individuals
(Asthanaa & Oostvogels, 2001; Khan, 2004). Moreover, the argument
states that the penetrative role lies central to masculinity, while to be pene-
trated is to be feminised. Panthis or giryas assume the penetrative role in sex
with male-bodied persons, while kothis are feminised by their assuming a
receptive role in sex. However, such gender constructions are relational, as
even kothis take seriously the responsibility of men to marry women and
reproduce (Asthanaa & Oostvogels, 2001; Khan, 2004; Pappas et al.,
2001). The elegance of this framework, coupled with its immunity from
critiques of ethnocentrism, resulted in its rapid deployment across mainland
South Asia, leading Cohen (2005) to argue that kothi has become a
Latourian black box, an unassailable fact that engenders social realities
(producing kothi subjects).
While the architects of the kothi/panthi model saw its relevance as a pan–
South Asian formation, this discourse is curiously absent in Sri Lanka.
Perhaps due to Sri Lanka’s ambivalent relationship with India—the latter
being figured as a regional leader as well as neo-colonial authority of sorts—
kothi and panthi are considered to be categories restricted to Indian cul-
tural boundaries. Instead, the grammars of MSM and LGBT are the
predominant registers of signification utilised in Sri Lanka, bolstered as they
are by the epistemic and material clout of transnational donor institutions,
Western scholarship and elite local non-governmental organisations.
Attempts have been made by the last to propose local idioms of sexuality,
such as samarisi (samarisi, a Sinhala term which translates to “same-loving”
or homo-romantic), driven by the explicitly stated logic of jettisoning the
erotic and privileging love in its stead (Ellawala, 2019). Yet the terminology
of choice in Sri Lanka remains MSM and LGBT.
These are discourses of sexual subjectivity that are sanctioned and pro-
moted by institutions. That is not to imply that the HIV/AIDS industry or
the LGBT rights paradigm bears a sole monopoly on sexual signification in
Sri Lanka. On the contrary, my informants gestured to myriad loci of
knowledge on sexual desires, practices and identities, ranging from media,
such as Tumblr and Queer as Folk, to local networks of friends and kin.
There also exist various local idioms of queerness, some of which are inflected
with queerphobic violence and heteronormativity in significant ways
(Nichols, 2015). Yet this is not to disregard the power institutional actors
bear in producing (“correct”) subjects. In keeping with Paul Boyce’s (2007)
argument, a number of my informants shared that their encounters with

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institutional “LGBT” actors—through workshops, lectures, research and

political activity—helped them understand what it means to “be gay”
(Ellawala, 2018). Power circulates through multiple translocal circuits and
economies, offering images, symbols, language and the imperative of
signification.
While it may seem at first that this process of interpellation exerts total
control over queer subjects, such an understanding elides the cracks and
fissures that run through these discourses, within which generative possi-
bilities of resistance to absolutist and essentialist signification may exist.
Several scholars have critically engaged with these various grammars—of
MSM, LGBT, and kothi/panthi—to illustrate their contingent and circum-
scribed natures. Confronting the discursive dichotomies of gay/global–
kothi/local, Gayatri Reddy (2001) troubles neat distinctions by gesturing
towards the simultaneities and reciprocities between these categories. Her
various encounters with these discourses and their diverse rehearsals in
Hyderabad leads Reddy to recognise “the trans-local nature of ‘gay’ subjec-
tivities in India, that argues against a coherent, universal ‘global gay iden-
tity’, as well as an explicitly non-universal, local particularity” (2001, p.
92). Such a reading leads us to consider the provincialisation of the trans-
national and the globalisation of the local, thereby injecting a sense of
uncertainty to questions of ownership, origins and access. Similarly, Paul
Boyce (2007) and Lawrence Cohen (2005) illustrate how the kothi as a
Latourian black box becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by generating sub-
jects in its image, which is resonant with Wittgenstein’s notion that the
desire for intelligibility springs from a belief in essences. What ruptures this
essentialist logic, Boyce says, is encountering those who are unintelligible,
for this radically challenges the absolute truth-value of the, in this case
kothi, paradigm. Cohen argues that Shivananda Khan, a major proponent
of the kothi model, tacitly acknowledges the insufficiencies of the kothi cat-
egory by discussing the reversal of expected sexual dynamics (kothi as pen-
etrator, panthi as the penetrated). However, by declaring that such reversals
are marked by discourses of shame, Khan attempts to contain and deflect
these ambiguities to preserve the integrity of the model. Similar critiques
have been levelled against the MSM and LGBT schemas as being totalising
frameworks that seek to discipline subjects within their boundaries, elide
incommensurabilities of genders and bodies, collapse local vagaries and dis-
miss irreconcilable differences between observed realities and frameworks
as anomalies (Gosine, 2006; Khan & Khan, 2006; Sharma, 2006).
This chapter continues this critical project by locating the spectre of inde-
terminacy in various narratives my informants shared with me. Here, I must
respond to an oft-posed question of what significance indeterminacy bears
to queerness in Sri Lanka. I do not seek to narrate indeterminacy as indig-
enous to Sri Lanka or South Asia, for to do so would be to reproduce the
reductive cultural logic of the kothi/panthi discourse as well as to reify
fraught national/regional formations. Indeterminacy, and negative space

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 U ncertain G rammars , A mbiguous D esires

more broadly, is too ubiquitous and unruly a metaphysic to be constrained

by borders and oceans. Rather than making exclusive claims, I aim to illus-
trate fleeting glimpses of how indeterminacy can be chased and appre-
hended in discourses of queerness. My argument turns on how indeterminacy
manifests at the fractures of what Butler (2001) terms “grids of intelligibil-
ity”, the norms and a priori knowledge that produce a recognizable human
subject. To the extent that the grids of intelligibility that I focus on presume
the salience of delimited, precise and objective categories (e.g. LGBTQ+,
MSM, kothi/panthi) I suggest that queerness indexes indeterminacy in the
semantic excesses that seep past these confines and evade schemas of valu-
ation and signification. Foregrounding the category of indeterminacy draws
attention to that which is often dismissed as an anomaly or even explained
away cursorily as fluidity. In fact, the optics of indeterminacy aid in resisting
these acts of excision by challenging the totalising nature of the discourses
that operate on queer figures. The stories my informants shared speak to
ways in which indeterminacy marks various dimensions of the queerscape,
such as the ambiguities in desire and love (erotics and affects) and failures
of the description of selfhood (semantics). The figure of indeterminacy man-
ifests primarily on two mutually constitutive registers: linguistic and sche-
matic. On one hand, my informants frequently used indeterminate language
when describing their sexual experiences, which betrays how uncertainty
marks our very linguistic praxes. On the other, they spoke to practices and
beliefs that do not neatly conform to any one framework of identification,
thereby generating an indeterminacy in identification or an insistence in
accounting for ambiguities in such conceptual theorisations. These two
manifestations are linked, as the indeterminacies of their descriptions
reflected (in part) the failure of reason and logic at the encounters of sexual
discourses, structural forces and unpredictable realities. Such collisions pro-
duce fractured narratives and drive ripples through the smooth and perfect
surface of signification. It is to the exercise of (partially) charting this frag-
mented terrain that I turn to next.

Erotic uncertainties
In a conversation about the mechanics of anonymous queer sex, Kelum, an
older man who had been engaging in such sex for nearly three decades,
confided in me, “I never take the first step. I think it’s because- (pause) I
don’t know- (pause) if it’s because I’m scared”. Kelum continued on to sug-
gest that the legal realities of queer sex in Sri Lanka –homosexuality remains
criminal in Sri Lanka ever since the institution of British colonial-era anti-
sodomy laws—means that he is haunted by questions of who (the potential
lover is), why (is he being propositioned, is this a set up), and what (would
the outcome be, will they be arrested). Despite years of experience, Kelum
stated that ambiguity continues to shroud these encounters. Many others
spoke to the uncertainty that envelops the initiation of sex. In the context

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of the relationship, she was in at the time, Shanika, a self-identified lesbian,

said that she feels unsure about initiating sex, preferring to let her partner
do so every time. When asked why this might be the case, Shanika said,
“Um, maybe because- (pause) the person I’m dating right now is- (pause)
she’s straight… So, I’m, in my head, I haven’t told her this, but in my head,
I feel I’m not comfortable showing her my insides”.
I find these narrative fragments compelling for several reasons. First,
there is a palpable sense of uncertainty that marks the language these inter-
locutors use, from the pauses and the staccato tempo of speech to the use of
phrases and terms like “I don’t know” and “maybe”. I posit that these
ambiguations of speech are related to the ineffable nature of Amal’s desires
in the opening vignette: “I don’t know”. I have elsewhere documented the
inadequacies of language borrowed from the West (such as grammars of
LGBTQ+ and MSM) in representing local experiences, despite their trans-
position to vernacular registers (Ellawala, 2018). Combined with the stulti-
fying effect that normativity exercises on the development of a robust queer
lexicon, the failure of dominant modes in languaging queerness gives rise to
the stutters and silences that saturated my conversations. If queerness exists
at the limits of normativity and indeterminacy signals the frayed ends of
schemas of signification (Yusoff, 2017), then it is unsurprising that the
queer should so readily index the uncertain and ambiguous.
This sense of indeterminacy in language reflects a crisis in certainty that
pervades the erotic encounter and the processes of recognition that under-
pin it. These admissions stand in contrast to the theorisations of sexual
exchanges within identificatory discourses of MSM, LGBT and kothi/panthi,
which fail to include or complicate the sex act. Often, discussions of sex
acts are elided from literature, especially in scholarship on MSMs
(Seckinelgin, 2009). If sex is mentioned, such literature might recognise the
conditions (state persecution, poverty and gendered power differentials)
within which sex occurs, yet the act itself is often represented as either
purely mechanical, evacuated of all affective dimensions, or as an unequivo-
cally affirming and pleasurable experience deeply desired by all parties
involved. While I do not intend to excise pleasure out of this conversation—
indeed, Kelum’s and Shanika’s continued engagement with the modes of sex
they discussed is a testament to the motivating force of pleasure—I suggest
that ambiguity and uncertainty circulate through circuits of pleasure.
Shanika’s disclosure that these anxieties haven’t been shared with her part-
ner speaks to the gaps in understanding that exist between coupled bodies,
producing uncertainties in expectations, intentions and affects.
Another source of the ambiguous traces in these narratives are structures
of power and cultural hegemonies. Kelum’s narrative speaks to how the
omnipresent threat of police violence and state repression structures his
sexual exploits, particularly in public space. Indeed, one’s access to private,
secluded spaces for queer sex is limited in Colombo and elsewhere in the
island, thus exposing many to the uncertainties of a public sexual sphere.

50
 U ncertain G rammars , A mbiguous D esires

Similarly, Shanika speaks to the incursion of heteronormativity to her love-

making, inciting anxieties that her lover may realise her purported hetero-
sexuality and abandon her. Indeterminacy occurs through the collision of
cultural hegemonies with dissident discourses and practices, yet the former
are never vanquished. Rather, the lingering presence of these structures of
power maintains indeterminate states that pervade queer experiences. To
wrestle with indeterminacy is also to acknowledge its imbricated nature
with power, with each constituting and contesting the other. This coincides
with Jacqueline Best’s theorisation of how forms of indeterminacy are mar-
shalled in aid of elite or dominant agendas. Best notes that the “veneration
of uncertainty has become a powerful tool in the hands of both business
leaders and international institutions like the World Bank as they have
called for workers and the poor to embrace uncertainty as a condition of
their economic survival” (2008, p. 360). However, Best reminds us that even
in such attempts to discipline indeterminacy to cooperate with power, there
remain excesses and contingencies that evade total control. Shanika and
Kelum’s insistence on practising such uncertain forms of sex attests to how
indeterminacy manages to elude the disciplining forces of heteronormativ-
ity as well as the determining thrust of non-normative sexual schemas.
Therefore, we cannot treat indeterminacy as an unproblematically and
unequivocally counter-hegemonic site or praxis but, rather, contend with
the dynamic relationship between it and structural power and the ways in
which each accommodates, reifies, resists and dilutes the other.
The discussion on how power structure aspects of indeterminacy relate to
the untethered nature of sexual desire. Manel, a self-identified gay woman,
shared that while she is mostly attracted to and has been intimate with
women, she cannot rule out attraction to men as she may experience such
desire in the future. She stated:

I don’t find men repulsive, it’s just that I’ve not had that exposure.
So, I haven’t ruled that out entirely. But that could also be because-
(pause) I’ve been conditioned to think that it’s a thing that has to
be there, so I’m trying to figure out if it’s a conditioning or if it’s
actually what I like.

Yet again, we are presented with how socialisation into hetero-patriarchy

creates friction within queer identification and desires, thereby generating
and sustaining uncertainties. Manel indexes an erotic (hetero)potentiality
that exceeds the confines of a gay category limited to same-gender desire.
When considered alongside Manel’s later admission that she would even
marry a man to please and care for her parents, we must consider how
potential heterosexual curiosity as well as a plausible resignation to hetero-
normative conformity as structuring her desires.
Aside from the rupture this heterosexual potentiality creates in the
framework of gay female identification, the possible workings of the

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heteronormative imperative generate additional indeterminacies that

Manel grapples with. She speaks of “trying to figure out” what her desires
are as well as where they come from. While leaving identification open-
ended (or indeterminate) during the course of this exploration, as Manel
does, is one approach to this conundrum, Shanika outlines another. She
shared the details of a recent incident, in which some form of intimacy
had transpired between her and a man, which she attributed to “confused
emotions” [emphasis mine]. In explaining this encounter, Shanika men-
tioned that while she considers her sexual attraction to exist along a
spectrum and she is attracted to men, she finds it easier to identify as a
lesbian as “you’re being fair to yourself and fair to society as well”. This
logic resonates with Judith Butler’s (1997) theorisation of submitting to
one’s own categorisation because of one’s desire to exist intelligibly and
be recognised. Related to the question of social legibility is Wittgenstein’s
(1968) writing on how the demand for intelligible subject/object seeks
mastery over linguistic indeterminacy, seeking exactitude in reference
and description. Here we see how submitting to one’s category is an
attempt to manage indeterminacy, while the very manifestation of “con-
fused emotions” in intimate exchange attests to the partial nature of
signification.
Shanika indexes the notion of a continuum, which invites a discussion
on whether the phenomenon of indeterminate desires is merely a question
of sexual fluidity. I resist framing this narrative within the conceptual and
epistemic bounds of fluidity as to do so is to disregard the uncertainties,
precarities, and ambiguous affects that my informants spoke of. The con-
cept of fluidity has, much like that of kothi, become a black box. Fluidity
has become commodified and thus de-radicalised, judging by the fashion
and beauty industry’s embrace of the concept as the latest trend (Luttrell,
2018; Marsh, 2016). No longer signifying a contestation and negotiation
of selfhood, the mainstreaming and gentrification of fluidity has resulted
in it functioning as an explanatory framework much like “gay”, “bisex-
ual”, or “female”. While I do not mean to negate the radical potential
that fluidity as an analytic may bear, I seek to reject the overdetermina-
tion of fluidity by insisting on an indeterminacy of desire that evades
rationalisation.
Love is yet another affective site at which idioms of indeterminacy are
referenced. Love was a recurring theme in my ethnographic encounters
which serves to reject the jettisoning of romance and affection—indeed any
kind of affect—that one sees occurring in explanatory models such as MSM
and kothi/panthi (Gosine, 2006). However, rather than insisting on an
uncomplicated insistence on love in opposition to this epistemic silence, my
informants narrated more nuanced and complex experiences. Chalitha, a
self-identified gay man, was one of the most eloquent speakers I encoun-
tered during my fieldwork, waxing poetic and representing the theatre of
the queer in exquisite detail. One of the high dramas he kept returning to

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 U ncertain G rammars , A mbiguous D esires

was the question of love. In one moment, speaking poignantly to its impos-
sible nature, Chalitha said:

I had high expectations. I built castles in the sky… but now I realise
that those things are all lies, that they’re of no use to me. But, no
matter how aware I am of this reality, I love someone right now.
That person even called me last night and said, “these things [love]
don’t last forever”. But no matter what anyone says, I can’t free
myself from these things [love], I can’t free myself from him. I don’t
think any gay person in Sri Lanka can truly escape love.

Chalitha’s reference to “these things” affixes a mysterious and inexplicable

quality to love. Love exists on many registers, both as fantasy (the utopic)
and reality. The manifestation of the ideal in the real is fraught with prob-
lems of ambiguity, much like all projects of translation (Povinelli, 2001).
However, Chalitha speaks to the inescapability, even inevitability of love-as-
fantasy. No matter how acute one’s understanding of the vagaries of love is,
he says that it is impossible to escape love. Resonant here is José Esteban
Muñoz’s (2009) theorising of fantasy as an important modality of the queer
utopic project. It is possible that the ideal that exists solely in the queer
imaginary is what enables the likes of Chalitha to survive both the disap-
pointments of reality as well as the indeterminacies that exist at the yawn-
ing chasm between the two. Enmeshed in the problematics of love is also an
ambiguity that frames one’s feelings towards love. Chalitha contrasted this
uncertain position to public discourses—especially romance novels and
media—on the redemptive and transformative nature of love. He critiqued
this myopic attitude, stating that the reality of love is vastly different to
what expectations these discourses engender, especially for queer subjects.
Situated at the intersection of all these forces—the desire for the utopic,
socialised expectations for the transcendent, the heteronormative elision of
queer love and the bitterness or banality of reality—the queer figure is
forced to grapple with the uncertainties of love.
The indeterminacy that marks central vectors of sexual subjectivity, such
as desire and love, also saturate the very self-conceptions of sexual identity/
selfhood. I proceed with this discussion with the caveat that it is not my
intention to reify an independent, intrinsic and salient sexual identity. I am
mindful of Gayatri Reddy’s (2005) argument that there may exist multiple
planes or axes of identity that structure erotics and are more salient to an
individual than sexuality/sexual identity. However, the sexual grammars I
am concerned with in this chapter—of MSM, LGBT, and kothi/panthi—
presuppose a central and salient sexual identity or have slowly mutated
through local and intersubjective praxes to denote a core sexual self (Gosine,
2006). All these grammars, as public discourses of sexuality, also demand
recognition from the subject (one must recognise themselves as gay, kothi,
or in the context of HIV/AIDS prevention work, MSM, and these categories

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as organising their erotics in some manner). Against this backdrop, my

informants voiced more uncertain narratives of sexual selfhood. The fol-
lowing exchange, which took place between Saman and I, exemplifies this
phenomenon. Having used examples of one’s job, family, or religion as fac-
tors that people consider to be central to a sense of identity (which he agreed
was the case), I asked Saman if he considers his sexual desires to play a simi-
lar role in shaping his sense of self:

S: It’s not totally clear what you mean by that.

T: To how you identify yourself?
S: You’re asking how?
T: Does your sexuality or sexual desires affect who you think you are as a
person? Are they part of who you think you are as an individual?
S: I- (pause) identify myself- (pause) a sexual identity- (pause) no, I don’t
think they are related to who I am as a person.

I followed this exchange with a question on whether he considers his “sex-

ual orientation” to be “gay”, based on his use of these terms at the begin-
ning of our conversation. To this question, he readily replied that he is gay.
It is clear that what occurred in this exchange was not a failure of language,
for Saman had ready access to the lexical categories of “sexual orientation”
and “gay”. Rather, I interpret this moment as indicative of ways in which
certain terms (gay, sexual orientation) are used as markers of social legibil-
ity while simultaneously evacuated of their semantics and original function.
When necessary, and in response to certain demands of signification, Saman
was able to “speaks a language that is already speaking” (Butler, 2001, p. 631),
invoking a grammar of subjecthood that has a deep past. This phenomenon
relates to what anthropologists have observed in parts of India and Nepal of
terms of reference that seem to sit peculiarly outside of the cultural matrices
that they are meant to refer to (Boyce, 2007; Pigg, 2005). What I suggest is
that this difference in theorisation and the lived experience of such language
generates indeterminacies within conceptual frameworks. Thus, as opposed
to becoming a totalising category that organises every aspect of Saman’s
erotic experiences, “gay” has become an instrumental category that is asso-
ciated with a constellation of other lexical cues (e.g. sexual orientation) and
is used to achieve social legibility. This is not to say that the logic of sexual
identity finds no purchase, for the very imperative of identification is evident
in Saman’s speech (“I’m gay”). Yet to treat this paradigm as total would be
erroneous, for the slippages in meaning and practice insist on an indetermi-
nate status for such schemas of signification as cultural “truths”, despite
their best efforts to become calcified as such. Commenting on the identitar-
ian valences and implications of indeterminacy, Elizabeth Grosz says:

The position of the in-between lacks a fundamental identity, lacks

a form, a givenness, a nature. Yet it is that which facilitates, allows

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 U ncertain G rammars , A mbiguous D esires

into being, all identities, all matter, all substance… a position that
is crucial to understanding not only identities, but also that which
subtends and undermines them, which makes identities both pos-
sible and impossible.
(2001, pp. 91–92)

It is an in-betweenness, of belonging and non-belonging in the body politic

and the nation, that produces sexual identities that seek to incorporate the
sexual minoritarian subject into the public imaginary. However, this very
quality of ambiguity demarcates the limits of this project, much like inde-
terminacy both makes possible and delimits modern knowledge (Foucault,
1970). Within semiotic models of sexuality, indeterminacy “has a trembling
presence, its speech-act is a stutter, inhibiting what identity is and can
become” (Yusoff, 2017, p. 98). Indeterminacy fractures certainty, exposes
the fault lines of cultural orthodoxies and situates the subaltern within
these fissures as elusive and (partially) unknowable.

(In)conclusion
My focus thus far has been to explore some of the ways in which my inter-
locutors make meaning of the world around them—be it desire, love or the
concept of the self in relation to these experiences and others—through
ongoing social and intersubjective processes. Central to this nascent project
is an understanding that the figure of indeterminacy marks the attempts to
determine meaning in myriad ways. A serious engagement with Johannes
Fabian’s (2002) theorisation of the “denial of coevalness” and an attempt to
address this problematic entails considering the ethnographic encounter as
one of the sites of such meaning-making. It can be argued that my discus-
sion of indeterminacy is restricted to the ethnographic moment, as uncer-
tainty and ambiguity manifest precisely when informants are compelled to
present their experiences in rational and coherent ways. Meditations on this
valid critique lead me to the following thoughts. I hesitate to assert that
individuals only seek to make meaning of their experiences within the eth-
nographic encounter, as this may serve to rob subjects of agency and deny
their capacity to engage the world in an active, reflective and reflexive man-
ner. Second, Paul Boyce (2007) makes the cogent argument that the research
site is a crucial space for sexual subject formation, thereby rendering what
indeterminacy that marks the ethnographic encounter as significant in and of
itself. As Butler (2001) demonstrates through her exegesis of the John/Joan
“case”, the questioning and interpretive processes that transpire at the site of
the interview contribute to subjectification long past its ends. Thus, the dis-
ciplining force of the interview is not to be taken lightly. The invocation of
indeterminacy in the face of the normative impetus of the interview to clas-
sify and control gains even greater significance and must be reckoned with
as more than mere white noise. Finally, even if we were to accept that life

55
 T hemal E llawala

contexts outside of the research site do not make demands of rationalisation

and meaning-making to the same degree, this implies that subjects experi-
ence life outside of the research site in a way that is not fully determined by
sexual discourses. This suggests that indeterminacy linger even here.
What my incipient theorisation of indeterminacy offers is a glimmer of an
alternative possibility of epistemic and ontological proportions. It signals
the possibility of queerness outside of the strictures of discourse and the
necessity of devising epistemologies to think through these ontological
excesses. Remarking on the challenge John (of John/Joan fame) issues to
normative ideologies of gender, Butler suggests that “it is precisely the ways
in which he is not fully recognizable, fully disposable, fully categorizable,
that his humanness emerges” (2001, p. 634). While grids of intelligibility
contrive to limit the scope of humanness to those interpellated within its
boundaries, the likes of John, who are forcibly located at its margins, insist
on a humanness that is articulated on a wholly different register. It is to
hearken precisely to these alternative ontological forms and fragments that
I peer into the supposed void of indeterminacy, to behold the myriad frac-
tals of the human that have been abandoned. While orthodoxies dictate
that one must speak and be known through normative registers, to be legi-
ble as human and a subject, the stutters and pauses, the contradictions and
vacillations signal an alternative relationship to discourse. They “offer a
critical perspective on the [very] norms that confer intelligibility” (Butler,
2001, p. 634), enabling a critique of the limitations and stultifying effects of
schemas of signification. The epistemic promise of a project such as Butler’s
and mine is that it suggests that the negative space that inheres to inquiry is
not meaningless minutiae but the very rejection of the terms of our analysis.
It suggests different epistemic aims, different questions that ask with uncer-
tainty, grope through the dark to stand before fleeting visions.
A serious and sustained engagement with the figure of indeterminacy
must lead us to consider the political stakes of this project. While indeter-
minacy offers the opportunity to resist the foreclosure of possibilities that
the naming of the thing produces, we must also grapple with what this
means for political mobilisation, for often the illegibility of open-ended sub-
ject positions renders them outside of the conditions of possibility for creat-
ing material change. As a potential response to this conundrum, I turn to
Nivedita Menon’s (2004) understanding of ‘invocation’ and ‘deconstruc-
tion’. We must employ strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1999) to mobilise
critical masses around what names/nouns/banners we are able to agree on
when challenging the hegemonic forces of the state, law and the heterosex-
ual polity. However, in the face of such agreed-on heuristics becoming natu-
ralised, we must challenge the overdetermination of ontologies and
interrogate the economies of power that undergird them. This chapter is situ-
ated in the second modality and aims to illustrate the artificial and fraught
nature of any project that seeks to essentialise. The critical engagement with
indeterminacy that this process of ‘deconstruction’ calls for, be it in activist

56
 U ncertain G rammars , A mbiguous D esires

movements or scholarship, begs the questions of what methodologies we

utilise to apprehend indeterminacy while evading the violence of overdeter-
mination that stands to dilute the potency of this analytical category
(Warterton & Yusoff, 2017). What tools—in terms of imaginations, meth-
odological praxes and politics—must we develop to proceed with this intel-
lectual project? These questions lie at the very core of our understandings
of the ontic and epistemic.
What I have attempted throughout the course of this chapter is to articu-
late a sexual politic of indeterminacy as a plane on which we can assay
sexual formations in Sri Lanka, and perhaps more broadly. By locating the
traces of uncertainty and ambiguity that inflect the sexual discourses that
circulate in the region, I highlight the incomplete nature of the project to
overdetermine sexualities. Attending to the processes by which individuals
make meaning of their realities suggests that indeterminacies are woven
into the fabric of daily and erotic life. While sensitive to the ways in which
power operates even within the site of indeterminacy, both sustaining it and
diluting its radical potential, I propose that indeterminacy often vexes hege-
monies by staying their attempts to exert total control over subjects and
bodies. The contested open-endedness that indeterminacy proposes sug-
gests a politic of possibility (Chatterjee, 2002), that resists neo-liberal con-
ceptualisations of the self-actualising individual and other orthodoxies that
similarly delimit and discipline the queer. What I articulate here as an early
formulation is, as Kathryn Yusoff terms it, “a project of recognition without
end; in which… something indeterminate and incommensurable might be
allowed to come near and not be immediately incorporated into a schema
of valuation or signification” (2017, p. 78). Indeterminacy creates the sluices
in such schema through which queer excesses escape signification, enabling
subjects to inhabit an in-betweenness of legibility and invisibility that for-
ever eludes exact description.

Notes
1 I have used pseudonyms to refer to all my informants to protect their privacy.
2 My use of the term queer to refer to both subjects and desires is motivated by
the need to contest totalizing representations that are posited by other sexual
discourses in South Asia (e.g., LGBT, MSM). As Judith Butler argues, the term
queer can be considered “a site of collective contestation… the point of depar-
ture for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings” (1993, p. 228). It
is in the very nebulous and undetermined character of the term that a resistance
to positivist orthodoxies can be imagined. This is not to suggest that the term is
devoid of the ethnocentric problematics that other sexual grammars, such as
lesbian or gay may imply, as Ara Wilson (2006) reminds us. It would seem that
my method is vexed by some of the very indeterminacies I aim to interrogate.
3 I use indeterminacy here in the general understanding of the word, as has been
employed by scholars who have contributed to the theorising of the concept
across multiple domains (Best 2008; Lee-Lampshire 1995; Povinelli 2001;
Yusoff 2017) as “the ‘trouble’ or friction in subject/object knowledge-formation
(framed as ontological or empirical challenge)” (Warterton & Yusoff, 2017, p. 6).

57
 T hemal E llawala

The term indexes an open-endedness of meaning, an inability to be foretold or

determined and an absence of a teleological process that leads to a certain out-
come. One must wonder how the terms indeterminacy, ambiguity, and uncer-
tainty relate to each other. Are they one and the same? Or do they bear distinct
meanings? While a linguistic exegesis on the subject is beyond the scope of this
chapter, I take my cue from the philosophical and critical theoretical debates on
indeterminacy to suggest that it serves as the metaphysical nimbus around forms
such as ambiguity, uncertainty, and vagueness (Best 2008; Hyde 2016; Warterton
& Yusoff 2017). While ambiguity is often employed to refer to semantic phe-
nomena—such as polyvalence or polysemy (Best, 2008)—it is considered an
aspect, an instantiation of indeterminacy. Excavating the interrelationships
between such categories is not a luxury I am afforded in this chapter but cer-
tainly must be performed in the future.

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 3
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER
DOMINIC D’SOUZA
What happens when your queer icon refuses to be?

R. Benedito Ferrão

In early May 2017, I received a couple of different emails from the Indian
press asking me, either, to comment on the life of the late AIDS activist,
Dominic D’Souza, or provide permission for the reuse of a photograph of
him. In all cases, the messages requested haste in my response, as the writers
had to submit their articles shortly. I found this a little queer. While I knew
that 2017 marked the 25th anniversary of D’Souza’s passing due to AIDS-
related causes soon after being diagnosed as the first person in India to have
become infected with HIV, I recalled all too well when Dominic, a friend of
mine, had died in 1992—it was on May 27, a couple of days before my
birthday. Yet that the Indian press were gearing up to feature a story on
D’Souza weeks before the 25th anniversary of his death caused me to won-
der if I had gotten the date wrong. Or was it that on this particular occa-
sion, there was going to be a longer public engagement, via the press, with
D’Souza’s life and legacy given that these news features were being released
prior to the actual date of the anniversary?
The date on which these articles were meant to appear in the press came
and went, and the statement I prepared about D’Souza’s life and work was
excluded, perhaps because in it I expressed the opinion that his story had
been hijacked for the cause of the middle-class gay rights movement in
India. My message had read:

Dominic D’Souza’s legacy is one of a Goan and an international

activist who refused to be a victim. While 25 years later he may be
remembered as the first person to be diagnosed with HIV in India,
what he should be memorialized for is the landmark case he
brought to court that challenged perceptions of how those with the
disease should be treated. The lasting influence of the judgment in
Dominic’s favour continues to inflect how those diagnosed with the
ailment are regarded. This fight for the rights of patients and their
humanity is something that gets subsumed in the film My Brother…

61
 R. BENEDITO FERRÃO

Nikhil ([MBN;] 2005), which is loosely based on Dominic’s life—a

fact the film does not acknowledge. Rather, like with so many
Bollywood films that use Goa as a backdrop meant to characterize
it as a pleasure periphery to India, MBN uses the Goan story of
Dominic’s life to make a statement about gay rights in India. The
problem with this skewed representation is not only that the film
privileges middle class gay Indian identity, but also that it obscures
Dominic’s legacy which is about the rights of anyone with the dis-
ease, regardless of sexuality. This is still an important point to be
made today given the growing amnesia around HIV/AIDS. Though
there is still no cure, advances in HIV-treatment have created com-
placency about access to medical care by those who live in impov-
erished circumstances. On the other hand, the push for gay rights
in India in the aftermath of the legal judgment pertaining to 377
has limited the scope of such advocacy by largely having it centre
around class-based privileges and same-sex marriage. In both
instances, what becomes apparent is that HIV/AIDS is no longer
the “red ribbon” issue it once was, and this is precisely why, 25
years later, Dominic’s life and legacy are significant.

While I had been credited, erroneously, for an image of D’Souza carried by

one news sources, it was, in fact, not the news outlet that had contacted me
in the first place.1 In fact, in addition to the publications that had contacted
me, there were others that had taken note of the upcoming anniversary and,
again, weeks before its actual occurrence.2 On further scrutiny of the pub-
lished stories, it became clear that the slew of articles had purposefully been
run when they were to coincide with a mid-May community event orga-
nized by a gay group in Bombay in commemoration of D’Souza’s passing.3
However, though the scheduled program was meant to mark the 25th anni-
versary of the AIDS activist’s passing, it was also to feature a public screen-
ing of the film MBN, with Onir (2005), its director, present. I now saw even
more clearly why the statement I had prepared, on request, had not been
quoted from by the press.
It is no surprise that even in desiring to memorialise D’Souza’s life, the
25th-anniversary event wound up only being able to use the supposed ori-
gins of HIV/AIDS in India interchangeably with gay identity in the country
through the showing of MBN. But what happens when your queer subject
refuses to be queer? In the vacuum of any official statement about his own
sexuality by the late D’Souza himself, MBN—assumed to be India’s first
film to take up the subject of homosexuality explicitly—4constructs an
alternate reality that is itself conscripted by its purpose of championing
the stigmas faced by gay middle-class Indian men. In keeping with the
unpublished statement quoted above, this chapter takes up the question of
how D’Souza’s life and legacy continue to be interpreted through the film
it inspired, causing a conflation between D’Souza the person and the

62
 T wenty - five years after D ominic D ’ S ouza

fictionalization of his story. In its desire to speak to the Indian national

context of middle-class gay men, the film has trouble dealing with D’Souza
as a Goan figure, given Goa’s anomalous Portuguese colonial history in
comparison to the rest of once–British India (Ferrão, 2011, p. 141).
Recentring D’Souza’s Goanness, I assert, may allow for a rethinking of the
possibility of decolonial queer activism in South Asia, for it is precisely the
far more complex reality of the figure of D’Souza, which MBN leaves out,
that may present a queer politics of affiliation unbeholden to the concept of
nation and nationalism.

The biopic that isn’t

Writing about D’Souza on the 25th anniversary of his death, Onir (2017)
reminisces on Outlook:

And how can the stigma go? Through understanding … no other

way. Maybe cinema helps. As for My Brother Nikhil [sic] (my 2005
film on the life of D’Souza), it’s more the case that the subject found
me instead of the other way around. I was hosting a documentary
talk show … when I came across D’Souza’s story. It was so power-
ful that it lingered and I couldn’t shake it off. I had been working
on another script, which was supposed to be my first film, but I was
now consumed by the urge to make this movie.

For Onir, D’Souza was never more than someone to fictionalize in a film.
Onir (2011) admits as much in the published version of his screenplay: “I
remembered having edited some documentary material on Dominique De
Souza [sic]. . . . But I did not want to tell Dominique’s [sic] story. Nikhil was
born out of Dominique [sic] but ultimately became a different person” (p.
100). Not only does Onir get D’Souza’s name wrong here, but that name is
also altogether absent in the film’s credits. If D’Souza’s story was so inspira-
tional to Onir, what is to be made of this remarkable elision? And herein lay
the problem in figuring D’Souza into an alleged commemoration of his life
at the 25th-anniversary event in Bombay via the screening of MBN.
Ultimately, the film plays as an act of co-option through the omission of
D’Souza’s name for the purpose of foregrounding, essentially, a gay-themed
story exclusive of D’Souza. An event that uncritically uses such a film must
then also participate in the occlusion it creates.
Because MBN’s narrative is built on the history of a real person, it takes
the form of a biopic, but even as biopics are expected to be fictionalizations
of reality, artifice exceeds the truth in Onir’s retelling by never acknowledg-
ing the person the film is ostensibly about within the filmic vehicle itself.
The genre of the biopic is used in the case of MBN to disappear the real,
for its investment is not in telling D’Souza’s history as something that actu-
ally happened. Rather, MBN takes D’Souza’s story and accords it other

63
 R. BENEDITO FERRÃO

meanings—it shifts the semiotics of HIV infection from the real-life per-
son’s struggle to the struggles of being gay and Indian. It is then only fitting
that D’Souza’s name is never to be seen anywhere in the film.
I do not mean to suggest that biopics are ever to be considered authorita-
tive renderings of a person’s life; for the purposes of this chapter, I am more
inclined to think about how they come to replace reality and the manipula-
tion that occurs to effect such replacement. In Bio/Pics: How Hollywood
Constructed Public History, George Custen (1992) surmises that although
“most biopics do not claim to be the definitive history of an individual or
era, they are often the only source of information many people will ever
have on a given historical subject” (p. 7). In alluding to the popularity of
media, Custen not only speaks to the wider reach and public imprint of the
cinematic retelling of a person’s life but also cautions that the genre of the
“biopic … from its earliest days is minimally composed of the life, or the
portion of a life, of a real person whose real name is used” (1992, p. 6). That
the biopic is not beholden to fact, even if it relies on it, testifies to how the
genre blurs reality and fiction.
In Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film
Genre, Dennis Bingham (2010) refers to “the biopic genre [finding] itself in
the liminal space between fiction and actuality” (p. 7). Given its loose use of
D’Souza’s life, the same could be said of MBN, even though it does not term
itself a biopic. In his introduction to The Biopic in Contemporary Film
Culture, Belén Vidal (2013) defines the biopic as “a fiction film that deals
with a figure whose existence is documented in history, and whose claims to
fame or notoriety warrant the uniqueness of his or her story” (p. 3).
D’Souza’s story is inarguably unique given his status as the first recorded
person in India to have been diagnosed with HIV; MBN “deals with” this
unique story by doing what a biopic would—translating it into a fiction
and, thereupon, an erasure.
Despite not being a self-proclaimed biopic, MBN certainly uses the
mainstays of the genre in its structuring, such as narrated flashbacks.
Custen (1992) explains that narration in biopics “historically ‘sets’ up the
film” (p. 51). Narration in MBN also has a docudramatic effect in that it
presents seemingly factual testimony within the devices of fiction. In defin-
ing the category of docudrama, Alan Rosenthal (1999) finds that it “covers
an amazing variety of dramatic forms, bound together by two things. They
are all based on or inspired by reality, by the lives of real people, or by
events that have happened in the recent or not too distant past” (p. xv).5
MBN conveys its reliance on reality by including a lawyer character who
takes on the case of Nikhil’s discrimination. This echoes the real-life circum-
stances of D’Souza’s story, which involved a landmark case and a lawyer
who continues to feature in the afterlife of that case, as is referred to later
in this chapter.
To connote reality more apparently throughout the film, the task of nar-
ration is given largely to Anamika Kapoor, with other characters piping in

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on occasion. Sister to the title character, Nikhil Kapoor, Anamika tells the
audience about her brother after his passing, as they come to discover;
hence, the very idea of narration is built into the film’s title which denotes a
story told by one sibling about another. In seeming to speak directly to the
film-watching audience, Anamika’s narration breaks the fourth wall, estab-
lishing intimacy and a connection between Nikhil’s past and the present
moment of viewership. Relying on Custen’s marking of narration as histori-
cal framing, it is necessary to consider what histories are being presented in
MBN. The most apparent is the alleged genesis of HIV/AIDS in India—a
history that places D’Souza at its origin. Nonetheless, this history is replaced
in the conjoining of the initial appearance of HIV/AIDS in India with
Anamika’s retelling of Nikhil’s story in MBN as part of a fictitious family’s
history. Despite this fictionalization, Anamika’s and Nikhil’s are meant to
be an “everyfamily”, akin to an Indian viewer’s and, for that reason, recog-
nizable to such viewership.

One India, many Indiannesses

In her Open magazine article “Imagining the Idea of Indianness in Hindi
Cinema”, Rachel Dwyer (2017) reiterates its title when she posits that “[a]
recurring theme in Hindi films is the idea of Indianness”, clarifying that “[t]
his is not just about citizenship, but ranges across a wide range of themes
that define Indian history and culture” (para. 3). Ingrid Therwath (2010)
concurs that “[p]opular Hindi cinema has, since the first film was made in
India in 1913, played a central role in the formulation of the national iden-
tity” (p. 1). Indianness in Bollywood’s Hindi-language cinema at the end of
the twentieth century, and into the following one, may be constructed and
portrayed as nationalism, patriotism, a sense of national identity or belong-
ing, or some combination thereof. Dwyer (2017) cites the 1990s as a time
when several films featured the Partition and “Indo-Pak themes”, as well as
the Kashmir conflict. Another attestation of Indian cinema’s role in circulat-
ing and perpetuating ideas of Indianness, these portrayals of historical and
recent border conflicts subtly and overtly inflect Indian patriotism with
Hindu identity if not religiosity. The other to such religious nationalism is
the Muslim “who pose[s] a major threat to the idea of the Hindu rashtra or
nation”, Haris Zargar (2020) persuades by honing in on stereotypical rep-
resentations of followers of Islam in a range of films from the 1990s and
early 2000s, including Mission Kashmir (1998) and Maa Tujhe Salaam
(2000), among others.
If Indian cinema in this period aided the formulation of Indianness as
religious patriotism, it did so in the milieu of economic liberalism. The rise
of “[e]thnic nationalism and pan-Indianism … during the 1990s while the
country’s economy was being opened up”, Therwath (2010, p. 2) reasons,
proved beneficial to India’s middle classes and Hindu nationalism with the
turn of the 21st century becoming “the Golden Age of the NRI”, that is the

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non-resident Indian who now came to be represented cinematically as an

exemplar of positive Indianness (p. 2). MBN may be placed within this era
of Indian filmmaking not only given the date of its production but also
because its middle-class characters straddle homeland and diaspora, as I
establish.
Returning first to my ongoing investigation of form in MBN, it is neces-
sary to ascertain how the genre of the biopic fits into the scope of represent-
ing Indianness in Hindi films. Preeti Kumar (2014) takes stock of how
Indian cinema’s

great men biopics have been a method of deploying the passions of

patriotism by the chronicling of heroic deeds, sacrifices, and lofty
moral virtues, and by fabricating, rediscovering, or authenticating
the myths of celebrated men. Presentations of particular versions of
historical lives privilege specific ideologies and naturalize an imag-
ery of the nation in the popular psyche.
(p. 40)

Where Kumar assesses Indian cinema’s hagiographical Great Men Biopics

from the 1990s onward as presenting a “predominantly masculine image of
the nation to the audience” (2014, p. 40), Dwyer (2013) takes a longer view
of the genre, aligning it with the form of

the historical, one of the earliest genres in Indian cinema, dating

back to the silent period with films such as Kalyan Khajina (directed
by Baburao Painter, 1924). The historical genre is particularly
skilled at depicting a nation in crisis, so the films are about the
melodrama of the nation itself, not just about their heroes and her-
oines. … Hindi historical films focus on characters whose lives are
told as narratives of struggle, sacrifice, and patriotism.
(p. 220)

In either instance, whether equating the nation with its male heroes or por-
traying the crises of the nation (therein subsuming the regional), the Indian
biopic, as gauged by Kumar and Dwyer, respectively, offers its audience
protagonists who are larger than life.
This predilection alters, Dwyer deduces, after 1991 when the Indian
economy liberalized, giving “rise to … the new middle classes, which form
the main audience in film culture: films are produced for and consumed by
them. The films reflect this group’s understanding of its history and cul-
ture…” (2013, p. 221). Dwyer (2013) distinguishes “The New Hindi
Biopic” as

[drawing] more on direct interviews and on sources produced by

the rapidly expanding media. Important among the latter are …

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Internet sites that are in conversation with interviews on television

shows, magazines, and other sources. These new biographies are
for the most part popular accounts sanctioned by the subject and
his/her family rather than historically researched, academic biogra-
phies … [T]hese lives are often read not to establish a truth, but
rather to address key issues in ordinary lives.
(2013, pp. 221–222)

Citing television shows as one of the sources for the New Hindi Biopic,
Dwyer’s observation brings to mind how Onir first came to learn of
D’Souza’s story in the course of working on a talk show. This follows on
Aswin Punathambekar’s (2013) findings that film and television are part of
an expansive Bollywood circuit where these (and other forms of) media are
not mutually exclusive with regard to the flows of technology and con-
sumption (pp. 5–6). The circuitry of such flows, it might be added, also
make for easy co-option. In using D’Souza’s story, Onir’s retelling relies on
the trope of the familial as its setting as I have pointed out. The use of an
everyfamily in the film embellishes its Indianness while also offering the
veneer of veracity and intimacy.
In further alliance with the tenets of the biopic genre, Onir’s MBN caters
to a middle-class audience, mirroring for it a relatively recent history—that
of the discovery of HIV/AIDS in India—while employing the story of an
ordinary person (within an ordinary Indian family) forced to deal with a
vital issue. Ordinariness is typified in Onir’s film by the middle-classness of
the Kapoor family, a family just like any other Indian one of their socio-
economic status, the travails the filmic family face notwithstanding. In its
illustration of the middle-class Indian experience, MBN utilizes other main-
stays of post-liberalization cinema, including the presence of an NRI char-
acter. Here, it is Nigel de Costa, Nikhil’s boyfriend, who is the NRI who
returns to Goa “as the trans-national messenger of gay rights[,] … the
global gay and modern subject who comes back to the homeland to edify
it” (Ferrão, 2011, p. 143). Nigel’s role as an advocate of self-acceptance
who brings awareness of gay rights from elsewhere encapsulates the some-
times conflictual relationship between NRI and homeland, elsewhere and
India, modernity and tradition.
Bollywood’s representation of NRI subjectivity is a fraught terrain, the
evolution of such characterization playing out against considerations of
modernity taken up by Hindi cinema. The representation of NRIs in
Bollywood is not all-encompassing, Therwath (2010) points out, its dar-
lings mainly being “the affluent section of the Indian diaspora … , the many
Indian migrants struggling with income and a hostile living or working
environment…” getting short shrift (p. 12). In MBN, Nigel’s socio-eco-
nomic status is obvious and necessary. The film links “[h]is liberal nature …
to his financial security, evidenced by his beachfront property, no doubt
owing to his employment beyond India’s shores…” (Ferrão, 2011, p. 143).

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 R. BENEDITO FERRÃO

This characterization of Nigel conflates his diasporic identity with “middle-

classness, modernity and being able to be out of the closet” (Ferrão, 2011,
p. 143).
The eclipsing of the wider reality of diverse South Asian diasporic exis-
tences in mainstream Bollywood films may be related to liberalization.
Dwyer (2017) observes:

There is an undeniable shift in the concept of Indianness, the ways

in which India sees itself and how Indians see India in the world
today … Before the 1990s, India saw itself as a poor country with
a glorious past, out of which Indians were often cheated. This view
of history shown in the films by and large remains, but how India
sees the present has shifted enormously… Indians now see India as
a major global player, a modern country which has not forgotten
its ancient roots and culture.
(para. 23)

In this project of self-representation, for the NRI to serve as a partner who

projects Indianness elsewhere while being a representational and symbolic
conduit between the wider world and India, there would be little room to
show Indian lives that were not at least comfortably middle class. As this
applies to MBN, for Nigel to fit within the ambit of the Kapoors’ lives,
Nikhil’s especially, an equivalent socio-economic status accompanied by a
shared Indianness would be a requirement.
As a film about homosexuality, MBN is not immune to conflating
Indianness with Hinduness. The film leaves “the Kapoors’ religious persua-
sion … unclear, lest the prospect that they are Christian inhibit them from
being seen as the average Indian family” because of the film’s setting in Goa,
which has a Catholic heritage related to its Portuguese colonization; regard-
less, Goan Catholics are a minority (Ferrão, 2011, p. 143). This is of little
consequence in and to a film that is more invested in telling an Indian rather
than a regional story. To embellish its Indianness, the film relies on slippages
as markers of identity:

Because it is unclear what Nikhil’s family’s religious background is,

Nigel’s religious identity becomes … etched through … his
Portuguese surname … If the name “de Costa” is meant to register
as a Goan Catholic one because it is Portuguese, it could be argued
that the “more” Indian name “Kapoor” is expected to depict its
carriers as Hindu.
(Ferrão, 2011, pp. 143–144)

As an NRI, Nigel may play a pivotal part in the film but only insomuch as
his non-Hinduness does not impinge upon the film’s intention to construct
mainstream Indianness. This is achieved by having Nigel speak Hindi just

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like the other characters in the film, eschewing regional tongues in favour of
India’s alleged lingua franca. Casting its characters as Hindi speakers would
also mean that the film’s employment of Goan Konkani- and Marathi-
speaking talent would be negligible. Unquestionably, attention to regional
nuance is not one of MBN’s fixations. Nigel’s surname, for example, is not
apropos to the setting, “da Costa” being the variation of the name most
prevalent in Goa. Such details are inconsequential in a film preoccupied
with heightening Indianness while it diminishes the historical and regional
particularities of Goa. This is achieved on the whole by centring a part–
North Indian family, the Kapoors, who are to be understood as being more
Indian than Nigel especially because of their perceived Hinduness.
To be clear, MBN does not obscure Nigel; rather, its intended focus on
Nigel is not his regional but his diasporic identity, for it is this representa-
tion of the character that allows him to be seen as a vessel of Indianness.
Accordingly, such constructions of Indianness in Bollywood suggest a hail-
ing of the diaspora. Although Bollywood may attempt to include NRIs in
its representation of Indianness while also making overtures to overseas
Indian audiences to extend the industry’s commercial reach, expatriates’
reactions to these moves may not be as expected. Investigating audience
receptions of Hindi-language films, David J. Schaefer and Kavita Karan
(2012) reveal that homeland viewers are “more supportive of highly
nationalist films … than were those in the diaspora, suggesting that exter-
nal viewers are not necessarily attracted to films that promote Indian
nationalist values” (p. 140). How might Schaefer and Karan explain the
conclusion they arrive at that their largely Hindu diaspora group of respon-
dents find no affinity to nationalist Indian films if NRIs are known to finan-
cially support right-wing fundamentalist nationalism in the homeland?
Would the outcome of their study have been different if, in addition to
signs of Indian political nationalism, they had also investigated their dia-
sporic respondents’ reactions to Hindi cinema’s inclusion of symbols of
Hindu religious nationalism?6
The relevance of such questions lies dually in the expatriate’s economic
and religio-political ties to the homeland as well as Bollywood’s portrayals
of Indianness through representations of diasporic subjectivity. Therwath
(2010) apprehends how Bollywood may position the affluent “NRI hero
[to] sell ‘Brand India’ to the world while furthering the cause of capitalism
and social conservatism in India” (p. 11). The presence of such characters in
Hindi cinema “inform[s] the relationship of most Indians and their non-
resident alter egos, and through them, [India and Indians’ relationship] with
the West and its economic model” (Therwath, 2010, p. 12). Inasmuch as the
portrayal of Indianness in Bollywood may signal (and rely on) the global-
ized flow of financial contributions, political views and even religious ide-
ologies, what also surfaces is Indian cinema’s ability to suture Indianness
across a vast global terrain. The NRI’s presence in the homeland places the
transnational within a wider gamut of Indianness that is not delimited by

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the borders of the nation. Note that while Nigel, the NRI, may purvey the
message of gay rights to the homeland, it is Nikhil, the resident Indian, who
must become the face of gay discrimination and AIDS advocacy in MBN.
This partnering of diasporic and homeland subjects coextensively links
forms of Indiannesses as the characters that embody them representatively
grapple with modernity and change in India.

History in the unmaking

As Nikhil’s personal struggles are revealed in the film, in subsuming the
origin story of HIV/AIDS in India, the film further erases D’Souza by
replacing him with a fictional gay character who has the disease that put
D’Souza in the public eye. In other words, the history of HIV/AIDS dis-
crimination in India becomes the exclusive history of the discrimination of
gay men afflicted with the disease in the country through the protagonist
Nikhil. Although in step with the biopic’s form of delivering fact through
the craft of cinematic storytelling, the filmic narration delivered by those
closest to Nikhil takes on the feeling of fact, hinting at some basis of truth
external to the film. Kimiko Akita (2006) scrutinizes the interplay between
the truths of a person’s life and their fictionalization in her article
“Orientalism and the Binary of Fact and Fiction in Memoirs of a Geisha”,
in which she examines the 1997 novel by Arthur Golden that gave rise to a
2005 film of the same title:

Memoirs of a Geisha, like much popular fiction, required some

factual basis to give it credence. After learning about her life as a
geisha by interviewing her, Golden discarded an early fictional
account of a geisha he had written in the third person, and settled
instead on a fictionalized memoir form, borrowing heavily, but
altering in unflattering ways, facts from Iwasaki’s true story … He
never could have created, solely from his imagination or from
second-hand information, the story he eventually wrote. Golden
did credit Iwasaki as indispensable to his ability to tell the story
of geisha. Golden’s fictionalized memoir and the facts of Iwasaki’s
life that influenced it were symbiotically related. Just as Golden’s
fiction relied on some factual information, the true facts of geisha
life (Iwasaki’s life) as surviving cultural truth depended on
Golden’s fictionalizing technique. This creates a binary between
fiction and fact.
(p. 2)

Like Golden, Onir also acknowledges his debt to the source material that
inspired his creation, even if not within the film itself. These revelations
notwithstanding, in both cases, it is ultimately the manipulation of the
foundational material that takes on a life of its own in the retelling.

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Although works such as Golden’s and Onir’s may have some flavour of
the truth, their purpose is to subsume, transform, and eventually supersede
the real. Observing that “[f]iction has the potential to be more entertaining
than fact”, Akita (2006) informs that “Golden’s novel sold much better
than Iwasaki’s subsequent autobiography” (p. 2). As Akita holds, the filmic
version of Golden’s novel continues the orientalization of the geisha-figure,
relying on purloined cultural truths that are translated for “an American/
Western audience” (2006, p. 2). Memoirs of a Geisha, in its various forms,
“present[s] the Orient as a commodified Western object: a fiction of the
West, by the West, and for the West, yet received by the West as reality”,
Akita (2006, p. 3) concludes. As Akita alleges Golden does with Japanese
culture and history, of which he learns second-hand, a similar observation
can be made of Onir’s dubious treatment of Goa in which his film is set.
For example, Akita underscores the strangeness of “all geisha speak[ing]
English fluently” in the film version; in MBN, it is equally curious that
Hindi is the film’s language of choice, as it is not regionally Goan, and is a
language that D’Souza was generally unfamiliar with, unsurprisingly
(Ferrão, 2011, p. 142).
D’Souza’s Goanness is at first necessary but then disposable in MBN, for
Goanness is not Indianness:

The centrality of Goa to My Brother… Nikhil’s investments are in

dichotomizing the traditional and the modern in relation to iden-
tity. The highlighting of Goa’s regional identity as it is underpinned
by religious, colonial, cultural and historical differences in com-
parison to most of the rest of India is made tantamount to how gay
men find themselves misunderstood as outsiders in the very nation
they call home. This initial identification between gay and Goan
identity is nevertheless transcended when the film relegates Goa to
the backdrop, ceding it as the provincial space that allows for other
more global affiliations in the development of gay subjectivity.
(Ferrão, 2011, p. 144)

If the goal of Memoirs of a Geisha is to translate the figure of the geisha for
Western consumption, then MBN seeks to deliver a Goa-set story to an
Indian audience that must strive to place itself on par with the rest of the
modern world in how it treats gay men. To this end, Goa and Goanness—
and, therefore, D’Souza’s own history as it is tied to this location and its
specificity—are merely props.

The mechanics of dissemblance

In MBN, it is the very form of the film that serves to replace the origin story
it predicates itself on by giving fiction the texture of truth, a truth never
explicitly revealed as being absent. Trading in the semblance of fact, the

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genre of the biopic, much like docudrama, constructs versions of reality at

the same time as it documents it. Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest
grapple with the meaning and purpose of the genre of the documentary, in
similarly trying to decide where reality ends and its manipulation begins in
the execution of this cinematic form. They arrive at the understanding that

documentary is born out of a tortured process in which the pur-

pose of presenting the actual always involves a manipulation of
that self-same actual. So while documentary films often portend to
portray the “truth” or provide access to reality, they are made up of
endless layers of decisions and techniques that distort and twist the
non-filmic as well as the lenses.
(van Munster and Sylvest, 2015, p. 232)7

In explaining that “documentary is a genre that plays precisely upon the

ambiguity between representation and reality”, van Munster and Sylvest

attempt to go beyond the unhelpful distinction between reality and

fiction, [by introducing] the notion of arrangements of perceptibil-
ity as a more useful term for capturing what is at stake in the cre-
ative treatment of actuality in documentaries. In [their] view, the
main advantage of the notion of arrangements of perceptibility is
that it shifts the unfruitful discussion about documentary as a true
or false representation of reality to an analytical focus on how we
perceive and how we are able, allowed, or made to perceive.
(2015, p. 233)8

Because MBN functions as a semi-docudramatic biopic, van Munster and

Sylvest’s apprehension of arrangements of perceptibility in the documen-
tary form proves useful in thinking about how, and to what end, the
D’Souza-inspired film deploys reality.
Identifying various “operational modalities”, van Munster and Sylvest
(2015) categorize the style of “saying privileged over showing” as one of the
ways in which perceptibility is arranged in the documentary genre; here,
“‘saying’ refers to the narrative structure … , which generally takes the
form of an asserted claim that urges the audience to [believe]” (p. 233).
Recall that narration is a stock feature of the biopic form. van Munster and
Sylvest’s recognition of narration as a device that shapes truth—and “urges”
the audience to believe in it—demonstrates how this element of filmmaking
crosses over between genres and serves to create, literally, the voice of
authority. So, when Anamika, and others in MBN, tell Nikhil’s story, even
though it is based on D’Souza’s history, they are transferring the credence of
reality to the tale of discrimination being spun around HIV/AIDS stigmati-
zation faced by India’s gay men. Being agenda-driven also derives from the
“saying privileged over showing” arrangement of perceptibility identified

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by van Munster and Sylvest. In it, they see “the often overt attempt to
impress a particular perspective on audiences”, a political purpose (van
Munster and Sylvest, 2015, p. 235).

Sexuality, or is it?
Undoubtedly, Onir’s choice to transform D’Souza’s story for the express
purpose of making a statement about gay discrimination arises from the
lacuna around D’Souza’s sexuality—an absence the film must obscure while
using his story to tell a tale about a specific kind of sexuality. D’Souza’s
sexuality has often been the subject of speculation, conjecture readily giving
way to the assuredness of the activist’s queerness. A case in point is Benjamin
Law’s (2014) reportage of his conversation with Anand Grover, the lawyer
who took up D’Souza’s discrimination case:

Anand had worked extensively in cases relating to homosexuality

and HIV since the late 1980s, when he represented Dominic
D’Souza, a gay man who was fired after being diagnosed as HIV-
positive … After D’Souza died, Anand became obsessed. Gay men
approached him for representation if they were being blackmailed.
(p. 254)

Although Grover is Law’s source of information about D’Souza, Law does

not say that it was the lawyer who told him of D’Souza’s sexuality; this void
around Law’s source of information raises questions about its credibility.
For Law, it is sufficient that Grover took on cases of homosexual and HIV
discrimination to then decide that these two requirements are synonymous
and proof of D’Souza’s sexuality. Law’s book is titled Gaysia: Adventures in
the queer east, a tongue-in-cheek choice of name. An Australian of Asian
origin, Law’s, book, is an attempt to understand gay sexuality in Asia. That
the book’s title affects the stereotype that Akita cautions against in Golden’s
fictionalization of the geisha is itself telling of Law’s desire to serve as a
cultural informant between West and East. It also creates concerns about
the seriousness of his “research” and continues to demonstrate how fact
and fiction dissolve into one another so glibly when it comes to the matter
of D’Souza’s life.
The popularization of D’Souza’s story is not solely the territory of Onir’s
(2005) film, as far as fictionalizations go. When a character in The Lost
Flamingoes of Bombay, by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi (2009), discovers
he has been infected with the HIV virus, he laments to his boyfriend: “Do
you know how they treat people like me? A guy in Goa was locked up in a
sanatorium when they found out he had it” (p. 215). Apparently calling on
the stigma attached to being HIV-positive in India, the character’s is an
obvious allusion to what happened to D’Souza, a fact I discuss in more
detail later. Shanghvi’s novel, like Onir’s film, abstracts D’Souza’s life to

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cathect the trauma of HIV infection to the plight of gay men. In both cases,
the invisibilization of D’Souza still relies on the notoriety of the real-life
events and the plausibility of HIV infection due to homosexuality. Still in
reference to D’Souza, Onir (2017) writes that “[b]eing infected with the
HIV virus is an indication of sexual transgression. Perversely, so is rape
often read as such. So the victim becomes the outcast” (para. 2). Thereby,
for the filmmaker, HIV-infection and rape are not only about personal
trauma but also interchangeable and indistinguishable in the stigmatization
they cause due to public opinion. On one hand, a misrepresentation of the
multiple ways in which HIV can be transmitted, the statement is also an
oversimplification of gendered sexual violence. From here, it is a short leap
to speaking of HIV/AIDS as a stand-in for gay identity, as is the case when
Onir (2017) remarks, “It’s a little scary that core debates about the social
side of HIV and AIDS do not figure prominently in the government agenda
today. The whole notion of men having sex with men has been rendered
unacceptable all over again” (para. 6).
Even as he makes the case that HIV/AIDS should figure in governmental
policy, Onir only sees this as being a relevant political issue because of the
ostracism HIV/AIDS-discrimination brings to men who have sex with men,
thus limiting the broader potential of AIDS advocacy. That Onir chose
D’Souza’s story as the vehicle through which to raise awareness of these
matters springs from the convenient linkages the director makes between
what happened to D’Souza and HIV/AIDS discrimination generally, where
these matters slip into one another because of their possible association
with sexuality. If for these reasons, then, it is immaterial if D’Souza was gay,
for his story is meant to serve the greater good required of it by the director
as self-positioned gay rights advocate. In this vein, the film’s purposeful
deployment of D’Souza’s story is about cleaving AIDS activism from gay
rights activism, despite the relationship between the two. This is equally a
historical distortion of D’Souza’s own labours as an advocate for the rights
of those with HIV/AIDS; his Positive People, which MBN itself references
(renaming it People Positive) is a non-governmental organization (NGO)
that serves anyone with the disease, regardless of sexuality. As a figure
whose struggles as India’s Patient Zero, in the era of the global recognition
of the AIDS crisis, were nationally known, D’Souza’s life lends itself to the
cinematic as being the story of an individual who courageously fought a
legal battle against discrimination. It is this individuality that MBN bor-
rows and transforms.

The person for the cause

Vidal (2013) takes cognizance of how

[u]nlike in other film genres placed at the intersection of fiction and

history, … in the biopic an individual’s story comes to the fore.

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 T wenty - five years after D ominic D ’ S ouza

Personality and point of view become the conduit of history in

stories that often boil down complex social processes to gestures of
individual agency
(p. 3)

Effectively, in focalizing a movement through the story of one person, the

form of the biopic creates a figurehead that the audience can identify with
or look up to as a heroic personality. While reducing the complexities of
history and the role of the many associated in the making of a historical
moment, the device of using a single historical figure to relay a much more
involved story is also a filmic tool of the management of history in its
unwieldiness. That this then must necessarily rely on the selective exclusion
of people, facts, and events is evident. In the case of MBN, which I aim to
characterize as having the trappings of a biopic, it is the actual person
whose reality the film utilizes that is made absent, while his story is centred
for its historical importance and for its attachment to a cause.
The use of an average person’s story against the backdrop of recent his-
torical events—in MBN, this is the history of the emergence of HIV/AIDS
in India, tied to the discrimination of gay men—still instantiates not only
the heroic within the everyday but also the potential for intimacy between
the audience and the protagonist. In his examination of the queer biopics
Milk and Pedro, both released in 2008 and written by Dustin Lance Black,
Jonathan Lupo (2017) attends to how the scriptwriter creates intimacy in
the representation of the films’ main characters (p. 234). Lupo (2017) begins
by detailing how

Milk (Van Sant, 2008) first introduces its titular hero not by recre-
ating one of his many rousing speeches in front of roaring crowds
or canny political strategy sessions with his band of upstart activ-
ists, but alone in his kitchen, pressing “record” on a cassette
recorder … Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) introduces himself and states
the date, directing that the tape—his will—be played only in the
event of his assassination. The contrast between the gregarious,
“never blend in”, self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street” and
the quiet, confessional monologue is just one of the many ways in
which the film, like many biopics, promises a more intimate under-
standing of the person behind the headlines.
(pp. 227–228)

Eschewing the grand public moments associated with Milk’s status as folk
and political hero in the growing San Francisco lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) movement of the 1970s, the intimate portrait that the
film opens with, as Lupo shows, still connects the personal with the political.
Milk’s tangible aloneness as he contemplates the fragility of his life, con-
noted as it is in the solitary act of recording his will, is directly related to his

75
 R. BENEDITO FERRÃO

acknowledgement of the possibility that he might be assassinated for his

pro-gay activism. Lupo (2017) quotes Black’s script where Milk says into
the tape recorder: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy
every closet door…” (p. 234). Milk also hopes that his death will have rami-
fications for the political emancipation of “[n]ot only gays, but the Blacks,
the Asians, the disabled, the seniors” (Lupo, 2017, p. 234). In comparison,
the political implications of Nikhil’s HIV diagnosis develop as MBN pro-
gresses. Prior to this, as the title itself suggests, MBN occupies itself in pre-
senting an intimate portrait of not only a brother but also a son and a lover
through the personal reminisces offered by the main character’s inner circle.
That this young man who loves his family and is a source of pride to them
must deal with later disapprobation is what operationalizes the intimacy
the film develops, connecting it with the film’s political agenda.
In the sharing of the personal through the narration of the film by Nikhil’s
intimates, MBN offers its audience a central character who could very much
be like them in his commonplace attachment to loved ones. Consequently,
this expands the potential of MBN beyond being a film only about gay
issues; it is then also positioned as a film meant for more than an exclusively
gay audience, even as its motivation is to champion gay rights. Lupo (2017)
also identifies the use of the familial for the purposes of creating intimacy in
Black’s writing of Pedro, especially in the use of “extensive flashbacks to
key moments across [Zamora’s] past, including the separation from much
of his family in the [Cuban American’s emigration] to Miami” (p. 234). Like
D’Souza, Pedro Zamora’s infection with HIV led him to become an activist,
most prominently on the 1990s MTV reality television programme The
Real World. That an otherwise ordinary person could face discrimination
because of a health problem makes Nikhil’s struggle, in MBN, the stuff of
quotidian existence; that, like Zamora (and D’Souza), Nikhil decides to
turn a personal struggle into an opportunity for advocacy then elevates the
personal, and intimate, into the political.
Of course, Zamora and D’Souza did not suffer from just any disease.
That HIV/AIDS was a relatively new global phenomenon during their life-
times made their situations unique. Although Zamora’s story is one of a
national self-outing and D’Souza’s is about being forcibly outed to the
nation as being HIV positive, the coincidence between the two narratives is
in these men becoming AIDS activists in the 1990s because of their disease,
a condition of personal strife they converted into public action. It is pre-
cisely such lines of action that Vidal (2013) points out are the stuff of biop-
ics, for they are “geared to causal determinism on both a teleological
axis—the historical actor is presented as predestined to become one—and
on a theological axis—the moral justification for the predestined historical
actor’s immortality is already embedded in the figure’s myth” (p. 6).9 In
Milk, the titular character’s film-opening monologue, delivered to a tape-
recorder, not only provides a premonition of his murder but is also a self-
fulfilling prophecy that seals Harvey Milk’s legend as a man willing to, and

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who did, die for the cause of LGBT rights. Fatality in such circumstances
obviously lends itself to the heroic. For Zamora and D’Souza, life was not
given due to them having acquired HIV at a time when medical advances in
treating the disease were still in the early stages; both activists succumbed
to the illness within a short time of their diagnoses, even as the afterlives of
their activism persist. By conferring on Nikhil’s journey from ordinary citi-
zen to public advocate the storyline of the genesis of HIV/AIDS in India, as
well as the attendant issue of gay rights that MBN develops by borrowing
from D’Souza’s AIDS activism, the personal is made not only public but
also heroic. Yet, while creating a cinematic and tragic hero in Nikhil for the
cause of gay rights, D’Souza’s story as an early pioneer of AIDS activism in
South Asia is cleaved from the very film it inspired.

A story untold
As this chapter concludes, I want to return to the event I began with—the
25th-anniversary commemoration in Bombay of D’Souza’s death—to high-
light my observation of how MBN has taken on a life of its own to the
obfuscation of D’Souza’s legacy and its other possibilities. Interviewing an
audience member after the film screening, the Hindustan Times quotes him
as saying: “Depiction of homosexuality in mainstream media will make the
society receptive to the gay community. Movies like ‘My brother…Nikhil’
help closeted gay men become comfortable in their own skin…” (Joshi,
2017, para. 5). This same news report wrongly notes D’Souza’s death as
having occurred on “May 14, 1992”, taking the date of the screening, 25
years later, as being the actual anniversary of D’Souza’s passing (Joshi,
2017); this was also true of other press mentions.10 The comment about the
film by the audience member indicates how MBN lends itself to and circu-
lates within the ambit of the very audience whose cause it was meant to
champion: middle class, gay, Indian men. This also reveals the fulfilment of
Onir’s purpose to limitedly align AIDS advocacy with gay rights through his
film, despite HIV/AIDS being an issue not exclusive to the gay community.
Certainly, the programme and the publicity surrounding it included a
commemoration of D’Souza himself, for it is not a legacy that can be
ignored. Reporting on the event, Livemint notes that apart from a docu-
mentary about Positive People, the still-existent Goa-based NGO begun by
D’Souza, the line-up included an appearance by the previously mentioned
Anand Grover of the NGO, Lawyers Collective (Ratnam, 2017). Grover’s
defence of D’Souza, when he battled the discrimination he faced for being
HIV positive, in turn, led to the lawyer drafting, as Livemint states, “an
HIV/AIDS Bill that … [was] finally passed [in April 2017] as the Human
Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
(Prevention and Control) Act, 2017—the first national HIV law in South
Asia, which promised to tackle discrimination against HIV-positive per-
sons” (Ratnam, 2017, para. 3). Some of the news stories about the

77
 R. BENEDITO FERRÃO

commemorative event, like the one by Pune Mirror, also included the names
of others who had been part of D’Souza’s struggle, such as “Dominic’s
mother, Lucy, who was a nurse, [who] would band together with friends
and other family members to fight for his rights” (Engineer, 2017, para. 9).
One of these friends was Isabel de Santa Rita Vás, who Livemint chronicles
as saying of the struggle to defend D’Souza’s rights:

We knew very little about AIDS then … We were not really activists,
we were Dominic’s friends … We wrote to friends in other parts of
the world, and they sent us legal papers of cases … These we would
give to our lawyers. This was before Anand took up the case.
(Ratnam, 2017, para. 11)

Yet, at the same time as these news items covered the highlights of what
D’Souza had been through, as well as the importance of his life’s work as an
activist, it is still plain that it was the film and its screening that occupied
their interest. Consider this relationship that Livemint draws between MBN
and an account of the actual events that led to D’Souza finding himself in
trouble:

[The] film … has a scene in which Sanjay Suri, who plays the titular
Nikhil—swimming champion, beloved brother and son (and partner
of Nigel, played by Purab Kohli)—is sitting shirtless on a hospital
bench. Around him, nurses and doctors talk within earshot—
“Careful! Gloves pehenke haath lagana (Careful! Wear gloves before
touching him) … Why should we be at risk because of him)?”

This is what actually transpired.

On 14 February 1989, D’Souza, who worked at the World Wildlife

Fund, was summoned [by the] … police… D’Souza, who lived with
his mother, Lucy, a retired nurse … left immediately. He didn’t
leave a note … he couldn’t have known what was about to happen
… At the station, he was handcuffed and taken to Asilo Hospital
in Mapusa, where doctors gathered around him. They didn’t touch
him but asked him several questions: Did he have sex with prosti-
tutes, was he a homosexual, did he inject drugs? It was only when
he saw a nurse pass by holding a file with the words “AIDS” printed
on its cover that D’Souza realized that he was HIV-positive.
He was then transferred to an unused tuberculosis sanatorium
… There, he would stay for over two months against his will. In-
deed, it was because of D’Souza’s incarceration that the Human
Immuno Virus, which causes Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syn-
drome, or AIDS, was written into India’s court records.
(Ratnam, 2017, para. 5–8)

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 T wenty - five years after D ominic D ’ S ouza

Despite the lead in from the film to “what actually transpired”, there
seems to be no break in the cinematic fashion in which D’Souza’s story is
relayed in the news story; simultaneously, through this pairing, the article
suggests that the film and facts from the actual moment can be read coinci-
dentally. One goes from the revelation of the film’s characterization of
Nikhil—meant to be D’Souza—as a shirtless gay man to a factual depiction
of D’Souza as a single adult man who lives with his mother. In this juxtapo-
sition, it is as if the latter is likely proof of the former, the disrobement read-
ing less as vulnerability than a direction of the audience’s gaze on the
titillating spectacle of male semi-nudity as a marker of queerness.
Because MBN is chiefly invested in providing a gay rights narrative for a
middle-class audience, Shamira A. Meghani (2017) says of its displays of
vulnerability that they only vicariously “reference the grammar of caste to
represent HIV stigmatisation, revealing ‘untouchability’ as foundational to
the conceptualisation of HIV stigma in India” (p. 2). Even the aforemen-
tioned scene, quoted in the Livemint article, is indicative of how MBN uses
the logics of the Hindu caste system, especially its belief in untouchability,
as a metaphor for HIV stigmatization. In the scene, the medical profession-
als attending to Nikhil would rather not touch him, lest his polluting touch
afflict them, much like the loss of high-caste status that supposedly results
from contact with those who are untouchable. In spite of such parallels,
Meghani determines that MBN is limited in its representational scope for it
would be unable, for instance, to “feature Dalit subjects living with HIV
because to do so would disrupt the dichotomized temporalities of caste-as-
tradition versus gay-as-modernity”, or what I have been classifying as the
middle class Indian gay subject, that the film relies upon (2017, p. 2).
The film’s caste and class proclivities stem, moreover, from another mis-
representation of Goan identity and D’Souza’s own background. Even
though it borrows the contexts and settings of D’Souza’s Goa to create
itself, MBN makes Nikhil and his family part–North Indian so that they
“appear more Indian than had they been distinctly Goan”, due to Goa’s
divergent history from most of the rest of India, which annexed the region
in 1961 (Ferrão, 2011, p. 142). Their ethnicization allowing Nikhil’s family
to be viewed as Hindu, the Kapoors’ class status also gives itself to the caste
reading that Meghani submits the seemingly secular film to. Part of how
MBN eclipses D’Souza’s story is also then in its misrepresentation of his
ethnicity, and the obscuring of the Catholic cultural background of his fam-
ily, to create a cognizably Indian filmic milieu for the consumption of a
Hindi-speaking national audience.
Because the Kapoors, Nikhil’s family in MBN, must be identifiably
Indian, the fact that the D’Souzas had spent a significant amount of time in
East Africa is something the film would have no room for. The D’Souzas’
East African past is no anomaly given the history of Goan travel and resi-
dence in that part of the world from colonial times.11 Were the film to
acknowledge such circuits of Goan identity as they are informed by the

79
 R. BENEDITO FERRÃO

extra-national existences of Goans might have perhaps allowed it to ges-

ture at shared postcolonial legacies and the still-looming crisis of AIDS in
the developing world. This would require, of course, that the film think
differently about its commitment to tell a particularly Indian story, but as
post-liberalization Bollywood necessitates, the audience must be given a
self-reflexive portrayal of an India that is “a potential global power”
(Dwyer, 2013, p. 221). As a film of such ilk, MBN is beholden to ideas of
nationalism, caste, class, and gender in the making of gay subjectivity it
foregrounds.
While I have aimed to establish how MBN uses the form of the biopic,
although it is not one itself, to represent the HIV/AIDS stigmatization of
gay middle-class men in an Indian setting, I am not intent on suggesting that
the film might have been more judicious in actually being a biopic about
Dominic D’Souza. The same is also true of any claim that could be made to
the veracity of D’Souza’s sexuality, for I have not sought to argue that a film
about HIV/AIDS could not also be about gay identity. D’Souza’s legacy
continues to exist despite its misrepresentations in Onir’s (2011) film, so
there is little that a possibly more “authentic” biopic could offer, especially
seeing as biopics are themselves constructions of reality as I have been
detailing. Instead, the larger question this chapter has engaged with is how
the politics of advocacy, even in the representation of the marginal, can be
manipulated cinematically. That cinematic representations of such a nature
limit the potential of AIDS activism, and especially in how its advocates
could be remembered and their legacies deployed, is worth more complex
consideration for their political possibilities.

Acknowledgments
Research for this chapter was completed while I was a Fulbright-Nehru
Fellow at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa; my gratitude goes
to the Fulbright Program and the centre for this opportunity. My thanks to
Deborah Al-Najjar, Anjali Arondekar, Jih-Fei Cheng, Elton Naswood, and
Vishvesh Kandkolkar for their insights in relation to this chapter, which is
dedicated to the memory of Dominic D’Souza.

Notes
1 See Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy (2017).
2 See, for instance, Sriram (2017), Engineer (2017), and Joshi (2017).
3 See GayBombay (2017).
4 Rediscovered in 2020 in a Berlin archive 49 years after it was made, Prem
Kapoor’s Badnam Basti (1971) is believed to be a still-earlier instance of an
Indian film that portrays a gay relationship, although in a muted fashion. See
Gaekwad (2020).
5 Emphasis in original.
6 Schaefer and Karan’s (2012) study solely surveys the viewership of Bollywood
films from the first decade of the twenty-first century—the same period as

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 T wenty - five years after D ominic D ’ S ouza

MBN’s creation—their 2008–2009 research project including 409 respondents

of which 48 were from the diaspora; 86.7% of the homeland subjects identified
as Hindu while 87.5% of the diaspora respondents also did (pp. 134–135). The
high number of Hindus represented in this study matches India’s own demogra-
phy as a Hindu majority, although ostensibly secular, country. Curiously, while
Schaefer and Karan set out to see how their respondents reacted to representa-
tions of nationalism in Bollywood, any attempt to have their subjects reflect on
the Hindu bent of such nationalism, given Hindi cinema’s predilection in the
early 2000s in this regard, appears to be absent. This exclusion is made even
more jarring given not only that, overall, 86.8% of the respondents identified as
Hindu but also because, as Therwath (2010) exposes, NRIs “contribute finan-
cially to the Sangh Parivar”, the parent organization of India’s most dominant
Hindu nationalist political party (p. 2). Simultaneously, right-wing Hindu reli-
gious and political organizations have reached out to the upper and middle
classes of the diaspora for financial support while preaching a gospel of connec-
tion to the homeland that is cathected to Brahmanical Hindu identity (Shankar,
2019; Swain, 2015).
7 Emphasis in original.
8 Emphasis in original.
9 Emphasis in original.
10 Also see Roy (2017).
11 See, for example, Carvalho (2010) and Mascarenhas-Keyes (2011).

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 4
THE ICONOGRAPHY OF
HINDU(IZED) HIJRAS
Idioms of hijra representation in Northern India

Arpita Phukan Biswas

There appeared to be a general consensus asmongst the journalists and

priests in Benaras that the idea of the pind-daan ceremony for kinnars was
orchestrated by none other than Acharya Jitendra Anand—a monk and the
founder of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Ganga Mahasabha
who, given the dwindling interest of the Modi government in the Ganga-
cleanup project, was trying to come back into political relevance by initiat-
ing the formation of a militia, the Kinnar Akhada. The kar sevaks, on the
other hand, mocked that there could really be a substantial political poten-
tial in allying with the hijras and partook in the rites, rituals and logistics
out of fear and respect for Acharya Jitendra Anand. They believed that
there had been many in the past who had tried to establish their footings
within the provincial politics of Benaras and had quietly slipped away after
losing face, unable to prove their staying power and merit. A city-beat
reporter from a local daily who introduced me to Acharya Jitendra Anand
told me that the inception of the Kinnar Akhada first took place when
Laxmi had gone to Benaras for the last rites of her father. Acharya Jitendra
Anand had then approached her with the idea of initiating an akhada for
kinnars. Laxmi readily agreed that it took her a couple of years to think
about it; Acharya Jitendra Anand would continually check on her to know
if she had changed her mind. Then one fine day, five years later in 2015,
“just like that”, she decided that she would go ahead with Acharya Jitendra
Anand’s idea to start the akhada for kinnars. It was popularly believed that
the genesis and motivation for the Kinnar Akhada was, on one hand, to
counter the masculinist, patriarchal character of the Indian Akhada system
and, on the other, was to facilitate the incorporation of largely Islam-
following hijras into the folds of Hinduism—their rightful place within
Sanatan dharma and thereby the Indian mainstream society. The story of
the formation of the Kinnar Akhada in thus being positioned as the brain-
child of Acharya Jitendra Anand suited Laxmi quite well; by attributing
authorship to Acharya Jitendra Anand, Laxmi, a veritable outsider to the
Hindutva politics of the Hindi hinterland, appeared to enjoy the benefits of

84
 T he I conography of H indu ( ized ) H ijras

the authority of a local monk even as she presented herself as someone who
sought to establish close proximity with him and, at the same time, repre-
sent herself as someone who partook in the Akhada formation with the
willingness and permission of an insider, thus finding a foothold within
what was delineated as highly gendered and masculinist spaces of provin-
cial politics.
“After all, there is a lot of discrimination amongst hijras too”, Laxmi,
sitting in the front seat of the car on our way to the Ganga Aarti, argued, as
other hijras and Rishi Ajay Das sat in the rear. “Why should Hindu hijras
be asked to observe the rites and rituals of a Muslim hijra?” The sharp dis-
tinction drawn between hijras as distinctly Hindus and Muslims echoed in
Laxmi’s memoir as well, where she writes that

during the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, castration was

forbidden. Those who wanted to be castrated had to do so secretly.
Since Hinduism permitted castration, while Islam did not, Aurangzeb
is said to have forcibly converted many Hindu hijras to Islam.
(p. 178)

In doing so, Laxmi positions the ethos of hijrahood as being antithetical to

Islamic worldview and praxis, thus setting the backdrop for the authenti-
cating hijra-ritual of castration in Hinduism. While such claims could be
thought to inform Laxmi’s ideological orientation towards crafting a Kinnar
Akhada, translating her worldview to the pragmatics of contemporary hijra
personhood would require her to develop or integrate processes—both
social and political—that could be used to consolidate her position as a
Hindu hijra. While doing so, Laxmi’s status as an outsider appeared to both
authenticate her and bestow her with powers to script a story of both gen-
der non-conformity and religious conformity that, in the modern history of
the Indian akhada system, was apparently not previously seen and would
therefore be expected to be resisted. Furthermore, by framing the story of
the formation of the Kinnar Akhada as an instance of the politically infa-
mous contemporary right-wing ghar-waapsi program meant to reconvert
lower-caste Muslims and Christians back into Hinduism through the ritual
of shuddhi—originally, a practice of purification adopted by upper-caste
Hindus when in contact with anything deemed polluting and had been
adopted by Arya Samajis of the 1920s for the reconversion of untouch-
ables—back into Hinduism, Laxmi, to form the Kinnar Akhada, appeared
to lay claim to the tradition of much larger right-wing political processes
that began in the 1920s in an attempt to form a Hindu Rashtra (nation)
through the subsequent formation of the Hindu Mahasabha that under-
girds Hindutva politics in India and, since then, has taken many different
forms. The delivery of this promised political reform drew on popular rep-
resentations of hijras as followers of both Hinduism and Islamism and
largely as people who ideologically crafted their bodies and ethos in the

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mould of dynamic Islamic principles. Taking this position appears to have

made Laxmi pliable within the hostile gendered and masculinist world of
Benaras. To thus deliver on the promise, Laxmi joined hands with various
other local political actors in Benaras and Bhopal who helped her craft her
entry into the Akhil Bharatiya Akhada Parishad (ABAP) as a kinnar
Mahamandaleshwar (spiritual guardian) of the Juna Akhada. This chapter
charts out some of the politics of hijra representation and the precipitation
of hijra subjectivities within a very specific context of Hindutva politics
through gestures, both small and large, through which Laxmi and her aco-
lytes seek to introduce new dimensions to the contemporary hijra person-
hood oriented towards, as I would like to demonstrate, a rising middle-class
public through the deployment of upper-caste politics. To do so, Laxmi
mobilizes the gendered grammar of upper-caste Hindutva politics—one
that may align the pan-Indian subject of queer politics that emerged in their
struggle with the law, with a universalist pan-Indian conception of a
Hindutva politics—and the fact that Hindutva politics has, in the more
recent forms, centred on the charismatic allure of a strong leader who
aggressively represents the face of Hindu reform.
Furthermore, I am interested in charting out the dynamics of representa-
tional politics involving the politics of queer visibility that specifically satu-
rates the figure of the hijra, and through which the hijra crafts themselves
as veritable transgendered subjects. What is extremely important to such a
politics of visibility is the persistent and overbearing presence of the media—
local, national and global—each oriented towards their specific audiences
and the social media through which mediated subjects, such as Laxmi,
articulates her fractured subjectivity over an uneven and hierarchized ter-
rain of queerness. Such a politics of queerness, I would like to demonstrate,
is situated at a strategic nexus between upper-caste and middle-class social
structures located in a metropolitan city of Mumbai from where it travels
to the tier-two cities through the ubiquitous presence of television and
social media. For Laxmi, as she writes in her first memoir, is posited as
about balancing the ghetto and the mainstream, both of which, she claimed,
she wanted to occupy and to live at the same time leading her to an impos-
sible impasse—should she be a hijra as per the expected hijra norms, or
should she chart out her own trajectory? This sentiment is often reiterated,
for instance when she writes, “There’s a family I’m related to by blood, and
then there are my chelas who are my other family. I need both families and
cannot envisage a life without either” (p. 167). She seeks to overcome this
contradiction by taking the previously uncharted course of becoming an
upper-caste hijra celebrity in India in which she selectively borrows parts of
lives both from the hijra world and from the one that had been bestowed
upon her by her upper-caste, middle-class upbringing and LGBT activism
in Mumbai. In doing so, riding on her upper-caste, middle-class, trans-
gendered status, Laxmi grasped at generating new imaginaries of hijra per-
sonhood in which the world of mainstream societies and the world of hijras

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could be accommodated and assembled together so as to pave the way for

a middle-class transgender society. Furthermore, her status as a hijra celeb-
rity transgressing trenchant boundaries of the local offers her a unique van-
tage point from which to critique local formations of the hijra, a method
she productively deploys to generate new meanings and socio-political pos-
sibilities towards a middle-class hijrahood. To that extent, Laxmi’s first
memoir holds itself out as a promise; it positions Laxmi as a one-off char-
acter to have been able to transgress the trenchant and treacherous bound-
aries between the hijra world and the mainstream society such that Laxmi
emerges as a legible figure not only within circuits already deemed sexual,
such as transnational HIV-AIDS activism and its ensuing gender politics, or
the precipitation of gender politics around Section 377, but also begins to
become socially and politically legible within other gendered circuits, such
as the natal family, the community and organized upper-caste Hindutva
politics. This transaction between the local and the global, in Laxmi’s case,
is further partly brought about through the mediated subjectivity produced
through the television oriented towards a middle-class audience.
Furthermore, such a narrative of hijra subjectivity is constructed not on the
representation of queer figure as the injured subject of a colonial-era law
that largely has formed the basis for most queer testimonials but by recraft-
ing the injured figure as already a story of India’s progress and its success
within the HIV-AIDS paradigm. Laxmi accomplishes this by crafting a story
not of injury but that of relentless mobility and triumph. She easily con-
fesses that she is who she is because of her relentless ambition and the fact
that she now has become a globetrotter. In doing so, Laxmi both plays to
transnational activism on HIV-AIDS and exceeds that representation by
becoming a successful cultural figure who not only marks India’s progress
but also contests elite, racialized and hierarchized representations of India
within the global HIV-AIDS industry and the transnational sexual politics
as culturally backward, thus playing to Indian nationalism. Her success as
a cross-over transgendered figure, one who moves seamlessly between the
hijra ghetto and the mainstream society, is thus propped up as that which
uniquely positions her as a promising entrant into the world of middle-class
Hindutva politics.

Queer anxieties, and the spectre of a (Hindu) middle-class

sexuality politics
From the very beginning of what precipitated as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisex-
ual and transgender) activism in India, middle-class, upper-caste Hindu
conservatives in India were construed as not only ideological opponents but
one of the most pressing threats to the formation and evolution of new and
existing queer subjectivities in India, against whom queer subjects had to be
protected by the action of the law. However, the development of LGBT
subjectivities that could arrive on the scene of the law occurred in various

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stages through discourses of sexualities produced by and about a middle-

class public in India, as much as it construed and produced discourses of
sexualities about itself. This section seeks to trace and understand the evo-
lution of middle-class publics in queer imaginaries against which queer
counter-publics have been continually mapped and imagined. The salience
of mapping sexual discourses about non-hijra publics in a study about
hijras lies in the fact that hijras have largely been represented in popular
imaginaries as those who embody and perform their roles as public figures
by specifically orienting their sexualities towards the service of non-hijras.
The middle-classness of such non-hijra populations then forms the contem-
porary backdrop to the hijra’s encounter with non-hijras. The spectre of the
middle-class publics and their sexual politics have often been invoked in
queer descriptions of sexual resistance in India, a legacy that has been
handed down to hijras as they began to emerge as critical counter-publics
within India’s queer movements as well. Representations of hijras, both as
part of the movement and as stand-alone sexual figures in their own right,
have had to contend with an emergent middle-class politics of sexuality
both within and without.
Attempts to organize gay sociality has been documented to be as old as
1978 when a gay newsletter called Gay Scene was started from Calcutta
until it shut down in 1980. In 1981, attempts to run weekly Saturday meet-
ings at the Indian Coffee House were reported in New Delhi which did not
survive the summer. In Calcutta, a gay men’s group met every Saturday dur-
ing 1982–1983 at a local coffee house, Cafe 82. The politics of crafting
sexuality as a distinct form of personhood in the early years involved the
formation and consolidation of sexual counter-cultural publics that precipi-
tated through clandestine publication and circulation of various magazines
within gender and sexuality countercultural circuits and through the emer-
gence of the HIV-AIDS industry that partially centred on the homosexual
subject. Trikone, a non-profit support group with the explicit aim for social
and political organization for South Asian LGBT people founded by Arvind
Kumar and Survir Das in 1986 in San Francisco Bay Area was reported to
have published several magazines yearly that was subscribed to by people
across Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Burma, Nepal,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Tibet. Shakti Khabar that began in 1989 in London
also voiced the anxieties of people involved in same-sex relations in India.
In 1990, Bombay Dost began as a gay quarterly magazine in English and
Hindi was run by Ashok Row Kavi, a member of the Humsafar Trust based
out of Bombay which adopted a slightly different track towards addressing
homosexuality. Dost received widespread sympathetic coverage in the
Indian media, including in video news magazines. However, instead of
addressing the question of same-sex desire head-on in terms of sexual ori-
entation and desire, it addressed issues of condom distribution and AIDS
education, particularly for gay men in Bombay. In doing so, it underlined
the necessity of politically identifying as homosexuals in the backdrop of

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the emergent economy of HIV-AIDS in India. These publications thus served

to precipitate inter-cultural transactions on same-sex sexualities which, in
turn, affected and organized the knowledge produced about same-sex sexu-
alities in India.
However, despite their attempts to organize and consolidate homosexual-
ity in India, these magazines and organizations found that their elite and
middle-class contributors and subscribers did not necessarily see themselves
as either gay or homosexuals. For instance, “messing around” was a term
that was often used by the contributors to describe same-sex proclivities. In
an account to the Trikone, a person describes his attraction towards other
males as homosexual sensibility/behaviour. Descriptions of sexual activity
between males have been referred to in terms of baazi/playful indulgence as
well. Other narratives explore the question of same-sex love as a discovery
of ones’ feminine side. Such uneven representations of same-sex sexualities
opened up the question of the experience of sexuality as that which was
differently distributed across a variegated set of actors marked by distinc-
tive class and cultural preferences. Given this context, the consolidation of
a critical queer public that could eventually speak to the law necessitated an
engagement with these varying idioms of sexual subjectivities even as it
depended on strategies that could transcend these differences, as developed
in a sustained engagement with the law. However, given that these maga-
zines circulated largely within the reading and writing elite and middle-class
counter-cultural public, the consumption of homosexual consciousness,
that is, homosexualization was attributed to a Western-influenced middle-
class sexuality counter-public. On the other hand, the critique to homo-
sexualization was represented as emanating from a very conservative
middle-class public which portrayed homosexuality as a western import.
This view was reified in the AIDS Bhedbhav Andolan’s (ABVA) early mani-
festo in 1991, which, following global trends in gender- and sexuality-based
activism, bracketed out homosexuality as a distinct form of individual iden-
tity that was based on one’s sexual object choice. Such individuated con-
structions of sexualities challenged conventions of representing and
embodying sexualities as that which were regulated by compulsory caste
injunctions to reproduce the male line through marriages across socially
equivalent units. Sexuality activism thus precipitated as a form of ethical
praxis, which, besides forming critical queer networks that would inspire
fresh imaginaries of same-sex desires directed inwards towards the forma-
tion and consolidation of LGBT communities, simultaneously engaged
itself in educating middle-class publics about the presence and proliferation
of same-sex sexualities in India, one of the means through which it shaped
its counter-cultural politics. This led to the eruption of relentless battles
between queer subjects and middle-class publics across texts (including the
law) and the streets.
The publication of the citizen’s report by ABVA in 1991 was a landmark
moment for hijra representation for it can be read to have foregrounded the

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various anxieties that riddled the figure of the hijra within countercultural
discourses on hijras. Hijras entered activist discourse as a homosexual fig-
ure—thought of as essentially male—and thereby were marked by non-
normative sexual object choice.
In relation to such conservative middle-class public who resisted the forces
of homosexualization, the lower classes were represented as relatively sexu-
ally more permissive and freer. Such distinctions drawn between middle-
class sexual conservativism and lower-class sexual permissiveness came to a
head in 1994 when Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Kiran Bedi, the then
inspector general of jails, was widely criticized for using Section 377 of the
Indian Penal Code to disallow the distribution of condoms in the Tihar jail
in Delhi in order to dissuade homosexuality amongst its prisoners. The pas-
sage of the 1986 amendment to the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA)
that expanded the scope of commercial sexual exploitation to include a
wider range of places apart from the brothel where sex work might occur
and an even more stringent approach to punitive measures for the illegal
solicitation of sex work was further seen as the imposition of middle-class
sexual morality over subaltern sexualities in India. This was further com-
pounded by the inhuman treatment of sex workers during the HIV-AIDS
intervention programs through which sex workers were not only routinely
subjected to unannounced medical examinations but were also indefinitely
detained in remand homes after such examinations under the ITP Act of
1986. The right-wing campaign against the screening of the lesbian film Fire
in 1999, depicting the development of sexual intimacy between two sisters-
in-law; the expulsion of two policewomen, Urmila Srivastava and Leela
Namdeo, from service in Madhya Pradesh in 1987 on the pretext of their
marriage in a private ceremony; the expulsion of lesbian students in Kerala
in 1992; allegations of lesbian discrimination in women’s NGO in 2002; and
rising suicides amongst homosexuals, especially lesbians, were some of the
incidences that further fuelled debates about the threat of middle-class con-
servativism to same-sex intimacies in India. Naisargi Dave (2012) in her
ethnography on lesbianism in India, for instance, gives a detailed view of the
fissures between women’s movement and lesbian activists in India where the
question of sexuality was seen as an elite and peripheral concern to the
women’s question in the third world in the light of more pressing issues such
as poverty alleviation, education, violence and development. There was,
therefore, a growing consensus among sexuality activists that homosexuality
had to be recouped from the middle classes in India.
Representations of such distinctions between middle-class sexual conser-
vativism and lower-class sexual permissiveness prevailed in the early articu-
lations of the figure of the hijra as well. Laden with poverty, systematically
uneducated and disenfranchised, persecuted under the ITPA by the state,
harassed by the police under the pretext of Section 377, politically unorga-
nized, socially secretive, frequently subjected to violence and detested by
the middle-class public for their sexual-shamelessness but simultaneously

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revered as a ritual figure of reproductivity, the figure of the hijra was care-
fully construed as a stable figure of lower-class sexuality—untainted and
undisturbed by Western-influenced middle-class sexuality politics—that not
only attested to the indigeneity of homosexuality in India but also built on
the orientation of LGBT activism against middle-class sexual hypocrisy.
Within the early decades of the largely elite and middle-class queer move-
ment, the figure of the hijra was therefore spoken for rather than repre-
sented as those who could speak.

The real and imagined limits of transgender activism

Twinkle and I sat on the pavement of the market area, waiting for the car
to arrive. The Ganga Aarti had ended, and after hours of walking around
the temples, ghats and the streets as part of the ritual, we finally had a
moment of respite as we waited for the other hijras and the vehicles to
arrive. Twinkle along with her hijra partner had come all the way from
Delhi to attend the pind-daan ceremony in Benaras. She and her partner
accompanied their guru, Bhavani Maai. Sitting on the pavement with a
plate of prasad (holy offerings) and other paraphernalia, a veritably annoyed
and snappish Twinkle narrated her story of how she became a hijra.
Educated and fairly well-off, both Twinkle and her partner belonged to
plush, middle-class families in Delhi. After considerable thought, Twinkle
and her partner concurred that their attraction to each other was because
they were gay. As soon as that realization hit home, Twinkle and her gay
partner wanted to live together. In fact, they often found themselves staying
over at each other’s house or crashing together at friends’ places. However,
on finding out that Twinkle was gay, her parents largely shut her up in the
house and strictly regulated her activities outside. In such conditions,
Twinkle managed to finish her degree in fashion designing and, with the
help of a family fund, started her own boutique. Her family regularly
coaxed her into getting married. But Twinkle would stall the problem, say-
ing that she wasn’t established enough in her career to start a family yet.
Meanwhile, she waited for her partner to finish her education as well. When
finally both of them were employed, they took the decision of undergoing
sex-reassignment surgery. Both turned hijra, eloped from home and started
living together. Once her parents got to know that both Twinkle and her
partner had become hijras, they were shocked, ashamed and stopped pro-
testing; they caved to the idea of Twinkle living with her hijra partner. They
no longer wanted that Twinkle come and live with them. Now both Twinkle
and her partner worked together in the boutique and have subsequently
contributed to many fashion shows in Delhi. But why was Twinkle part
of this eclectic melee of people in Benaras trying to kick-start a Kinnar
Akhada when she already had a fairly functional, if not successful business
that could support both of them? Was she, as one of the kar sevaks I met
mockingly observed, interested in politics as well? Twinkle had a faraway

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look. She was herself ambivalent about why she was there. One of the rea-
sons was that her guru, Bhavaani Maai, had wanted her to accompany
them, and because Bhavaani Maai has been like a guardian to both her and
her partner during their times of distress, she was there with her. Having
said that, if the Kinnar Akhada made people more accepting of hijras, then
she would feel that she truly had something to contribute to the society,
something bigger than herself.
Twinkle’s ambivalence towards the Kinnar Akhada appeared to echo
across the other hijras’ reluctance to be part of what on the surface appeared
to be Hindutva political mobilization. While Laxmi was certain that
increased visibility across the political spectrum would lead to greater
acceptance of hijras in the society, not many other hijras appeared to have
bought into that vision even if some of them arrived in Benaras after Laxmi’s
persistent urgings to support her for the pind-daan ceremony.

Reading Laxmi, the celebrity hijra

Writing the memoir
The next day we went to the United Nations building. The flags
of all the member-nations fluttered. On seeing our own tricolour,
I touched it lovingly and had tears in my eyes. I was representing
my beloved country at the United Nations! From where to where
I had come—from the bottom of a pit to the United Nations. I
was proud of myself, but with empowerment came responsibility.
I was no longer just Laxmi, the hijra; I was India. I had to be care-
ful about my etiquette and my dress, for any slip-up on my part
would reflect badly on my country. Thus, the cold notwithstanding,
I only dressed in saris. At meetings, I worked like a workaholic.
New York has a million temptations to distract one, but I did not
succumb to any of them. I didn’t even join the others for a visit to
Ground Zero. I just worked.
(Tripathi, 2015, p. 109)

The journey towards the memoir on Laxmi, according to journalist Vaishali

Rode, began when the editor of Mumbai-based daily Mahanagar, Nikhil
Wagle asked her to do a profile on Laxmi for its Diwali issue. It was around
the time when the HIV-AIDS intervention programs in India were almost
about to close in on a decade. However, popular imaginaries continued to
place hijras as dangerous abjects who could be encountered and seen on
the streets and other public spaces, strictly observing the trenchant bound-
aries between the public and the private. Rode herself re-creates her
encounter with hijras to one such afternoon when she saw a hijra in salwar
kameez approaching her as she left her house. As their paths crossed, the
hijra requested Rode to zip up the top at the back, which had come undone.

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As she zipped it up, she was aghast to see shopkeepers in the area snigger-
ing at her for fastening a hijra’s zip. Their comments made her feel that she
had done something strange. With this small act, it appeared that she had
disturbed the heavily regulated boundaries between freaks and the nor-
mals. She thus took it on herself to make the world see that hijras were not
freaks, a conclusion she had arrived on after having met Laxmi at the
MDACS (Mumbai District AIDS Control Society) office in 1999. Laxmi
was in her 20s and had come with her guru, Nani, to pick up a supply of
condoms. As Rode followed them to the DWS (NGO) office in Govandi,
she began to see “that Laxmi was not run-of-the-mill hijra”. It is this
observation, she reasons, that sustained her interest in Laxmi for over a
decade and motivated her to finally publish an autobiography on Laxmi
with Manovikas Publications in Pune. This story appears straightforward
enough; Laxmi, with all her celebrity, enthralls Rode, and thus, she writes
about Laxmi.
Except for the fact that her intrigue about hijras began much earlier and
with an anecdote that might illuminate her wieldy vantage point from
which she reconstructed Laxmi’s life as a celebrity-hijra in the memoir. As
described by Rode herself, she found herself being interested in the hijras
sometime around 1999 through her encounter with Nani, a hijra who had
called Rode’s husband on the home landline phone. Nani had a male voice
with a female salutation, and Rode was intrigued. This intrigue was further
intensified when, shortly afterwards, Rode read about a hijra conference in
the newspapers. “I was curious. I had no idea what a hijra conference was.
So I thought of asking Nani. I told Pramod to call me when Nani visited his
office” (Tripathi, 2015, p. 227). Developed as a story of discovery, awe and
grudging respect, Rode’s trajectory in the memoir is to largely reconstruct
Laxmi as someone who was different from other hijras in terms of her
comportment, education and her social status, thus laying out an imaginary
for two distinctive types of hijras—agential and progressive and non-agen-
tial and backward. In doing so, while Rode, in the most conventional sense
of a journalistic discovery, found a story to tell, she told that story about
hijras from a vantage point that perhaps obscured the lived realities of most
hijras who not only negotiated the precipitous boundaries between their
lower-class hijra worlds and that of their middle-class patrons but also
were themselves located differently across the spectrum of lower-class to
middle-class lives, partly through their investment in, and integration with,
processes of globalization and LGBT politics in India and partly through
the vector of transforming relationships with their natal families. Rode is
then veritably surprised that Nani has been able to transgress these worlds
and sets out to explore the means by which a hijra’s appearance in the
middle-class world may be traced. Laxmi’s story is, then, an extreme exam-
ple of Rode’s urge to offer a corrective to popular hijra representations as
poor, diseased freaks who have no shame and harass people for money in
public places. In order to affirm her view of hijras, she thus builds upon

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what Laxmi frequently said to her through the course of writing the mem-
oir, “I tell my hijras that we too are partly responsible for the social stigma
that we face. If we mix with people and have a dialogue with them, their
perceptions are bound to change” (Tripathi, 2015, pp. 228–229). Thus, as
the memoir unfolds, we see Rode uphold Laxmi’s frequent assertions about
being a hijra-in-the-world as a talisman that guides her through producing
Laxmi as a celebrity hijra.

Pind Daan ceremony, corporeal practices and

the politics of visibility
Sheets of rain poured down over the city as several people milled at the
Pishachmochan Kund in Benaras on September 26, 2016, where the hijras
led by transgender activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi held the pind-daan cer-
emony for their hijra ancestors. Sprawled across the bank of the pond,
about 15 hijras sat in prayer under a marquee with about half a dozen
priests chanting hymns and offering ghee (clarified butter) and grains to the
ceremonial fire. Rishi Ajay Das—a monk from Ujjain—and Swami Jitendra
Anand sat under two ceremonial umbrellas in one corner of the marquee
hovering over the ceremony.
The unusualness and the novelty of the ceremony drew large crowds that
had gathered at the Pisachmochan Kund; photographers and journalists
from regional newspapers and documentary filmmakers thronged the mar-
quee where the hiijras sat in full finery around the ceremonial fire, dressed
in colourful sarees, heavy make-up, jewellery and thick long hair tied in
tight buns adorned with flowers. “Look at the audacity of these hijras! Who
would’ve thought that we would get to watch hijras observing pind-daan in
our lifetime”, one of the priests conducting the pind-daan mockingly
remarked. Onlookers nearby sniggered nervously, glancing in the direction
of Rishi Ajay Das and Swami Jitendra Anand seated in the corner of the
marquee. No priest dared raise too many questions, either in jest or seri-
ously given the gravitas provided by Swami Jitendra Anand’s support and
presence. Newspapers reporting on the incident quoted media spokesper-
sons for the event saying 151 Brahmin priests would be conducting the
pind-daan ceremony for an even larger gathering of hijras to break a
300-year-old tradition which does not allow post-death rituals for trans-
genders, despite the fact that only a few handful of reluctantly relenting
hijras and an even fewer number of reluctant priests had actually shown up
for the event. Nevertheless, the ritual of the pind-daan was carried on with
all sincerity amidst the torrential rains.
Traditionally, determined as a ritual undertaken during the pitr paksha,
the 16-day lunar period in the Hindu calendar, the pind-daan is a ceremony
when sons of Hindu families pay homage to their ancestors through an
offering of pind (food) to remove pitru dosha, that is, the obligations a son
has accumulated from one’s ancestors. Upon one’s death, it is believed that

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for the soul to attain salvation, one’s son must fulfil these obligations that
have accumulated to them so that the departed’s soul, which resides in the
pretlok/world of the dead in suffering can free itself to finally be emanci-
pated upon reaching pitralok—the designated world of ancestors where the
soul can then finally rest in peace. This post-death ritual acts as a way to
construct and affirm one’s ancestry through the male line.
Laxmi, a figure towering at over 6 feet, clad in a golden-bordered white
saree with a thick line of vermillion in the parting of her long curly hair
carelessly tossed backwards, a long mangalsutra (sacred symbol of mar-
riage) around her neck, a red bindi, sandalwood tilak on her forehead, a
thick bunch of bangles, long nails painted golden and bare feet covered in
red lac stood leaning against the doorframe of the entrance to Acharya
Jitendra Anand’s house tapping her feet and slightly swaying to the tunes of
a Rihanna song that she was listening to over her earphones on her mobile
phone. The hijras led by Laxmi had just finished registering themselves for
the Ganga Aarti the next day at the Dashashwamedh Ghat on the banks of
river Ganga, and had headed to Jitendra Anand’s residence to relax and
discuss their plans for the coming two days. As she watched me restlessly
meander on the verandah of the house, Laxmi removed her earphones and
called out to me. Placing one of the earphones into my ears, she asked if I
had heard the song before. When I said no, she quickly ran down her playl-
ist and played another pop song hoping that I must have heard at least this
one before. When I refused, she looked at me incredulously and rhetorically
asked if I was from Mumbai at all. By then, Raghav (name changed), one of
Jitendra Anand’s shishyas (disciples), wrapped in a white dhoti and shawl
ambled to where Laxmi and I stood chatting. Upon discovering that I stud-
ied in what was largely a technology institute, he off-handedly proposed if
I might help him with social media campaigning for an upcoming election
in Lucknow for which he held a ticket. Sensing my discomfort as I fumbled
for polite ways to stall the line of conversation, Laxmi helpfully suggested
that I go in and meet with Jitendra Anand who would answer all my ques-
tions about the Kinnar Akhada.
I hurriedly scrambled back into the living room where the other hijras sat
waiting for Jitendra Anand to begin the meeting. A number of Jitendra
Anand’s shishyas tirelessly but quietly moved around the house, making
arrangements for the evening aarti (prayers). A restless energy dominated
the living room where the hijras sat along with some kar sevaks—partici-
pants in the rath yatra and the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992—who
excitedly waited for directions from Jitendra Anand to help seamlessly facil-
itate the pind-daan ceremony over the next two days. Once the evening
prayers got over, Acharya Jitendra Anand, dressed in a saffron robe and
shawl hurried into the living room and took his place atop a platform at the
head of the room. The hijras, kar sevaks and I sat on sofas surrounding the
platform. Jitendra Anand looked around the room and appeared to be dis-
appointed about the very few hijras (seven) present at the meeting. Laxmi

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assured him that there were more hijras who were on their way and would
be present at the Ganga Aarti the next day. Despite her reassurances,
Jitendra Anand seemed to be unconvinced and commented that not enough
hijras had been converted from Islam to Hinduism and that there would be
attendance in greater numbers only when Laxmi had managed to facilitate
greater conversions. Laxmi, on her part, emphasized the religious signifi-
cance of hijras to Hinduism and the newfound rights for people of the third
gender under the Transgender Persons Rights Bill. Looking miffed but
somewhat mollified, Jitendra Anand proceeded to discuss the logistics for
the next two days at the meeting; he delegated and confirmed responsibili-
ties—while the hijras in the room would perform the Ganga Aarti and the
pind-daan in the next two days, the local kar sevaks were held responsible
for travel, media and publicity, venue and guests.
The initiatives undertaken by the members of the Kinnar Akhada to initi-
ate the inculcation of hijras into Hindu social and ritual life systematically
built on the long-held belief of the sacred significance of the figure of hijras
as personifying the powers of Goddess Shakti—the divine feminine creative
power. Such strategic syncretism between discourses on sexuality and tradi-
tion fall within the ambit of the character of ethnic movements which, as
Christophe Jaffrelot (2007) writes, has been systematically binding tradi-
tion to Hindu nationalism, at least since the 1920s with the advent of the
nationalist movement. Jaffrelot further observes that such ethnic move-
ments draw on the repertoire of disciplinary practices of the medieval
period even as processes of modernization continually transform them
(Jaffrelot 2007). Thus, hijras within these discourses are transformed into
ritual figures not by transgressing their sexual subjectivities but, in fact, by
means of ethnicizing their sexual subjectivities. In this, the Hindu monastic
system rather than being incidental forms the very backdrop for the nexus
between sexual subjectivity and their ritual status. For this, hijras of the
Kinnar Akhada continually take recourse to a ritual status enshrined within
tradition to validate their position within contemporary Hindu monastic
system. In drawing on historical representations, they trace their lineage to
the figure of the ardhanaarishwara—a half male–half female figuration of
Shiva and Shakti that developed at the beginning of first century CE (Vanita
& Kidwai, 2008) through various iterations of gender through the years.
The hijras’ recourse to a traditional ardhanaarishwara figure allows them
to link the eponymous third-gender category as developed within transgen-
der discourses and Indian socio-legal activism to a traditional heritage of
the category of tritiya prakriti to thus produce the figure of the hijra in
Hinduized terms. Within this, the hijra’s emergent sexuality is creatively
extended as an extant critique of Indian patriarchy to thus establish the
hijra as a Hindu figure.

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 T he I conography of H indu ( ized ) H ijras

Conclusion
In charting out some of the dynamics of the formation of the Kinnar
Akhada, this chapter explores the politics of representation and visibility
through which Laxmi and her followers craft themselves as transgendered
subjects within the highly specific context of Hindu upper-caste, middle-
class societies both in Mumbai and, for instance, in Benaras. Laxmi travels
between these two types of cultural and political spaces as a mediated hijra
celebrity. As a hijra celebrity, Laxmi finds herself in a position to partake in
various religio-cultural routines otherwise reserved for male members of
Hindu societies through which gendered subjects are traditionally crafted.
The incorporation of the Kinnar Akhada further involves the political
appropriation of such rituals to develop a new lingua franca for a Hindu
hijra through which Laxmi crafts a cultural politics of sexuality, largely
addressing upper-caste, middle-class publics. Such a politics of transgender
visibility draws on existing idioms of hijra personhood even as they con-
tinually regraft it upon new emerging contexts of Hindu nationalism.

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 5
“A NORMAL PERSON CANNOT BE
MADE QUEER” 1
The immorality act (amendment) commission of
1968 in apartheid South Africa

Vasu Reddy

No, Sir, history has given us a clear warning and we should not
allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking that we may casually
dispose of this viper in our midst by regarding it as innocent fun.
It is a proven fact that sooner or later homosexual instincts make
their effects felt on a community if they are permitted to run riot
[…] Therefore we should be on the alert and do what there is to be
do lest we be saddled later with a problem which will be utter ruin
of our spiritual and moral fibre.
– Justice Minister P C Pelser (in Retief, 1994: 99)

May I humbly submit this statement, praying that the government

does not proceed further with the proposed legislation prohibiting
homosexual acts between consenting adults in private.
– P R Coates (1968)

As a Christian woman, mother of three adult children. […]

I implore you to give this vile practice the disciplined punishment
it deserves.
– Frances Katz (1968)

I am a practising homosexual and thus an authority on the subject.

I am not guilty about my State nor do I in anyway consider myself
a criminal or pervert merely because I am the person I am and feel
the way I do.
– Judex (1968)

To some readers, this chapter may seem to be misplaced in a volume focused

on South Asian gender and sexual diversity. While the argument does not
directly address the question of South Asian sexuality in the subcontinent,

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 VA S U R E D DY

it nevertheless foregrounds aspects of a (South) African genealogy which in

some ways may seem far removed from South Asianness. To be on point, I
am still discovering what a South Asianness may entail and there are no
easy answers to pinning a core to this label and identity category (see
Moncrieffe & Eyben, 2007). If it is about ancestral heritage, roots and
routes, then arguably I stake a claim in this volume as a consequence of my
location, geography and queerness as gay man of South Asian heritage who
writes from an African diaspora (see Brah, 1996; Ong, 1999). If it is about
ethnicity, race and sexuality, then undoubtedly all these identity markers
become entangled in an apartheid (indeed colonial project) because they
share a common theme, namely strategies to systematically misrecognise
difference across intersectional identity markers. It is the case that the issues
motivated in this argument resonate in several ways a sexual politics, cir-
cuits of power, colonial (and the apartheid project) that exclude, erase and
minimise sexual difference, indeed gender and sexual diversity. Race and
sexuality in this chapter remain deeply interconnected as queers of colour
(far removed the idea of South Asianness in apartheid South Africa) had
little, if any, voice in apartheid South Africa. The latter is a remit of this
volume that at another level also demonstrates how context, location and
positions are to an extent shaped by differentiated experiences in diverse
and diasporic communities that show inflections across geopolitics, indeed
region, nation and identity. Identity matters in discussions about gender and
sexuality struggles, indeed without apology, also demand recognition in the
face of abjection.
I write this chapter as a gay man of South Asian parentage, a fourth-gener-
ation descendent of my ancestors from southern India. I write this chapter as
someone who is not ignorant nor in denial of my historical roots and routes
but rather as someone who as a consequence of history can lay claim to a
historical trajectory. I am product of indenture (see Bhana & Pachai, 1984;
Desai & Vahed, 2007; Meer, 1969) and far removed from the Indian subcon-
tinent of my ancestors. Both my great parents on the maternal and paternal
side emanated from southern India and the generation I belong to has virtu-
ally no contact nor identification with the category South Asian. The latter is
an ambiguous and discursive category that assumes a conjugality between
nation and state. If geopolitical identification is a limit, then a possible con-
vergence is the anti-colonial struggle (of which apartheid is an example) in
nation-making, a thread and point of departure and convergence.
A brief note about the structure of this argument. In sum, the chapter
provides a discursive reading of a commission designed by the apartheid
state to prohibit same-sex conduct and is structured in several interrelated
sections. First a brief social, political and legal context of pre-democratic
South Africa in the 1960s is provided. Second, the submissions to the com-
mission as part of the Law Reform Movement are described and histori-
cally situated. Third, attention turns to the 1968 commission and its
modus operandi. Fourth, a selection of submissions to the commission are

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 “A N O R M A L P E R S O N C A N N O T B E M A D E Q U E E R”

presented that provide perspectives, experiences and testimonies (either pro

and/or against same-sex sexuality). Fifth, a brief analysis of perspectives is
provided. This is followed by a sixth section that assesses aspects of lan-
guage and discourses in relation to compulsory heterosexuality and the
nation. Seventh, the argument turns to some effects and consequences of the
commission followed by tentative conclusions.

Social, political and legal context

The chapter spotlights a particular historical period in apartheid South
Africa. The 1960s was characterised by the consolidation of the power of
the ruling National Party in its restructuring of South African society, not
simply in terms of race, but also in terms of sex and sexuality.2 This chapter
focuses on the latter in relation to a commission that decided to curtail
same-sex conduct. Such a proscription, I motivate, must be viewed in the
broader context of the apartheid State apparatus.
Central to the apartheid programme was the racial classification of the
population, achieved, in part, by the Population Registration Act of 1950,
which required every person in South Africa be classified into one of four
racial groups: “Native” (later changed to “Bantu”), “European” (later
“White”), “Coloured”, and Indian (later “Asian”).3 The racial classification
was further reinforced by the formulation of another legal instrument, the
Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 that prohibited marriages
between whites and members of other racial groups. This Act may be traced
back to the Immorality Act of 1927 that specifically prohibited extra-mari-
tal intercourse between African men and white women. Under the 1950
Immorality Act all extra-marital sexual contact between whites and blacks
was made punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment (Pampallis, 1991:
183). The 1950 Immorality Act, was in its turn renamed the “Sexual
Offences Act” in 1957 and was of particular relevance to the further crimi-
nalisation of homosexuality, which does not, however, imply that homo-
sexuality was legal (or condoned) in South Africa prior to this point
(Burchell, 1997).4
An important aspect in South African legal jurisprudence was the opera-
tion of “common law”.5 In South African common law, sexual acts that are
not directed towards procreation were considered criminal, and some of
these included masturbation, bestiality, and sodomy between people of
opposite sexes (Hardie & Hartford, 1969). In the apartheid state, the terms
sodomy and unnatural acts were understood in gendered terms as acts con-
fined to men. In other words, sexual acts between women were not consid-
ered criminal. Sodomy was defined as anal intercourse between two men.
“Unnatural acts” were conceived as any other non-procreative acts such as
inter-crural intercourse (sexual gratification obtained by friction between
the legs of another person) as well as mutual masturbation. The terms, sod-
omy and unnatural acts, mobilise a specific lexicon of the law in order to

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pathologise particular genital bodies that have come to be characterised as

homosexual. South African “case law” confirms, in a number of cases since
the 1920s, a particular contempt with which courts prosecuted and pun-
ished same-sex activity.6 The point to be emphasised is that in the sixties the
State intensified its proscription of same-sex conduct in a number of ways,
and its chief recourse, I argue, was via the legal framework. The chief legal
instrument used by the State was the Sexual Offences Act of 1957 that iden-
tified several offences within this new taxonomy and which criminalised
types of sexual conduct that did not promote procreation. Chief amongst
these was homosexuality.
The express fear of the state was that any “visible” (or “public”) homo-
sexual behaviour would be construed as the promotion of homosexual
identity, and the state thus set out to curtail homosexual identity via the
legal system. The state’s fear itself discloses a particular political response to
the phenomenon of homosexuality.
I have begun by pointing briefly to the social, political and legal context
of South Africa in the late sixties, and provide here a perspective on the
legislative intervention by the State in 1968. I then consider the broader
impact of its regulation of homosexuality in relation to personal narratives
by individuals who made submissions to the Select Committee on the
Immorality Amendment Bill of 1968 (see also Klausen, 2015).
The explicit association of homosexuality with “immorality” is telling,
but hardly surprising. “Immorality” denotes the transgression of that which
is considered acceptable, but it also denotes sexual dissoluteness and pro-
miscuity, ideas that come to label, designate and configure the homosexual.
Another purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the public conflict over
sexuality that I claim had less to do with the practice of same-sex conduct
than with a particular queer formation of identity. I also suggest that par-
ticular meanings arise about the construction of queer identities in the
apartheid state in relation to the submissions made by people during this
period. In this regard, the chapter motivates the view that “queer” identities
may be traced to the apartheid state where a particular racialised variant is
to be discerned in the submissions. I have claimed elsewhere that post-
apartheid queer identity is to be characterised as radical, progressive and
democratic, as opposed to the apartheid version that I theorise was reac-
tionary and conservative (see Reddy, 2009; Reddy et al., 2009). Despite the
differences, I suggest that the identity I reference in relation to the homo-
sexual is still “queer”, primarily because ‘queer’ in the sixties also delin-
eated a pejorative understanding of the homosexual.
The preceding issues are manifested not by a detailed social history but
rather in the language disclosed by the submissions to the 1968 Commission.
I am not deploying legal principles to motivate this argument, but rather,
some legal concepts and issues to show how the law impacts on the con-
struction of queer identities and equally on the idea of sexual citizenship
based on equality, dignity and mutual respect.

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Much already exists in legal jurisprudence about the effect of the law on
homosexuality and some of these studies prioritise legal restrictions in
respect of sexuality from the perspective of queer theory.7 Critical scholar-
ship in this area was primarily a phenomenon of the nineties and has been
sustained through further work (see Bradway & McCallum, 2019; Fineman
et al., 2009; Giffney & O’Rourke, 2009; Hall et al., 2013; Leckey & Brooks,
2010; Marinucci, 2010; Penny, 2014; Ruti, 2017; Walcott, 2016). Similar
studies were done in the seventies and eighties from the perspective of soci-
ology, history, anthropology and cultural studies.8 The point about these
studies is that they disclose how public opinion about homosexuality (par-
ticularly in relation to society’s aversion to acts such as sodomy) are simul-
taneously reflected and represented via the law.
Much has been written and documented about gay and lesbian lives in
the apartheid state (e.g., Epprecht, 2004; Germond & de Gruchy, 1997;
Gevisser & Cameron, 1994; Isaacs & McKendrick, 1992; Retief, 1994).
This chapter does not, however, rewrite this history but borrows partially
from Gevisser (1994: 14–86) to develop some of the more pertinent
empirical factors that contribute to the 1968 Commission. The bulk of the
data for this chapter is derived from the archives of GALA (formerly
known as the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa, now known as
the Gay and Lesbian Memory in action that documents lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender [LGBT] social and legal history). The data in
this chapter focus on submissions made to the commission in 1968 which
do not feature in the Gevisser study. The point about one section of this
argument is to build on aspects of Gevisser’s valuable empirical and
descriptive brief by assessing the development of a queer politicised iden-
tity in relation to the law. The latter is developed in part through a theo-
retical argument, reinforced by reference to, and discussions of, submissions
to the 1968 Commission.

“Men at a party” and the law reform movement9

In January 1966, police raided an upmarket gay party in Forest Town,
Johannesburg. Nine men were arrested for masquerading as women, and
one arrested for indecent assault on a minor. A report from the South
African Police to a Parliamentary Select Committee two years later states
that—to the “disgust” and “repulsion” of National Party Parliamentarians—a
party was found in progress, “the like of which has never been seen in the
Republic of South Africa” (Gevisser, 1994: 30). The identification of gay
private parties affirms the existence of homosexual subcultures. Gay sub-
cultural practices, since the 1940s, included what was known as the “bottle-
party”, where guests brought their own liquor to the party bar. It was
possible that the state viewed such parties where liquor was involved to
be a form of subversive and immoral activity that they decided to curtail.
The raid was the largest, most organised and publicised ever, although

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random raids on parties on the Durban Esplanade had occurred before.

One explanation put forward for the increased interest of the police in
homosexuals during this period in the sixties (especially the targeting of
middle-class English-speaking northern suburb’s private parties) has been
the political and ideological influences of Prime Minister Verwoerd’s gen-
eral clampdown on all liberation movements (he was prime minister from
1958 until his assassination in 1966). It could be claimed that state inter-
vention was one of the many consequences of the conservative, reactionary,
racist, cultural and class prejudices of Afrikaner Christian Nationalism,
which served to consolidate its authoritarian control over the country. In
Johannesburg, Afrikaans cultural and religious organisations believed
wealthy Jewish and English men were corrupting Afrikaner youth (“rent-
boys” were usually Afrikaans boys fresh from the platteland—an Afrikaans
word to describe the area outside of towns and cities). It is especially telling
that Black homophobia during the 1980s and 1990s seems similar in nature
to a conservative nationalism of the Afrikaner Christian Nationalist one in
that it regarded homosexuality as a decadent, upper-class import, corrupt-
ing the natural heterosexual purity of the youth.10 The point about this is
that the state saw homosexuality as a practice that symbolised decadence
and promiscuity. The raid in Forest Town was the state’s response to what
it perceived to be a subculture of excess and immoral behaviour.
The impressions of the Forest Town party left by both the law and the
media were of immorality and high living. Newspapers highlighted the
“shocking” presence of professional men at the party. These professionals
included lawyers, doctors and accountants, which implied that the homo-
sexual is class defined. The media’s use of the word shocking implies that it
might have been “understandable” if there were working-class people at
the party rather than professionals. Conservative socio-political influences
therefore also cater sensationally to common class and cultural prejudices of
South Africa’s white working-class Afrikaner population. At this time in
South Africa’s conservative political history, a “conspiracy rhetoric” was rife
in government circles and social paranoia was rampant: “queer” conspiracy
was aligned with the black, communist, English and Jewish conspiracies
(Gevisser, 1994: 31). In this time there was a clear interplay of politics, his-
tory, ethnicity, and indeed homophobia in the propagation of a conservative
(perhaps in some senses fascist) ideology of the state. Furthermore, the legal
system existing at the time did not give police the right to raid private par-
ties, but by 1967, the homophobic sentiments of Verwoerd’s cabinet had
resulted in a proposal for “draconian anti-homosexuality legislation”
(Gevisser, 1994: 31). Such legislation was deferred, but in 1968 was enacted
by its incorporation in an amendment to the Immorality Act, making male
and female homosexuality punishable by law (imprisonment up to three
years). Prior to this, public and male homosexual acts alone were within the
ambit of the law. From 1968, to be lesbian or gay (regardless of actual
behaviour)—that is, homosexuality itself—was considered illegal.

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This intervention resulted in much anxiety within the homosexual com-

munity. One gay man said: “We feared a witch-hunt” (Gevisser, 1994: 32).
Such a phrase reminds one of the homosexual witch-hunts of the McCarthy
era in the United States (cf. D’Emilio, 1992).11 Many homosexuals in South
Africa considered emigration, and some finally did leave the country for
more liberal and progressive parts of the world (see, e.g., letter 8 cited later
in this chapter), but just as many remained in South Africa.
An immediate response to the impending legislation resulted in the
formation of an action group in Johannesburg and Pretoria that consti-
tuted itself as the Homosexual Law Reform Fund. The Law Reform
Fund responded to the immediate legal-political crisis by raising funds to
prepare evidence and lead the case against the proposed legislation
before the Select Committee. In my view, this response and opposition to
the state’s proscription of homosexuals was historically the first move
toward queer liberation. The move was primarily legal rather than polit-
ical, although it is difficult not to read the political into any legal
response. The point here is that gay mobilisation was, to some extent,
ambiguously political.
Gevisser’s (1994: 33) observation that “the threat of repression galvan-
ised the gay subculture, creating community as never before” is as relevant
as it is problematic. It is relevant insofar as the political and legal impera-
tives had the effect of mobilising a previously internally divided homo-
sexual and minority subculture. In the face of a common societal prejudice
and political threat, an unprecedented experience of social empowerment
and social unity was being constructed. Since the focus of apartheid as a
political strategy was social separateness and fragmentation, the galvanisa-
tion of the homosexual community was, in part, a small victory. But the
problem with such a galvanisation is that the ‘community’ to which
Gevisser refers was, in large part, made up of white, middle-class homo-
sexuals. Viewed another way, the strengths of the mobilisation created a
false sense of community in its over-emphasis of sex, at the expense of race,
to a large extent also divided—and in the post-apartheid project continues
to divide—the gay and lesbian communities. Furthermore, from another
perspective the organisation and modus operandi of the Law Reform
movement was also both elitist and sexist and not without prejudices of its
own. The historical demands of apartheid South Africa determined which
approaches would be most successful from those which might jeopardise
the gay liberationist cause, even if the paths chosen were viewed as too
insular from a more liberal perspective seeking to do justice to race, class
and gender minorities equally. Therefore, Gevisser (1994: 33) is correct
when he claims that the Law Reform movement “aimed at influencing
lawmakers rather than organising gay and lesbian people themselves”.
What this means is that the strategies were far more contextually-consti-
tuted and situationally specific than identity-oriented and were based pri-
marily on matters of legal principle. In this sense it could be deduced that

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the approach was deliberately and strategically accommodationist rather

than revolutionary (motivated by Sullivan, 1995).12
The Law Reform Group was evidently unconcerned about race issues or
the inhumanity of apartheid, and was fundamentally preoccupied with free-
dom of expression for homosexuals in a liberal and individualised approach.
In this sense, while race and sexuality are clearly entangled in the apartheid
project, it was the case that queers in the Law Reform group were reluctant
to actively demonstrate the resonance of race and sexuality (indeed gender
too) as part of interconnected struggles for justice. It seems this was the
priority which, in a very reactionary sense, underpinned the mobilisation
initiative in the first place. No connection was made with the broad anti-
apartheid effort evident at the time, reinforced by massive intensification of
the struggle against the Nationalist Party system. For example, the Freedom
Charter13 and its authors were banned and stigmatised (left-wing politics
generally was during this historical period). The organisers of the Law
Reform Group, in turn, were primarily middle-class white gay men and had
little access to the subcultural communities of black homosexuals, if indeed
such coherent subcultures even existed during the 1960s. Most important
of all is that the legal and political authorities themselves had stigmatised
homosexuality as a white problem. Within a conservative and accommoda-
tionist framework, the focus was on gender over and above any other con-
cerns. The Law Reform Group even worked within the National Party itself
rather than drawing on liberal activists such as Helen Suzman (Gevisser,
1994: 34), or even anti-apartheid activists, to strengthen the case against
state repression. These issues inform in part the public contestation about
homosexuality in relation to the 1968 commission. I will show how the
crisis of homosexuality, motivated by the state, demonstrates a “racialised”
conceptualisation of homosexuality, both in terms of the way the state stig-
matised homosexuality and in the way the queer “community” devised its
strategy.
“Identity politics” is indeed a contradictory process, in that while leading
to separation, it simultaneously brings forth a culture of alliances. In the
post-apartheid project, the alliances came to symbolise coalitional politics.
The events of 1968, however, demonstrate the use of the State apparatus to
bring about social transformation of homosexuality to place restrictions on
homosexual conduct. The manner in which the state responds coercively by
deploying criminal law sanctions to proscribe homosexual behaviour dis-
closes the state’s interest in sexuality and its engagement with the sexual
realm to reshape sexual identities and politics. One unexpected effect of the
State’s intervention is the simultaneous struggle for queer equality. By this is
meant a form of resistance to same-sex conduct and legal proscription. It is
my view that “queer equality” and “queer identities” evident in response to
the amendment commission, represent a conservative, middle-class and rac-
ist logic in respect of the submissions made to this commission (see the sec-
tion “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Discourses of the Nation”).

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The 1968 commission14

In 1968, the minister of justice in the apartheid government, Mr Pelser,
invited psychiatrists, sociologists and homosexuals to give evidence before
the Select Committee on the Immorality Amendment Bill. The objective of
the bill was to make homosexuality, including female homosexuality and
other sex deviations, punishable offences. The planned amendment to the
Immorality Act was designed to extend the crime of homosexuality even to
private acts with penalties of up to three years in jail and/or a fine of up to
R300-00 (in 1968 this was a hefty sum which in 2020 terms is approximate
to R22,704.48). The distinctive aspect of this proposed amendment was the
state’s incursion into the “private” lives of homosexuals. The planned
amendment to the legislation thus reinforced the power of the state to
engage in the surveillance of same-sex conduct.
Yet again the intervention by the state suggests that the “private” and the
“public”, in relation to sexuality, does not operate in a vacuum. The pri-
vate/public dichotomy also generates regimes of truth that open up a par-
ticular interpretative thread in understanding how the state regulates the
sexual realm. The state’s proposed amendment, in effect a planned “inter-
vention”, suggests the blurring of the boundaries between private acts and
public life.
Entailed in the distinction between the private and public is a spatial
marking which often sets the two apart. Formulated another way, the pri-
vate is characterised largely by a domesticated space which the individual
claims to be his or her own. The public, in contrast, is an external space
belonging to “all”, therefore “outside” the confines of the personal and pri-
vate. The private, it seems, in the context of state incursion into private lives
suggested by the 1968 amendment, may mean that the “private” becomes a
contested space for a possible violence by the state. Privacy, it would appear,
implies a protective function and is conventionally understood as grounded
in individual, gay autonomy. The planned intervention by the state in this
regard confirms the unbridled power at the disposal of the state to regulate,
channel and construct lives. The tension between the private and public
implied by the state intervention into private life, is not a new phenomenon
and was anticipated in the eighteenth century, meaning when the private
and public become two autonomous zones (e.g., Aries, 1989). This is
because citizens are no longer viewed as “free” subjects as they become the
“private” property of the public state, if “public state” implies that citizens
are caught and constituted in an order of power which regulates by legislat-
ing their individuality (cf. Aries, 1989, for a more in-depth discussion). The
state incursion into gay lives reinforces the idea that the private life of gays
was “disgusting” and “repulsive”, as demonstrated for example by the
Forest Town raid, indicated earlier. In such a case, homosexual life became
“queer” (a matter of deviance and pathology) that the state interprets as its
public responsibility to curtail.

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The planned legislation suggested that the state had plotted a legal strat-
egy to enter any premises by force, and on occasion, it deemed suspicious.
The state was during this period, equally engaged in monitoring the activities
of the liberation forces, and part of the state’s apparatus focused on covert
operations to destabilise what the state termed “clandestine” activities of the
liberation forces (e.g., Frankel et al., 1988). I argue that the planned homo-
sexuality amendment must be viewed in a similar economy of repression,
oppression and proscription with the intention of curtailing the freedom of
the queer subject. It is possible to claim that the homophobia of the state
leads to social engineering that uses the law as the instrument of control.15
Moran’s (1996: 82) formulation that the Sexual Offences Act “takes cer-
tain offences out of the category of offences against the person and conjoins
them with other offences and sets them up in a new and distinct division of
the law” has a special resonance with the South African statute.16 The term
offence denotes a violation or breach of a law, custom, rule or a crime and
connotes annoyance, displeasure, or resentment. At the level of language,
the notion of “sexual offences” had the primary purpose of framing a par-
ticular conception of sex, one informed by a moral economy that I claim
introduces the idea of the homosexual into law by promoting the continued
abhorrence and increased punishment of same-sex relations via legal
reform. A further theoretical extrapolation from this Act is explained by
Moran (1996: 83):

In naming the sexual, and in renaming specific offences against the

person as now being within the sexual order of the law, the statute
demands that sense and nonsense of the male genital body in its
male genital relations as wrongful acts should no longer be made
by reference to a violence to the carnal order of the individual but
by way of a wrong done to the sexual order. This is echoed in the
fact that the legislation demands that the lexicon of the carnal must
now be translated into a new lexicon: that of the sexual.

The preceding view explains how the law frames sexuality. First, it repre-
sents the legal language underpinning sexual activity between men who
have sex with men, disclosing a type of public opinion about homosexual-
ity. One meaning apparently is that homosexuality is an aberrant sexual
object choice. A second suggests the techniques and practices by which the
homosexual becomes installed within the law. A third, arising from the lat-
ter, is that the homosexual becomes defined in relation to the juridical. The
homosexual is thus, in this instance, produced as an object of law “and of
its criminalization and re-criminalization in particular” (Moran, 1996: 5).
Moran’s conception of the homosexual as a “genital body” includes the
notion that it is the type of body that is “always already sexed and gen-
dered” (1996: 12).17 Implicit in this conception of the homosexual as a
“genital body” is that “criminal law might also be a set of practices through

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which a refusal to imagine same-sex relations is put into effect in law”

(Moran, 1996: 13). Ironically, through this process of exclusion and crimi-
nalisation, the homosexual “queered” subject becomes equally the object of
struggle for inclusion, representation and rights in the context of post-liber-
ation politics. Critical legal studies scholarship has demonstrated that the
homosexual as “queer” is born at the limits of the juridical practice of gay
(see Moran, 1996; Stychin, 1995; see notes 7 and 8). The term queer also
represents the juridical as a practice of confrontation, exposure, denigra-
tion, radical submission, fragmentation and contingency (Stychin, 1995).
The conjunction between the law and sexuality has a particular significance
for Moran (1996: 3), who suggests that

[i]f homosexuality is fundamental to the sense of self and is innate,

it cannot be regarded as punishable by rational persons who respect
the laws of nature. “Homosexuality” was thus put to work as a
term that demands a “rational” and “progressive” legal approach
to such same-sex genital relations, or, more specifically, it was a
term through which the non- or decriminalization of those rela-
tions might be imagined.

The preceding observations confirm that in the South African Immorality

(Amendment) Commission, the state, on one hand, conceives homosexual-
ity as immoral, a transgression and indeed a crime. On the other hand, by
calling into question the homosexual as a problem to be contained, the state
intervention opens up a possibility for the homosexual to resist the planned
proscription. The state’s proscription of the homosexual simultaneously
precipitates a strategic agency against the state. Therefore, by mobilising
and galvanising support against the state, the Law Reform Group of 1968
demonstrates a capacity to self-identify in relation to sexual orientation by
forging and asserting an identity that the state views as transgressive. The
homosexual thus becomes “queered” by transgressing the supposed norms
circumscribed by the heterosexual matrix.

If we accept the divide between the public–private as a sign of

modernity in which the state as a sovereign power regulates the
lives of its citizens, then it could be argued that the “queer” subject
comes into existence by transgressing the limits defined by the
state in its disciplinary regime. Transgression, like truth and knowl-
edge, is brought about by the operation of power in the institu-
tions controlled by the state. Power, in the Foucauldian project, is
not simply viewed as a universal rationality but is rather identified
through its strategies such as surveillance, monitoring and the
imposition of limits on its subjects. I suggest that the Amendment
Bill proposed by the state could be further theorised as a type of
violence, a force, a powerful operation against the queer subject to

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which he or she must respond. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982: 130)

cogently explain the characteristics of power as a form of domina-
tion: “All it can do is forbid, and all it can command is disobedi-
ence. Power, ultimately, is the imposition of the law; the law,
ultimately, demands submission”.

The above view of power is defined by Foucault as the juridico-discursive

power, a negative, as it produces limits.18 And power is accompanied by a
type of resistance; where resistance is exercised against the exploitative
grounds of power. By being immoral, the homosexual is a transgressor, con-
ceived to be “transgressing the rules of hierarchy” (Stallybrass & White,
1986: 3). The hierarchy governing homosexuals is underpinned by state
laws. Where Stallybrass and White (1986) situate transgression within the
Bakhtinian topology of high and low culture in the conflict primarily
between language, Foucault’s (1977: 33) project identifies the language of
transgression in the future: “the language in which transgression will find its
space and the illumination of its being lies almost entirely in the future”.
This is a productive moment for queer subjects because transgression sug-
gests a resistance to the heteronormative ideology propagated by the state.
In apartheid South Africa, heteronormativity was principally defined in
terms of procreative acts within a moral (and Christian) model, which is in
contrast to the unprocreative (and “immoral”) behaviour of homosexuality.
When Foucault refers to the “future”, this could imply a claim made for
identity, by queers, for the recognition of private life within the context of
good, moral citizenship.
The language of transgression may be discerned in the submissions made
to the commission for they call into question identities in relation to the
“event” represented by the commission. Transgression then, may be defined
as a pushing to the limits in order to radically challenge the hierarchies of
power. The narratives contained in the submissions disclose an effect of the
challenge process and are productive in that they give us access to subjective
experience. Furthermore, I believe that to transgress is a performative strat-
egy (Butler, 1999). Where the narrated transgressions define the “experience”
of subjects operating at the margins of the social (a process characterised by
struggle and contestation), such trajectories enable us to identify the condi-
tions and the defining moments, in which these homosexual persons come
also to claim their identities. The proposed amendment to the Immorality
Act in 1968 precipitates a performative claiming of identity. Such a strategy
suggests a desire for freedom from a restrictive economy.
Related to transgression is the notion of freedom defined in the terms of
transgressive acts against exercised power. By crossing the limits, as O’Farrell
(1989: 40) explains, “if limits restrict our freedom, the transgression of lim-
its is an expression of our freedom”. Limits arise out of a restrictive econ-
omy, and if transgression is seen as a response to a restraining and aggressive
power, then it is also possible to claim that the personal narratives

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submitted construct, for us, a particular modality of identity in relation to a

particular moment in time. The crucial point is that submissions to the com-
mission are based on a personal, considered response to the state’s determi-
nation to criminalise non-procreative sodomitical sex. The submissions to
the 1968 Commission suggest that engagement with repressive laws also
help to produce an identity.

Submissions to the commission19

In this section, I profile some of the views expressed in submissions to the
commission. The GALA documentation is extensive in this regard. For the
purposes of this chapter, I have made a selection based on the diversity of
the submissions and focus on nine. In all instances, the submissions were
addressed to the minister of justice in 1968, Mr P.C. Pelser. In each case I
provide the date of the letter and the residential location of the author, and
in some cases, where the submissions are lengthy, I provide only extracts.
For easy reference and cross-reference in my analysis, I have numbered the
letters in numerical order. I have also categorised and arranged the letters to
reflect the two dominant positions that characterise the submissions: those
for homosexuality under the heading “pro homosexuality” and those
against under the heading “against homosexuality”. The letters are repro-
duced in their original form.
The letters are written in a personal, intimate and reflective manner and
represent the subjects’ struggle with the difficulties of self-acceptance, espe-
cially of those rejecting the proposed amendment. Some submissions are
character references that attest to the honesty and commitment of homo-
sexual individuals in the context of work. The letters range from friends,
church leaders, politicians and employers. Some submissions endorse the
state’s proposed amendment. Despite the differences, all the submissions in
one important sense confirm the contested nature of sexuality, which I claim
is not a new phenomenon (e.g., Gay Left Collective, 1980; Weeks, 1981).
Another point of correspondence is that all the submissions are autobio-
graphical and reflect a mode of writing that promotes a type of narrative
that underscores personality and history in relation to a particular event. In
another sense, however, there are differences. In respect of submissions
written by self-identified homosexuals, it seems a confessional mode is
operative in their disclosure of their sexual and gender identities. This strat-
egy is perhaps used to reinforce an underlying motive to divulge some
essential truths about the self. If confession represents sin, guilt, and the
possibility of restitution, then the boundaries around identity, the self and
others, are reconfigured when confession is reproduced in a structure where
the self-constructs an identity. As Foster (1987: 10) corroborates, confes-
sion attempts to “objectify the self, to present itself as a knowable object,
through narrative that restructures the self as history and conclusions” (my
emphasis). Despite the fact that confession functions to disclose a sin in the

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hope of receiving absolution in a Christian theological sense, I read the

confessional act (the disclosure of sexual orientation) present in some of the
narratives as a plea to secure restraint from the totalising power of the
apartheid state.
I do not, in the narrow sense, suggest that the confessional submissions
represent sexual identity as a sin for which the subjects seek absolution.
Such confessional submissions represent at once the autobiographical as
well as the political. If the task of the homosexual letter-writer, as confess-
ing supplicant, is to show that the confession is never merely representation
but to insist that queer identity is contingent on truthfulness and redemp-
tion from a dominant Other, then I claim that the confessional mode is an
attempt to authorise “liberation”, a “freeing” of the subject, which is in
itself a political strategy. I put forward the view that the confessional letters,
by self-identified homosexuals, display this modality of representation.

Pro homosexuality
Letter 1: P.R. Coates (Cape Town, March 4, 1968)
May I humbly submit this statement, praying that the government
does not proceed further with the proposed legislation prohibiting
homosexual acts between consenting adults in private? I am a
homosexual. Due to shyness on my part and great discreetness on
the part of other homosexual men, I have never had the opportu-
nity to become a practicing homosexual. Members of my own sex
have always attracted me and I have never been even vaguely inter-
ested in the opposite sex. I was 19 years old when I fully realized
my condition. After many discussions with my doctor who couldn’t
suggest a cure, I was sent to a psychologist. After six interviews he
too seemed to think there wasn’t anything he could do either. If the
cure lay in earnestly trying to be different, I would certainly have
changed. I gained peace of mind only when I accepted my condi-
tion as normal for me. None of my friends or family suspect my
condition. I am often asked by them why I don’t marry, yet how
can I tell them that for me to marry would be [a] “perversion”? I
attach copies of testimonials which I feel sure will assure you that I
am considered of good character and a diligent employee, and not
a degenerate sort. I hope I shall be forgiven addressing this letter to
you. I feel this matter so nearly threatens my future and that of so
many others like me that I had to write.

Letter 2: Dr A.M. Lewin Robinson, Chief Librarian, South African

Public Library, Cape Town (January 19, 1967)
I have pleasure in testifying to the character and ability of Mr. Peter
Coates who joined the staff of this National Reference Library in

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April 1964 as a non-professional Library Assistant […] Mr Coates

is a man of varied interests which include a painstaking research
into the history of tramways in this country and a study of small
organs. He is a tremendously hard and willing worker and it would
be difficult to replace him if he decides to increase his experience
elsewhere.

Letter 3: Ms F. Dance (Boksburg, March 19, 1968)

Being a Lesbian or a Homosexual is not only a confusing situation
to the rest of society, but also to us that are Lesbian or Homosexuals.
It is naturally the wish of every human being to be born normal,
and we are definitely no exceptions. Do you think for one minute
that we enjoy being persecuted, scorned and humiliated by our fel-
low beings? If we could possibly just change our feelings to suit
society, we definately would. I for one would because it would
make life a lot easier, but unfortunately it is impossible regardless
of what sentence is imposed on us, that are born misfits in life. […]
I have been for various physical tests: skin tests, blood tests, saliva
tests and every bone in my body was xrayed, the results were: That
I am definitely physically female. I was then referred to Tara
Hospital by Dr. Feldman of Johannesburg General Hospital for
two weeks observation […] When my two weeks observation was
up, I was told by my doctor that there was nothing they could do
for me, so I just had to go through life as best I could […] Any
homosexual or lesbian that has sexual relations with a minor ought
to be punished in the same way as a man that has such relations
with little girls. Another argument that has cropped up quite often
is that we are going against the Laws of God as far as having chil-
dren is concerned […] I feel that if this new law is enforced, the rate
of suicides in the country will rise, also instead of doing the impos-
sible like making us normal, the Law will only succeed in driving us
further into a lonely seclusion […] I hope I have not failed to stress
my point as I am no writer. I do hope that this letter will assist
the committee in drawing the conclusion that we are no danger to
the other citizens of our country. I would like to give oral evidence,
for the sake of our people. If this is granted kindly let me know
where and when.

Letter 4: J.C. Van Rensburg (Uitenhage, February 26, 1968)

I would like to express some views on the subject. South Africa
appears to be far behind in this matter. We only have to look to
England and many of the Continental countries to see [how] this
problem is handled. Frankly in all my dealings with these so-called
“deviates” I have never come across a “roughie” as I have with the

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so-called “normal” types. On the whole I have found the homo-

sexual to be quiet and in many ways keeping more to the Law of
the country. If this new Bill comes into force can you imagine all the
blackmail that will take place? Believe me, homosexuals are not
over-sexed persons. They are born that way. This country does not
prosecute cripples or mentally retarded persons. Homosexuality
can never be stamped out. It will be driven underground and
achieve nothing […] The true homosexual is capable of loving
another person of the same sex with as much affection, tenderness
and passion as any relationship between a man and a woman. If all
the homosexuals were jailed, there would be no room for other
criminals […] You would also have to jail some of the top surgeons,
lawyers, artists, executives and many other men in key positions.
Many folk would be amazed if there was a register of homosexu-
als! We would really “fall on our backs” with surprise.

Letter 5: Rev. John A. Smart (Cape Town, March 5, 1968)

I am not a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, although I have an ama-
teur knowledge of both subjects. I am a middle-aged Minister of a
well-known Religious Communion, being of the larger Church-
Groups in the Republic […] I am frankly amazed at the present
Bill; it seems so out of line with modern trends […] What is the
reason for the Bill? Somebody tells me there has been such an
increase in homosexual practice. I do not think this is at all true,
but cases are being publicised, giving a wrong impression […] May
I suggest that the whole question be submitted to a Public
Commission rather than to a Parliamentary Select Committee?
which would include on itself Ministers of various denominations,
doctors, lawyers, social workers, and psychologists and psychia-
trists, before any attempt is made to legislate? […] For the old
anomaly has been that if a man wrongs a girl over 16, wrecks a
home, begets illegitimate children, cause divorce etc. he cannot be
touched by the law. But let him touch a fellow male, then he is in
for it. It seems absurd for a modern State to wink at adultery and
fornication or seduction of girls over 16, and to allow such an easy
divorce system as we have in S.A. and for society to be so tolerant
over things like divorce, for the same State to make homosexual
acts without distinction into crimes.

Letter 8: Judex (Johannesburg, February 18, 1968)

[…] I am a practising homosexual and thus an authority on the
subject. I am not guilty about my State nor do I in anyway consider
myself a criminal or pervert merely because I am the person I am

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and feel the way I do […] I would like this […] invaluable oppor-
tunity of contributing to the enlightenment of the subject, to a bet-
ter understanding of the problem and the hope for more tolerance
and a saner legal outlook towards it […] I am not obviously “queer”
and do not exhibit unpleasant effeminate affectations, traits or
mannerisms. In my work no one is aware of my homosexuality and
only my closest and intimate friends know of my state. I do not
indulge in importuning or habits that transgress accepted legal and
social codes of ethics. Later through the auspices of friends and
associates I met other homosexuals with some of whom I had rela-
tions or “affairs” if there was mutual attraction, with others I
formed friendships which have been very close and lasting but
since the homosexual world has been forced into becoming a twi-
light world due to society’s and the Law’s censure, most encounters
among homosexuals are brief and superficial because of the ever
present fear of exposure. I have had many offers to form a homo-
sexual alliance i.e., to live with and share a home with a companion
but have never followed this practice because of strong family ties
and also the embarrassing queries and surmises such an affiliation
of this nature is likely to give rise to […] I do not of course make
any allowances for nor condone licentiousness, obscenity, public
indecency, corruption of the young and innocent, but here the same
laws apply as do to all civilized society and the vast majority of
homosexuals are in utmost agreement on this subject […] It is cited
that homosexuals comprise 20% of the population in the big cen-
tres and 10% of the overall populace. It therefore is a very pressing
and real problem that need not be a problem at all if proper and
just legislation existed and a more tolerant social attitude adopted.
Take for instance the large number of police whose already over-
loaded duties are complicated and made more difficult by the intri-
cacies involved when they are surely needed for the real pressing
threats of Terrorist invasion, fifth column, the insoluble crime in
the non-white townships and in the Cities and rural communities.
These are the real dangers facing the country and threatening her
safety, morality and these must go unchecked while the Police are
engaged in ignoble deeds of trapping, luring, and arresting law
abiding citizens whose “crime” happens to be following what they
believe to be their own inalienable right […] If stringent suppres-
sive laws were passed many of South Africa’s most valuable and
useful citizens will be driven from their homeland if conditions
were made untenable and intolerable for them. Can South Africa
afford to lose only one of her white citizens, let alone possibly tens
of thousands because of archaic and outmoded legislation which
has its roots in ignorance, superstition and bigotry.

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Against homosexuality
Letter 6: W. Fensham (Rondebosch, Cape Town, February 24, 1968)
May I be permitted to present to you the Scriptural laws on homo-
sexuals: since we are a Christian country, and our laws are based
on the high spiritual standards in our only Guide Book (the Bible)
and extends from the Old Testament into the New Testament, and
down the corridors of time to 1968, and the Republic of South
Africa. During the 20 years of Nationalist rule our country has
been blessed and prospered: because our leaders have put God first
in governing this Nation. It is with this knowledge in mind that I
feel free to present the Biblical as well as the Historical aspect on
homosexuality […] May I respectfully draw your attention to the
fact that homosexuals are in no way different from the depraved
minds of those who indulge in rape and other sex offences, and fall
in the same category as the Immorality Act: while they are due to
the same convictions.

Letter 7: Frances Katz (Durban North, May 9, 1968)

I am moved by my strong and earnest feelings to write to you on
one or two subjects of national importance […] As a Christian
woman, mother of three adult children, one a son, and as 29 years
ago coming to S.A. from England where homosexuality flourished
then and is thriving now, I implore you to give this vile practice the
disciplined punishment it deserves. The wishy, washy thinking of
my own people in Britain, the anarchy which openly flourishes
there shocked and dismayed me on my return stay between 1960
and 1964. I saw much, both in real life and on television survey
reports to know that England is in the hands of the rabble that
tolerates anything! Sex murders on Moors of young innocent
babies whose mothers weep, even today for the unhung beasts who
infest British prisons, kept at the country’s expense! In Brighton
where I was staying whilst my daughter was engaged in teaching in
the next block of flats a herd of homosexuals openly flouted their
lust affairs with their teenage male consorts powdered and per-
fumed up to the hilt. Great Caesar, it made decent folk sick! Young
boys were lured and flattered into their clutches. It is a vile and
insidious poison that filters in and defiles the life blood and man-
hood of a nation. Nay! Past our Glorious Nelson’s column in
Trafalgar Square those young lads, even today sell their puny
chicken like bodies for a few shillings a night—is this then my
England anymore? […] My second worry is on hearing an often
quoted statement. We are surrounded by envy, jealousy, greed,
encircled by Chinese communist spies crawling with terrorist

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infiltration. South West Africa is U.N.O’s lever to persecute us […]

Sir, may we have the tools, both moral and physical to attack and
defend the land God has given.

Letter 9: S.C. Nash (South Beach, Durban, February 21, 1968)

[…] The homosexual is sick. In practising his unnatural habits he is
not being himself, but is unknowingly manifesting the characteris-
tics of some stronger individuals who has overwhelmed him in the
past […] Therefore, the obvious cure is to restore him to health by
whatever means are available. That is why I have said the help of
the medical profession and others will be needed. My suggestion is
that rehabilitation centres be established for all sick people, whether
homosexuals, psychotics or those more fortunate, suffering from
known and curable diseases. Each category, of course must be sepa-
rated, even separated from the healthy. Our government’s policy of
apartheid is not entirely wrong […] The mentally sick especially
must be isolated from the well. This will prove very expensive, but
rather something expensive than continuing to let them run loose.

The preceding submissions reveal much anxiety, confusion, hate and con-
testation about the subject of homosexuality. Each discloses, at a funda-
mental level, the public debate about the morality of homosexuality in the
context of repressive measures destined to proscribe the freedom of the
queer subject. The public debate implied by the responses in these submis-
sions illustrates and confirms that sex and sexuality have become an impor-
tant object of concern for the State, which is epitomised by its planned
intervention into the domain of the private life of a selected segment of its
population. In this instance “private life” is indeed a sexual (and sexualised)
life. The private life of the homosexual is understood by the state as a life
determined by one facet of identity, namely sexual conduct.
The earlier narratives also foreground the fact that homosexuality is a
“visible” phenomenon. If as I have argued, following Foucault, that some of
the narratives (letters 1, 3 and 8) disclose a confessionary mode as a “vital
component of modern power”, then it is possible to deduce that sexuality is
a historical construct, “invented” as it were “as an instrument-effect in the
spread of bio-power” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982: 119).20 “Bio-power”
attests to Moran’s (1996) conception of the homosexual as a particular spe-
cies of “genital bodies” that are configured and proscribed by law. The let-
ters, especially those submitted by queer subjects, are indicative of the
restraining power of the State that produces a discourse of sex (the earlier
submissions are examples) and advance claims to identity.
Letters 6, 7 and 9 endorse the state’s intention to prohibit and criminalise
homosexuality, and simultaneously demonstrate the politicisation of sex
and sexuality. It is also in this context that sexuality of the subjects confirms

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knowledge about the state’s power, which can be exercised over homosex-
ual bodies. The knowledge that emerges in these letters is productive in its
generation of a discourse on sexuality. This suggests that “discourse” offers
a plausible account of the “experience” of being positioned within a power
dynamic. Foucault’s (1990) scheme also convincingly articulates a new way
to conceive sex, namely that the displacement of an ars erotica is met with
a new conception of sex, one he labels a scientia sexualis. The latter repre-
sents a discursive restructuring of the sexual terrain around the centrality of
sexuality from desire to individual identity. Homosexual acts (ars erotica)
thus become the object of knowledge (scientia sexualis).
Letters 1 through 5 and 8 thematise identity as a distinctive aspect of the
recognition of homosexual behaviour. In this sense, the central feature of
the scientia sexualis is a valuable procedure, to generate “truth” about the
self—a point Foucault explains in relation to confession—which I suggest
is a precursor to what we have come to categorise as autobiography. If the
letter is a species of autobiographical narrative, then letters 1, 3 and 8
represent individuals who extract “from the depths of” the self, in respect
of their “self-examination” a truth of the “basic certainties of conscious-
ness” (Foucault, 1990: 59–60). In this sense, the “obligation to confess”, is
inherent within us such that we may not simply perceive it to be the “effect
of a power that constrains”, but a “secret” truth that “demands only to
surface” (Foucault, 1990: 60). The “secret” truth in relation to letters 1, 3
and 8 make known an identity that is deemed criminal by the State. The
letters reveal the authors as enunciating subjects whose “experience” rep-
resents a truth about the self. But while there are aspects of a homogenis-
ing gesture in all three narratives (an example being the view that
homosexuals constitute a single, unified group in which there is a common
understanding), there is also much that is disclosed in the narratives that
suggest otherwise.
A number of complexities in the meanings of the homosexual experience,
as well as the attitude of society toward the “problem” of homosexuality,
are revealed through the submissions. The “secret” truths espoused by the
above submissions also depend on the meanings in relation to the format of
the submissions. All are letters, written in an autobiographical mode. But all
eight narratives could be equally further catalogued. As stories about the
self, the subjects of narratives 1, 3 and 8 reveal how dominant sexual scripts
construct homosexual experiences and, by extension, homosexual identities
as queer. Narratives 2, 5, 6, 7 and 9 are written as positions that either make
a formal case for or against homosexuality from the perspective of charac-
ter, religion, biomedicine and/or the nation state. Letters 6, 7, 9 are in a
sense most vociferous in their opposition to homosexuality and base their
views principally on Christianity. I shall refer to homosexuality and
Christianity later. The first aspect I develop in the discussion is the concept
“sexual script” and the relevance of this concept to identity in respect of
narratives 1, 3 and 8.

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Sexual scripts, sexual lives and sexual stories

The narratives by Coates (letter 1), Dance (letter 3) and Judex (letter 8)
represent, in part, what social scientists have theorised since the seventies as
sexual script theory, which conceives the construction of sexual identities in
relation to social and cultural factors (compare Gagnon & Simon, 1973;
Parker & Gagnon, 1995). For these scholars, a sexual script is understood
as a type of sexual discourse that emphasises the sexual behaviours of its
subjects, and determines how sex is accomplished within particular con-
texts. I do not use the concept in this strict sociological sense in the present
argument. But, like the previously mentioned scholars, I view the scripts as
metaphors that reflect the social production of sexual behaviour. I am sug-
gesting that the epistolary narratives 1, 3 and 8 are configured in the mode
of a sexual script that introduces important themes such as relationships,
love, erotic adventure and emotional, social and psychological tensions
regarding sexual orientation. These aspects, I claim, frame the “experience”
of the subjects in terms of an unfolding narrative of identity politics.
Laumann and Gagnon (1995: 190) extrapolate three important aspects of
sexual scripts that represent some important contradictions, ambiguities
and struggles in relation homosexual experiences:

cultural scenarios (the instructions for sexual and other conduct

that are embedded in the cultural narratives that are provided as
guides or instructions for all conduct), interpersonal scripts (the
structured patterns of interaction in which individuals as actors
engage in everyday interpersonal conduct), and intra-psychic scripts
(the plans and fantasies by which individuals guide and reflect
upon their past, current, or future conduct).

The point that is relevant in relation to the preceding is that cultural, inter-
personal and intra-psychic scripts influence, determine and, to some extent,
proscribe patterns of sexual conduct (cf. Mutchler, 2000, for a detailed expo-
sition of some of these issues in relation to gay youth and masculinity).
For example, the narratives represent the complexities of “coming out” in
the shifting social and sexual environments of the “compulsory heterosexu-
ality” determined by apartheid society. In this sense the narratives “talk”
about sex while simultaneously disclosing an identity that frames the expe-
rience related to a “truth” claim about the self. Coates is unambiguously
explicit and unequivocally transgressive when he claims “I am a homosex-
ual”. Likewise, Judex discloses “I am a practising homosexual and thus an
authority on the subject”. Similarly, Dance says, “being a Lesbian or a
Homosexual is not only a confusing situation to the rest of society, but also
to us that are Lesbian or Homosexuals”. Coming out reworks to some
extent a history of forced confession, and expresses the political and histori-
cal moment of early gay liberation and lesbian feminism (cf. Sedgwick,

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1994: 56–57). Ironically, the period in which these narratives were written
were temporally close to the beginning of modern gay liberation dated from
Stonewall in 1969 (cf. Duberman, 1994).
The “coming out” story represented by the Coates, Dance and Judex nar-
ratives is informed by a sexual script that accounts not simply for a type of
sexual practice that the state wishes to criminalise. The stories also represent
a language, a name for an identity that the State wishes to curtail, silence and
pathologise. In this sense, Roof (1996) is correct in her thesis that the com-
ing out narrative therefore constructs a difference, a possible disjuncture
between public knowledge and private knowledge that is resolved through
the invocation of a true identity that has been squelched by homophobia.21
Another important point Roof (1996) raises, which is relevant for the above
narratives, is that the narratives, while told for the positive political purpose
of greater queer visibility as a liberatory goal, their impact is contained by
the limits of what Roof calls the heteronarrative. The latter refers to the
ideologically loaded conflation of narrative structure with the deferral of
desire and the threat of sameness. It is therefore possible to deduce that the
Coates, Dance and Judex narratives are, in terms of the view of radical
humanist Plummer (1995), also sexual stories narratives, he suggests, that
are the conceptual link between people’s lives and their culture and society.
Like Plummer (1995: 168), I view the narratives by Coates, Dance and
Judex as modes of life-writing, as acts as well as texts, sociological as well
as aesthetic phenomena, in which “story tellings may come very close to the
life as experienced”. Plummer illustrates how the “narrative turn” of cul-
tural studies may be taken up within sociology and suggests that a sociol-
ogy of stories asks different questions about stories from those questions
posed by cultural studies about stories. Perhaps the most important of these
questions is the potential social and political meanings in the letters by
Coates, Dance and Judex. One important meaning is the political change
that the narratives encourage and motivate in the context of a commission
that was established to curtail the emergence of homosexuality as a visible
and public phenomenon in the apartheid State. On another level, these are
texts that record a particular event in a particular spatio-temporal context
to which, I as the researcher, return to determine the efficacy for under-
standing the construction of queer identities.
Not surprisingly, the letters are stories of the self that deal with personal
identity, self-creation and romantic love, and the trauma of repression in a
hetero-normative and homophobic society. All three stories demonstrate a
position: a defence of their identities in which they motivate against the
criminalisation of their orientation. In doing so, each subject in these let-
ters accounts for the validity and legitimacy of their orientation by describ-
ing facets of their identities in terms of the social world to which they
belong. Each narrative is indeed a plea for acceptance, recognition, inclu-
sion, and, ultimately, for belonging. Letters 2, 4 and 5 likewise present
support for the homosexual cause by categorising the homosexual as a

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non-pathological species. On another level, it could be theorised that the

support for homosexuals displayed in these letters (not uncontentiously in
respect of the language used) is possibly also a form of alliance politics in
the liberal humanist mode.
It is interesting to note that one of the authors (letter 5) speaks from the
perspective of Christian theology, and expresses opinions in respect of toler-
ance and mutual acceptance that was quite revolutionary in terms of the
Christian theology of the time.22 The church in particular is still quite
divided on the issue of homosexuality (Boswell, 1980; Germond & De
Gruchy, 1997). The submissions also manifest the contested opinions in
respect of homosexuality amongst those within the heterosexual commu-
nity. Letters 2, 4 and 5 most notably characterise the homosexual as persons
that are to be defined in terms of good character and personality traits, in
marked contrast to letters 6, 7, 9 whose authors depict the homosexual as
an immoral figure characterised by promiscuity.
Coates’s confessional narrative begins apologetically (letter 1). Coates
“humbly submits” his letter in the hope he would be “forgiven for address-
ing” the letter to the state. Then he discloses “I am a homosexual”. The
submissive tone of the first sentence and the bold confession in the second
seem to me to be directed towards disclosure of a truth in the hope that the
state would “absolve” him by being lenient in respect of the written account
that attests to his character and demeanour. Coates tells his sexual story by
speaking the “language” of the state, describing his orientation as a “condi-
tion”, which he motivates in terms of the secrecy in which he maps his life.
The rhetorical procedure is strategic in his letter. Coates accounts for a
remedy and response to his “condition” by explaining he underwent psy-
chotherapy which, he explains, failed him. He then skilfully redeploys the
pathological signifier (homosexuality is a “perversion”) to explain that any
possibility of “marriage” would be counter to his “true” identity and is
therefore, by extension, a perversion. Coates motivates his identity and
presents his defence by providing the State with evidence in respect of his
character, personality and work ethic. Letter 2 written in Coates’s favour
encourages the State to value the importance of separating sexual orienta-
tion as an erotic, political and sexual identity from the related aspects of
personality, mental (and psychological) disposition and the work ethic.
Letter 2 confronts the myth that describes homosexuals as vulnerable, mal-
leable persons, a group predisposed, in a pathological sense, to be ineffec-
tual and weak. Subsequent studies not too far removed from the period of
the late sixties countered the perspective that homosexuals are weak and
vulnerable (see, e.g., Altman, 1971; Murphy, 1971).
Dance, for her part, states that her lesbian orientation makes her a
“misfit” (letter 3). She deliberately uses the word misfit to question the
possible violent effects of homophobia that may accrue from state’s pro-
posed amendment to the law, namely “persecution” and “humiliation”.
Her reaction is informed by her experiences as a homosexual. Her use of

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the collective pronoun we indicates that she aligns herself with homosexu-
als as a threatened group. She motivates her alliance with the threatened
position of all homosexuals when she claims, “We are no danger to the
other citizens of our country”. She also explains the contradictions of a
biomedical intervention, indicating that her physical tests merely confirm
what she had already known. Her doctors, we are told, offered her no hope
for change but rather counselled her “to go through life as best [she] could”.
Judex (letter 8) recounts his experiences by explaining a truth about the
self in a confessionary, but contested gesture: “I am not guilty about my
State nor do I in anyway consider myself a criminal or pervert merely
because I am the person I am and feel the way I do”. Judex’s use of “State”
also discloses possible meanings in relation to its rhetorical importance. If
Coates references his orientation as a “condition”, Judex’s use of “State”
establishes an important semantic correspondence. “Condition” and “State”
imply the diagnosis of the state of being homosexual. In the context of
Judex’s letter, the upper case suggests Judex’s desire for belonging and inclu-
sion. Etymologically, state is derived from the Latin word status which
denotes “a standing” and, by extension, a position. Judex’s usage of “State”
is therefore also symbolic of a desire to be incorporated, recognised and
possibly affirmed as a citizen of the state. In this sense, Judex’s use of lan-
guage, denoted by his use of “State” reveals association with the nation,
identity and sexual orientation. If state references the nation state and
“state” also represents Judex’s sexual orientation, then simple deduction
implies that Judex articulates the wish for a legal recognition of the homo-
sexual as an equal citizen of the State. In this sense Judex’s language sug-
gests that his letter may be directed towards a liberatory goal. Despite this
strategic use of language, there are parts of his submission that demonstrate
his selectivity and moral conservativeness.
The selections I have made from his narrative are included to illustrate,
first, the categorisation of his identity in gendered terms. He formulates his
masculinity in gendered terms which, as he claims, does not, disclose his
sexual orientation: “I am not obviously ‘queer’ and do not exhibit unpleas-
ant effeminate affectations, traits or mannerisms”. Given the pejorative
meaning of queer in the context of Judex’s experience, he similarly assigns
a stereotyped meaning to sexual orientation in feminine terms. This sug-
gests that gender identity is closely aligned to sexual orientation, and is
often the basis of much dissent, contention and division among queer sub-
jects. As West and Zimmerman (1987: 136) point out, “to ‘do’ gender is not
always to live up to normative conceptions of femininity or masculinity; it
is to engage in behaviour at the risk of gender assessment”. In relation to
Judex’s statement, such a statement emphasises a type of normalcy that he
wishes to establish in relation to his straight appearance that may, by impli-
cation, make him more amenable to acceptance by the state.
Second, the selections illustrate Judex’s impassioned belief that all homo-
sexuals are in agreement with his view:

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I do not of course make any allowances for, nor condone licentiousness,

obscenity, public indecency, corruption of the young and innocent, but here
the same laws apply as do to all civilised society and the vast majority of
homosexuals are in utmost agreement on this subject. (my emphasis)While
it is strategic to his argument to separate identity from sexual practice, he
assumes that “all homosexuals” are “in utmost agreement” on this subject.
Such a generalisation denies the fractures, divisions and polarisation of the
homosexual community. Ironically, the “homosexuals” Judex refers to are
indeed a white, racialised group. If we follow his argument, we discover
that Judex’s submission is far from liberatory and is in fact reactionary and
accommodationist. I believe his views represent a politics of collusion that
typified the apartheid state. Because his defence against his homosexuality
is selective in terms of advancing a positive case for the homosexual, his
liberatory gesture, in being presented in terms of racialised and racist pleas
towards the apartheid system, is weakened. I suggest that Judex’s case
against “compulsory heterosexuality” is underpinned by a racist ideology
that reinforces the apartheid mindset. In this sense his narrative appears to
be closer to the spirit and tenor of letters 6, 7 and 9, all of which articulate
views about sexuality, especially homosexuality in terms of the racialised
(and racist) context of apartheid (the latter is briefly explored later).

Compulsory heterosexuality and discourses of the nation

Toward the end of his letter, Judex considers the potential effects of the
Amendment Bill that will criminalise homosexuality, and speculates on the
impact this might have on the police service. According to him, the South
African police have a noble calling in respect of protecting the citizens (by
extension the “white” citizens) against what he terms the “terrorist inva-
sion” (recalling the conditions in the apartheid state), as well as the “insol-
uble crime in non-white townships”. His language concomitantly discloses
a particular image of and attitude towards the liberation forces (the banned
political movements during apartheid).
The “insoluble crime” he refers to could refer to the civil disobedience
programme reinforced by the liberation movements to destabilise the apart-
heid government (e.g., Thompson, 1985, 2001; Worden, 1995). So the
notion of the “terrorist” and “insoluble crime”, which we know had as their
purpose the “noble” (political) purpose of deracialising and democratising
South Africa, is for Judex a “crime”, an unlawful act. Theoretically his
assessment is correct given the fact that liberation movements were banned
in the sixties, and had intensified the armed struggle against the State. He
couches his views in moral terms:

Take for instance the large number of police whose already over-
loaded duties are complicated and made more difficult by the intri-
cacies involved when they are surely needed for the real pressing

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threats of Terrorist invasion, fifth column, the insoluble crime in

the non-white townships and in the Cities and rural communities.
These are the real dangers facing the country and threatening her
safety, morality, and these must go unchecked while the Police are
engaged in ignoble deeds of trapping, luring, and arresting law
abiding citizens whose “crime” happens to be following what they
believe to be their own inalienable right.

More alarming are his concluding comments that explicitly reinforce a rac-
ist logic:

If stringent suppressive laws were passed many of South Africa’s

most valuable and useful citizens will be driven from their home-
land if conditions were made untenable and intolerable for them.
Can South Africa afford to lose only one of her white citizens, let
alone possibly tens of thousands because of archaic and out-
moded legislation which has its roots in ignorance, superstition
and bigotry.
(my emphasis)

The preceding views manifest, first, the problems and dangers in homogenis-
ing identity politics because to homogenise an identity is to minimise (and
downplay) the contradictions and silences that inform identity-based poli-
tics. Second, his views might suggest that a queer political identity in apart-
heid South Africa lacked a radical edge but was couched instead in terms of
the narrow limitations of middle-class white appeal for acceptance within
an apartheid framework. Third, the views disclose how the discourse of
sexuality is integrally linked to the discourse of nation and race. Fourth,
Judex’s remarks show that homosexuals, despite the homophobia they
experienced, were not immune to racism. The preceding observations also
suggest that the Law Reform Movement of the sixties was primarily focused
on influencing lawmakers rather than on organising gays and lesbians and
that it possibly failed to mobilise an understanding of homosexuality within
a rights-based model. Perhaps more important, any alignment with that
which we have come to understand and interpret as “queer politics”, as
radical, resistant and coalitional, was not evident in apartheid South Africa’s
gay and lesbian organising.
Furthermore, submissions 6, 7, and 9, for example, manifest attitudes,
feelings and emotions that reflect a pathological perception of homosexual-
ity, that in contemporary contexts, would be viewed as hate speech. Letters
6, 7 and 9 further mobilise a defence in support of criminalising homosexu-
ality by appealing to the state in Christian terms. These letters do not simply
elaborate a “homosexual panic” but also a “moral panic”, that reveals an
obsession and anxiety about the figure of the homosexual; in this sense,
homosexual and moral panic becomes “sex panic”.23

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Letter 6 equates the homosexual to a rapist, implying that the homo-

sexual preys on innocent victims in a sexually violent way. Letter 7 views
homosexuality as a subject of “national importance”. Letter 9, in turn,
describes the homosexual as “sick”, classifying the sickness as an “unnat-
ural habit” that requires “rehabilitation”. One strategy inherent in
the letter recommending rehabilitation is to separate the “mentally sick”
(the homosexual) from the “well” rather than to “let them run loose”.
Acknowledging the economic implications of such a procedure, the
author nevertheless concludes that the quarantining of diseased bodies
(the homosexual is designated as such) would ensure, in his view, a
healthier society and, by implication, safeguard the rest of the nation
from any possible infection by homosexuals. Such thinking is still perva-
sive, and in the eighties, with the rise of HIV/AIDS, those infected with
the virus were quarantined from those who were not infected (Reddy et
al., 2009; Shilts, 1987).
The language in letters 6,7 and 9 reveal the authors’ view that the homo-
sexual is not only diseased but also a figure of sexual excess and promiscu-
ity (Bersani, 1995: 20). Most vociferous is Frances Katz’s letter (letter 7).
Her semantic choices disclose not just a panic about the homosexual pres-
ence but also a deep hatred towards what she considers a morally reprehen-
sible grouping. Katz supports her argument by describing the apparent
moral decay of British society. To her, this decay is the result, in part, of the
“vile practice” in which “homosexuality flourished”. She cautions the
apartheid state against the dangers of this “vile and insidious poison”
where, according to her, “young boys are lured and flattered into [the]
clutches” of older feminine men with “puny chicken like bodies”. According
to Katz homosexuality “defiles the life blood and manhood of [a] nation’
and as such, requires a disciplined punishment”. For Katz the State should
entrench a moral order by removing homosexuals from society. She also
propounds a gendered interpretation of nation but one which underscores
the patriarchal importance of the nation state.
Katz, like Judex, makes the connection between sex and the nation, and
her final statement refers to the “terrorist invasion” as another cause for
concern. Katz’s views reflect the conservative and exclusionary politics that
characterised the apartheid political order. For her, the nation is not secular
but sacred, and any endorsement of difference (informed by race and sexu-
ality) would contribute to the moral decay of the society.

The effects of the law reform movement24

As we have seen, the submissions to the commission were diverse and
divided in their views. The eventual decision of the Select Committee,
however, was not to further criminalise homosexuality by extending the
crime of homosexuality in private acts. This did not imply, however, that
the injunction of homosexuality between consenting adults was to be

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withdrawn; in fact, the act continued to remain an offence under South

African common law until 1998 when the process of the decriminalisation
of homosexuality began in the post-apartheid context (see Reddy, 2009).
One important consequence of the commission was that it amended the age
of consent by raising the age of males in the case of homosexual sexual
conduct to 19. This was in marked contrast to the 1957 statutory require-
ment that set the general legal age for heterosexual sex with minors at 16
years. That there had been no legal or governmental shift in attitudes to
gays was confirmed in 1968 by Minister Pelser’s warning that there would
be “no relaxation” in the legal position concerning homosexuality and that
the moves being made to legalise homosexuality in other countries could
“not be allowed” in South Africa (Gevisser, 1994: 35).
Despite the small victory, the sanctity of the private for homosexuals
remained illegal. The failure of the amendment was a victory from a psy-
chological perspective. Gevisser (1994: 36) cites the view of one activist:
“We had done it ourselves. We were threatened and we fought back and
won. For the first time. It felt great.” What was disappointing was the
collapse of the Law Reform movement soon after the Select Committee
had completed its proceedings. Gevisser (1994: 36) appropriately
describes the work of the Law Reform Group as a “narrowly-defined,
single-issue campaign aimed at blocking potential legislation rather than
at building an enduring gay and lesbian community.” In my view, this
short-lived victory discloses the limitations of a conservative and reac-
tionary political ideology in respect of queer political mobilisation in the
apartheid state.
With the withdrawal of its elitist leadership once its aims had been
achieved, the Law Reform Movement simply faded out. The endeavour
did, however, have ramifications that have much to offer in the develop-
ment of an understanding of “queer identities”. Widespread and unprece-
dented mobilisation had caused the extent of homosexuality in South
Africa to become more visible to the authorities and it appears that the
State’s strategy changed from one of an unrealistic wiping-out of homo-
sexuality to a more manageable minimising of its social effects (see Reddy
et al., 2013). As the authorities sought to remove homosexuality from pub-
lic places such as the street, the newly socially awakened and self-identified
gay subculture was forced to move indoors to the “privacy” of gay bars and
pubs where it could and did develop. Gevisser (1994) makes the cogent
point that the segregation of homosexuals from the rest of society (in other
words, their confinement to private “invisible” spaces) encouraged the
development of a subcultural community and of homosexual self-identity.
Gevisser (1994: 37) writes that the most beneficial side effect of this form
of apartheid (that between the homosexual margins and the heterosexual
centre) was the “formalisation of gay culture”. However, since racial apart-
heid was still intact, this meant further segregation between black and
white homosexuals.

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Conclusion
The preceding discussion has shown that the development of “queer iden-
tities” in South Africa is inextricably bound to the politics of the apartheid
state in what could be described as state homophobia. As referenced in the
introduction I write this chapter as a gay man with a South Asian (specifi-
cally Indian) heritage yet as someone who is far removed from the Indian
subcontinent. The experiences I have navigated through apartheid both
racially and constraints with respect to sexuality, have bearing on the
arguments in this volume in so far as they highlight narratives that repre-
sent ideas and thinking about sexual expression in their global and trans-
national flows. The insights in this chapter reflect stories from a diaspora
that speak to the broader concerns of the epistemologies and ontologies of
experience that move beyond geopolitics and ethnicity.
I showed in this chapter that the 1968 Commission was an important
event since during the apartheid project the first historical organisation of
gays in South Africa (Law Reform Group) against homosexual criminalisa-
tion came into being. As Gevisser (1994: 35) points out and is confirmed by
submissions (letters 1,3 and 8), gays “quietly and professionally [attempted]
to protect themselves by carving a niche within apartheid South Africa
while not disrupting the status quo”. This strand of queer activism was
racialised by the mobilisation of primarily white gays and lesbians but
within an accommodationist model. The primary motivation of those
endorsing the criminalisation of homosexuality was the protection of
“innocents” from the “problem” of homosexuality (Gevisser, 1994: 35).
The small victory for gays and lesbians (that homosexuality in private was
not criminalised) did not however, secure any legal rights for homosexuals
in apartheid South Africa. In fact, I argue, it consolidated the state’s power
and authority to intervene, monitor and contain homosexuality. In this
sense there was no victory. But, despite these negatives, some positive spin-
offs did emerge.
The homosexual became a visible phenomenon, a “gay presence”, and as
following Bersani (1995: 11) “visibility is a precondition of surveillance,
disciplinary intervention, and, at the limit, gender-cleansing”. The “homo-
sexual” emerges not simply as a “problem” but as a figure that challenges
the State for the right to equality and dignity, rights that are guaranteed for
the heterosexual population. This Immorality Act (Amendment) Commission
of 1968 could also be described as the beginning of a modern liberatory
project for South African queers, which gained momentum in the post-
apartheid state. The submissions similarly evidence the homosexual subject
as a productive subject who discloses particular truths about the self in rela-
tion to identity, integrity and personality. Similarly, the transgression of the
South African moral code produces the homosexual as a subject who speaks
back, and is therefore not silenced by the power that constrains him or her.
The submissions thus reveal that identity formation is fundamentally

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political, that it is produced in relation to a prohibitive power. An important

subtext here is the fact that the homosexual emerges in a counter-narrative
(one in which he or she has spoken) to the grand narrative of the apartheid
project. Such a counter-narrative is one that politicises homosexual identity,
and while in the sixties in South Africa it may have been inappropriate to
refer to a “queer” identity, the pejorative connotations of the word para-
doxically also suggest that homosexual identity is “queer” precisely because
it is an identity marked by opposition to heteronormativity and the prohibi-
tive hegemony. Ironically, the perceived minor victory of 1968 for homo-
sexuals was the precursor in the seventies to more sinister operations against
homosexuals by the state.

Notes
1 Peter Black (Submission to the Minister of Justice, 1968, housed in the Gay and
Lesbian Archives, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg).
2 The racial segregation of South Africa was consolidated in several ways during
the period from 1948 to 1960. The law was one of the chief instruments the
state used to systematically separate the races in all spheres of South African
society. Some of these laws include the Group Areas Act of 1950 which desig-
nated specific urban areas for occupation by particular racial groups. Under the
so-called Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act of
1952, the various passes required by Africans were consolidated into a single
pass book (officially called a “reference book”). Interestingly for the first time
since 1920 women also had to carry passes. Every African had to carry the book
at all times and produce it on demand to any policeman. Failure to produce the
book included fines and imprisonment. The 1954 Native Resettlement Act led to
the removal of 58,000 Africans from the Western areas of Johannesburg (includ-
ing Sophiatown) to Meadowlands in Soweto despite mass popular resistance.
Many coloureds, Indians and Chinese who lived in Sophiatown were also forced
to move. A white suburb named Triomf (Triumph) was later built on the site of
Sophiatown. In 1959 the State passed the Extension of University Education Act
which closed “white” universities to blacks, except with special government per-
mission. See Pampallis (1991: 179–190).
3 Numerous studies verify these issues and provide a good historical account of the
racial formation of South Africa. See, for example, Coleman (1998), Pampallis
(1991), Thompson (1985, 2001) and Worden (1995).
4 See Burchell and Milton (1997), Burchell (1997) and Snyman (1995) for legal defi-
nitions of sodomy within the context of criminal law. Perhaps also relevant here is
that according to South African common law at the time, the age of consent for
heterosexual intercourse for a girl is 12 years old, and a boy 14 years old. This age
of consent for heterosexual sex was set at 16 years in 1957 for both genders.
5 Common law is a body of legal rules that are not contained in legislation (also
called ‘unwritten’ law). It is a non-statutory system of law that refers to Roman–
Dutch law (historically influenced by English law). Related to this is the unwrit-
ten, customary law (or indigenous law) that has gradually been harmonised
with the post-apartheid Constitution of 1996. Customary law applied to citi-
zens in particular tribal or religious courts in South Africa. See Walker (1980).
6 Case law refers to the cases in respect of specific events that have been tried in
courts. I refer here to some of the cases cited by Labuschagne (1986: 167–185)
in his article (original in Afrikaans): “Decriminalisation of Homophilia and

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Zoophilia” in which he makes a case against criminalisation. He cites a number

of cases of mutual masturbation such as R.v. Gough and Narroway (1926) that
the court described as “abhorrent and grossly indecent”. In another case, Baptie
v. S (1963), the court considered same-sex conduct as a mental condition requir-
ing psychiatric treatment.
7 Extensive studies exist, and I cite some that are relevant in respect of this chap-
ter, and some that will be referenced here: Crane (1982), Herman (1994), Mohr
(1988), Radzinowicz (1947, 1957) and Wintermute (1995). Equally many stud-
ies on the law have been framed from a queer theoretical perspective, some of
which include Eskridge (1996), Moran (1996), Phelan (2001), Rimmerman
(2001), Smith (1994), Stychin (1995, 1998) and Stychin and Herman (1995,
2000, 2001). These studies, especially the texts written from a queer theoretical
perspective, demonstrate how the law operates as an instrument through which
sexuality is constructed, monitored and controlled. These studies also emphasise
the important connection between the law and sexual regulation, and this chap-
ter is motivated by these insights in relation to the 1968 Commission.
8 See for example seminal texts by Altman (1971), Garland (1985) and Weeks
(1981).
9 This section borrows from Gevisser (1994: 14–86) to demonstrate the socio-
political and legal aspects of a developing subculture. This section is important
in that it establishes a contextual framework for the subsequent intervention by
the apartheid state. Gevisser’s documentation is offered in summary here, and
where relevant, direct citation is referenced. Retief (1994) also assesses State
repression of homosexuality and addresses partially some of the historical issues
in respect of State proscription of homosexuality in terms of censorship, polic-
ing, gay conduct and the supposed “gay threat to white civilization”.
10 This factor is indeed relevant in respect of purist interpretations of ethnicity,
which to some extent reflected Afrikaner thinking at the time, and a belief still
held today in ultraconservative quarters within the Afrikaner community such
as the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (cf. February, 1991; Giliomee, 2003; Le
May, 1995). The point of correspondence here is the return of the pathological
signifier in respect of the “unAfricanness” of homosexuality as a colonial,
European and white import. See Reddy (2001) for a discussion in this regard.
11 D’Emilio (1992: 57) talks about the “homosexual menace” as perceived by the
“Cold War America”. Some of the events he describes in relation to the anti-
communist witchhunts form an interesting and comparative parallel with the
South African context in relation to the persecution of gays and lesbians. See the
chapter titled “The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War
America” (1992: 57—73). D’Emilio makes a connection between the anti-com-
munist campaigns against suspected communist supporters, and the persecution
of gays in America.
12 Sullivan (1995) proposes a liberal humanistic, individualised and experiential
approach to homosexual emancipation rather than a radical queer political
approach that is based on resistance, and on communitarian models.
13 The charter represented the demands for a non-racial South Africa with political
rights for all citizens irrespective of race, colour or sex, amongst other issues.
The charter was adopted by the Congress of the People in Kliptown,
Johannesburg, June 26, 1955, and was later endorsed by all member organisa-
tions of the Congress Alliance (led by the African National Congress).
14 See also Report of the Select Committee on the Immorality Amendment Bill,
1968 (Government Printer, 1968). I have not prioritised the report because of
its detailed legalistic commentary but simply highlighted what some of the find-
ings of the commission were. See also Retief (1994) for a brief historical focus
on the 1968 Commission.

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15 Much has been written about the connection between race and gender in repres-
sive regimes. Relevant in this respect is the particular operation of power in
relation to the law, an aspect taken up in a related sense by McClintock’s (1995)
study in relation to the colonial project.
16 See other more legalistic explanations, Radzinowicz (1957) and Smith and
Hogan (1992).
17 See also Sedgwick (1994: 67–90), specifically the following observations: “The
most obvious fact about […] judicial formulations is that it codifies an excruci-
ating system of double binds, systematically oppressing gay people, identities,
and acts by undermining, through contradictory constraints on discourse, the
grounds of their being” (70).
18 It is also important to consider that Foucault’s work on power displays was
a slight shift in his later work. Where power is theorised as oppressive in his
earlier work, we also note, particularly in Power/Knowledge (1980) that power
is also facilitative and productive.
19 The empirical data in this chapter is drawn from archived material from GALA.
I reference citations by name and date.
20 Central to Foucault’s (1990: volume 1) project is a critique of the assumption
that the power bearing upon Western sexuality is essentially repressive. Given
the discursive “interests” that underpin sexuality as it may have functioned since
the seventeenth century, his study presents a counter-critique of the “repressive
hypothesis” as it was propagated in nineteenth-century Victorian society in its
surveillance of sexual practices. While Foucault (1990: 22) does not dismiss its
repressive aspect, he extends the problem by framing it from an epistemological
perspective, insisting that repression be recognized as “a digression, a refine-
ment, a tactical diversion in the great process of transforming sex into dis-
course”. Central to his critique is the view that “Western man has become a
confessing animal” (Foucault, 1990: 59), a notion that was informed by an
establishment of an apparatus to generate a discourse on sex, which also saw
new developments at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The emergence of
a political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex was not simply
to be “judged” but also an issue to be “administered”, reinforcing this as a
“police” matter, “an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces”
(Foucault, 1990: 24–25). Foucault (1984: volume 2 on the history of sexuality)
deals with the morality of paganism and the techniques of the self circumscribed
by pagan morality and the conflict with Christianity. Foucault (1986: volume 3
of the history of sexuality) is dedicated to early Christianity. The principal issue
derived from Foucault for this project is his critique of repression. His focus, like
my own, is to focus on how repression generates a regime of “power-knowl-
edge-pleasure” (1990: 11) in the discourses that are generated by the repression
of sexuality.
21 See Sedgwick (1994: 3–4, 56–57, 71–72, 76–82) for a detailed exposition of this
concept. Fuss (1991: 4) also articulated this in relation to the “inside/outside”
model of gay and lesbian identity: “On the one hand, it conjures up the exterior-
ity of the negative—devalued or outlawed term in the hetero/homo binary. One
the other hand, it suggests the process of coming out—a movement into a meta-
physics of presence, speech, and cultural visibility. The preposition ‘out’ always
supports this double sense of invisibility (to put out) and visibility (to bring out),
often exceeding even this simple tension in the confused entanglement generated
by a host of other active associations”. See also what D. A. Miller (1988: 195)
identifies as the “open secret”, the “secret that everybody already knows”.
22 One submission, written in Afrikaans (uncited in this section of the chapter) was
made by Dr D. F. B. De Beer (Secretary General of the Commission for Public
Morality) of the Afrikaner Dutch Reformed Church, dated March 22, 1968,

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Pretoria. The submission requests the minister of justice to criminalise three

issues: adultery, concubinage and homosexuality. All three are considered
“immoral” in Christian theology. More so, Dr Beer adds, these should be “crimes
punishable” by what he views as a “Christian country” (my translation).
23 Duggan and Hunter (1995: 75) articulate three crucial moments in the politics
of sexuality in the United States: the “porn wars”, pro-gay efforts in law, and
anti- and post-identitarian politics in the gay and lesbian movement. They for-
mulate a sex panic as follows: “In the grip of a sex panic, if you are accused of
sexual ‘deviance’, your defensive strategies are limited to either confession and
repentance, or denials of personal ‘guilt’, both of which only reinforce the legiti-
macy of the attack”. The point about a “sex panic” is that it generates intense
anxiety and dissent about issues related to sex, primarily by heteronormative
society. HIV/Aids in the early decade of the disease was considered a sex panic.
See also Sedgwick (1994: 19–21, 138–139, 182–212) for a description of what
she terms ‘homosexual panic’.
24 Retief (1994: 103) also confirms the gendered and racialised views espoused by
the Select Committee report: “A striking feature of the Select Committee report
is its white male viewpoint: whenever homosexuality is talked about, it is white
gay men who are used as examples, and lesbians and black gays enter the discus-
sions as afterthoughts”.

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 Part II

TRANSNATIONAL
MIGRATIONS AND DIASPORIC
LINKAGES
 6
“I WANT A YAAR”
Pakistani Muslim American gay men and
transnational same-sex sexual cultures in the West

Ahmed Afzal

Serendipitous encounters: Finding/locating South Asian

Muslim Americans
During 2001–2002, I spent 18 months carrying out ethnographic research
among the Pakistani American and Pakistani immigrant communities in
Houston, Texas. A central goal of my research was to critique homogeniz-
ing impulses in public discourses and policy in the United States that con-
ceived of Pakistani Americans and Pakistani immigrants in the United States
as a monolith. I sought to disrupt the pervasive conception of South Asian
Muslim Americans as a model minority, on one hand, and terrorist and
religious fundamentalists, on the other (Afzal, 2014). Instead, I was inter-
ested in exploring everyday Muslim American lives at the intersection of
race, class, profession, gender, sexuality, citizenship status and religious sec-
tarian affiliations to demonstrate the complexity of the South Asian Muslim
American experience. I was committed to including narratives and experi-
ences of gay-identified Pakistani Americans and Pakistani immigrants not
only to demonstrate the heterogeneity of the South Asian Muslim American
experience but also to reconsider the privileging of heterosexuality in con-
ceptualizing immigrant population movements to the United States.
In the initial months of my research in Houston, however, I recognized
the challenges of finding gay Muslim American interlocutors for my
research. Although South Asian and Muslim LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual) organization exists in
large cities like Austin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San
Francisco and Washington, DC, similar organizations are conspicuously
absent in Houston, the fourth-most populous city in the United States and
a city with one of the largest South Asian Muslim populations in the United
States. Anil, a Houston-based gay Indian American friend whom I had met
online in an effort to make local contacts didn’t know of any Pakistani gay
men in Houston. Instead, Anil pointed me to the South Asian LGBTQIA+
community in Austin. “All of my desi gay friends are in Austin”, Anil said to
me. It started to appear that I would have to travel to the more liberal city

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of Austin to find gay interlocutors for my research. Then, quite serendipi-

tously, only a few months into my research, I met Aamir.
I had been out to dinner with a couple of Pakistani female friends when
we decided to stop at JR’s, a popular gay bar in the Montrose neighborhood
in Houston. Montrose is located next to the Museum District which is
home to over 10 institutions dedicated to education and the arts, notably
the internationally renowned Rothko Chapel, the Menil Collection, and the
Contemporary Arts Museum. After a leisurely late evening at JR’s, we took
a stroll down the street when I saw a young man approach me. I did not
recognize him at first. “I am Aamir. I think we met at the mosque a couple
of weeks back …you were there with a friend of mine”, he said as we stood
in the brightly lit parking lot next to JR’s. Aamir continued: “I saw you
come into the bar but I wasn’t sure if I should come over and say hello. I
had actually left to go home but drove back because I thought I would take
my chance and say hello!” Perhaps noticing my confusion, Aamir said
rather emphatically: “I don’t think too many Pakistanis come here. I am not
out [of the closet] but there are few gay Pakistani friends with whom I come
to JR’s. It has now become a part of my life”.
Aamir was born in Karachi, Pakistan. His family had emigrated from
India to Pakistan at the time of the creation of Pakistan in 1947. One of
Aamir’s maternal aunts had immigrated to the United States and had resided
in Houston since 1981. Aamir’s parents divorced when he was 7 years old.
Aamir’s maternal aunt sponsored Aamir’s mother’s immigration to the
United States. In 1995, Aamir, his eldest brother and his mother immigrated
to Houston. Aamir’s brother completed his education in business manage-
ment in Boston and had stayed there, eventually marrying a Pakistani
American colleague. Aamir and his mother resided in a two-bedroom apart-
ment in southwest Houston. Aamir attended college as a full-time student
and worked part-time as a teller at a bank. His mother worked as an office
administrator at a private financial brokerage company.
Over the course of the next several months, Aamir and I became fast
friends. I socialized often with Aamir and his Pakistani gay friends. In this
group of Pakistani gay men, differences in class, educational backgrounds
and professional affiliations were subordinated to a shared gay Muslim
identity. Aamir’s friendship circle consisted of second-generation Pakistani
Americans, twice-migrant Muslim Pakistanis from the Gulf States and
Africa and recent immigrants from Pakistan. Shahrukh, a recently natural-
ized American citizen, worked as a waiter at an upscale American restau-
rant and had migrated to the United States from Karachi when he was 20
years old. Salman, a second-generation Pakistani American, was born and
raised in Houston. Salman had just recently completed his graduate educa-
tion in social work in Canada. He was in the process of moving back to
Houston where he was born and raised. Saif was a recent Pakistani immi-
grant from Karachi. Saif worked as a salesperson at a local health food
store. Saif’s boyfriend, Imran, worked at a hair and beauty salon in the

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evenings and attended community college part-time. Imran had grown up

in South Africa and had come to the United States for college. Imran had
met Saif through Aamir.1
I still recall the first time that I met Aamir’s friends. Aamir and his friends
had gotten together at Aamir’s home to celebrate Eid, a festival that marks
the end of Ramadhan, a month during which Muslims fast from sunrise to
sunset each day. It was a mild and dry winter night in November. Aamir’s
mother was in Boston to spend the Eid Festival with Aamir’s older brother
and his family. Aamir had cooked a traditional Eid meal consisting of mut-
ton korma (a curry dish with lamb braised with spices and heavy cream),
chicken biryani (a savory rice dish loaded with spicy marinated chicken,
caramelized onions and flavorful saffron rice), vegetable curry and seviyan
(a desert made of vermicelli slow-cooked in milk, sugar, pistachios and
almonds).
As we sat around chatting and enjoying the sumptuous meal, Imran
rather spontaneously began to sing a popular song, “Chithhi aayi hai…
Wattan se chithhi aiye hai” (A letter has come…a letter has come from
home) from a 1986 hit Indian film, Naam (Name) that was sung by cele-
brated Indian ghazal maestro, Pankaj Udhas. The song is a heartfelt ode to
the native land and speaks of diasporic longings for the homeland.
Underscoring the enduring significance of this song and its place in the
South Asian diaspora, journalist Pradeep, in an article in The Hindu, a daily
English-language newspaper published in India, writes:

Some songs are immortal. Pankaj Udhas’s Chithhi aayi hai…, an

anthem of longing, a song for those settled far away from their
motherland, tugs at the heart strings… No concert of Udhas is com-
plete without this song, which was voted among the top 100 songs
of the millennium by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
(Pradeep, 2017)

I recall the evening at Aamir’s home as a significant “lightbulb moment”

that allowed me insights into the varied registers deployed by Aamir and his
friends in constructing a transnational sexuality and identity. One, these
young men were practicing Muslims who observed the alcohol prohibition,
ate only halal food, prayed daily and remained deeply committed to their
faith. Two, these men shared an ancestral affiliation to Pakistan. Three,
these men invoked South Asian popular culture that transcended the border
of Pakistan, as evidenced from Imran’s spontaneous rendition of an Indian
film song, to position themselves as a part of a South Asian diaspora. Finally,
this friendship circle consisted of men who had appropriated Western epis-
temologies of sexuality and self-identified as gay men.
In this chapter, I draw on ethnographic research with South Asian Muslim
American gay men of Pakistani descent in Houston to explore discourses
and practices that shape transnational same-sex sexual cultural formations

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in the West. The analysis is guided by the following set of interrelated ques-
tions: What are the national, transnational and cultural contexts, discourses
and social locations that shape constructions of selfhood, identity, commu-
nity and belonging for gay Muslim Americans? How and to what effect do
these transnational same-sex sexual cultural formations challenge and/or
appropriate western terminologies and categories of sexuality in the United
States on the one hand and South Asian cultural scripts of homo-sociality
and same-sex eroticism, love and relationships on the other? and, finally,
How is religion implicated in and intertwined with such appropriations and
cultural, geographical and linguistic border crossings?
The analysis disavows liberalist notions of a transparent and monolithic
queer sexuality that have guided Western human rights activism in the non-
West and instead employs cultural analysis to explore everyday negotia-
tions of religion, race, sexuality and transnationalism in Muslim American
communities during the early twenty-first century. The analysis highlights
two intersecting registers of selfhood and subjectification that place sexual-
ity in local, transnational and cultural contexts. In particular, I draw atten-
tion to culturally constructed male sexualities that are informed by the
scripts of homo-sociality and same-sex eroticism, love and relationships in
the homeland and the increasing centrality of belonging to a transnational
Muslim ummah, that is, “a transnational supra-geographical community of
fellow Muslims that transcends nationality and other bases of community”
(Kibria, 2011, pp. 4).
The narratives of South Asian Muslim American gay men discussed in
this chapter contribute to ethnographies of Muslim Americans and cultural
analyses of LGBTQIA+ immigrant communities in the West. The ethno-
graphic focus on Muslim American gay men of Pakistani descent is a cor-
rective to the exclusively heterosexual focus of research on transnational
Muslim population movements and community formations in the United
States in the early twenty-first century. Equally, the analysis challenges the
increasingly hegemonic interpretations of the Qur’an that foreclose the pos-
sibility of accommodation of same-sex eroticism, love and relationships in
Islam. Instead, the analysis reveals spaces of same-sex sexual accommoda-
tion in Islam.

Research methods
The data for this study were collected for my doctoral research during long-
term qualitative ethnographic fieldwork, notably participant observation
and qualitative interviews, in Houston for 18 consecutive months in 2001–
2002. I visited Houston for shorter visits to carry out postdoctoral research
from 2002 to 2011. The participation observation took place at a variety of
public venues such as bars, clubs and cafes, as well as social get-togethers
and visits at the homes of my interlocutors and their straight and gay
Muslim and non-Muslim friends and acquaintances. Beyond participating

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in the everyday lives of my interlocutors, I tape-recorded 10 in-depth oral

life-history interviews. During the entire duration of my initial fieldwork in
Houston, I resided in a section of southwest Houston where South Asian
businesses and residences predominate.
The institutional review board at Yale University, where I completed my
doctoral education, approved the research. In keeping with the requisite ethi-
cal and regulatory obligations for the protection of human participants in
social science research, I have used pseudonyms and changed identifying
details for all interlocutors mentioned in this chapter. All interlocutors were
fully aware of my research and of my identity as a doctoral student. All inter-
locutors signed a consent form that explained their role and rights as partici-
pants of this study. As stated in the consent form and as I communicated
explicitly verbally to all interlocutors, they were free to decide not to partici-
pate in the study. If they joined the study, they could change their mind later
and leave the research at any time. There would be no penalty or loss of
services or benefits if they decided to not take part in the research project.
My identities as a Pakistani Muslim American gay man provided this
research with a personal investment. The period of my scholarly inquiry
into the questions and concerns raised in this chapter coincided with my
own quest to rethink and further understand the legitimacy of my Muslim
and gay identities, especially in light of the increasing hegemony of literalist
interpretations of the Qur’an in contemporary universalist Islam (D’Alisera,
2004; Kibria, 2011) that criminalize same-sex desire, love and relation-
ships. Fragments of the narratives and the glimpses of everyday practices of
self-making of my interlocutors discussed in this chapter assuredly make
visible the active strategies and resources that Muslim American gay men
deploy to create space within the global Muslim ummah even as they fash-
ion a selfhood that evokes Western terminologies of nonheteronormative
sexualities. Much as these complex negotiations intersected with my jour-
ney, this chapter is not about me. It tells the story of these men.
Two caveats are in order before continuing further. One, the ethnographic
research and data presented in this chapter reflect transnational sexual cul-
tural formations through the lens of a specific group of gay Muslim
Americans, that is, Muslim men of Pakistani descent who had resided in
Houston and with whom I interacted during the period of research during
the 2000s. My intention in this chapter is to ground the analysis of transna-
tional Muslim American sexual cultures within the specificities of the indi-
vidual life experiences of my interlocutors. The analysis should not be
taken as an attempt to generalize or elide the variety and range of emergent
transnational nonheteronormative sexual cultural formations in Muslim
American populations in the United States. Following anthropologist
Richard Parker’s (1999) approach in his ethnographic study of globalization
and the emergence of modern gay communities in Brazil, I similarly approach
the documentation of Pakistani Muslim American gay lives in this essay as
“a collection of fragments, slices of life, bits and pieces” (Parker, 1999, p. 23)

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 AHMED AFZAL

rather than a definitive account of the lives of the men included in the study
much less representative of all transnational Muslim American nonhetero-
normative sexual cultural formations.
Two, the research in this chapter documents South Asian sexual cultural
formations during a specific period, that is, the first decade of the twenty-
first century. The data and analysis do not reflect developments and
changes and the cultural politics of Muslim American sexual cultural for-
mations since the time I completed the research. Indeed, the transnational
Muslim sexual cultural formations that I describe and document in this
chapter are always in the making, shaped by shifting emphases on varied
transnational registers of invocation and affiliations, as well as changes in
individual dispositions in constructions of selfhood, sexuality and com-
munity over time.

Theorizing transnational same-sex sexual cultures

The analysis of transnational same-sex sexual cultures in this chapter builds
on theories of transnationalism through an ethnographic analysis of South
Asian Muslim American gay men of Pakistani descent in Houston. In the
last couple of decades, anthropologists have intervened in theorizations
around transnationalism and produced a copious body of scholarship that
has examined negotiations of nationhood, citizenship and belonging among
recent immigrant communities in the United States. In the contemporary
period of globalization marked by the intensified flows of people, ideologies
and capital across national borders, notions such as nationhood, citizenship
and cultural belonging are no longer bound within the territorial boundar-
ies of the nation-state (e.g., see Appadurai, 1996; Basch et al., 1994; Gupta
& Ferguson, 1997; Hannerz, 1996). Rather, theorists of globalization and
transnationalism such as Arjun Appadurai (1996) argue that “global cul-
tural flows” such as the movements of individuals across national borders
have replaced a single “imagined community” with “imagined worlds”,
that is, the “multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated
imaginations of persons and groups” that transcend the borders of the
nation-state (Appadurai, 1996, p. 33). These theoretical interventions illu-
minate negotiations of belonging, identity and community formations
within shifting fields of power that link the local to the global (e.g.,
Appadurai, 1996; Gupta & Ferguson, 1997; Hannerz, 1996).
Immigrant communities living thousands of miles from the homeland
are engaged with a wide range of projects and practices that reconfigure
the relationship between immigrants and the homeland. For example, eth-
nographic studies have examined the familial, socioeconomic, political,
religious and communication networks and associations maintained by
transmigrants in multiple nation-states (e.g., Abelman & Lie, 1995; Basch
et al., 1994; Clarke, 2004; D’Alisera, 2004; Kibria, 2011; Lessinger, 1996;
Maira, 2002; Ong, 1999; Rana, 2011; Rangaswamy, 2000; Rouse, 1995;

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Shukla, 2003). These studies reveal the institutional structures and every-
day practices through which transmigrants build financial and intellectual
support for transnational projects and highlight the intersection of U.S.-
based immigrant groups with individuals, infrastructure and institutions
beyond the geographical borders of the United States. These practices of
subject-making and being made by regimes of power and authority (Ong,
1996) not only transform relations of national and cultural belonging but
also re-cast religion, race and ethnicity as transnational projects.
In spite of the proliferation of ethnographic studies of transnational com-
munities in the United States, only a few studies have examined transna-
tional same-sex sexual cultural formations in the United States. In Pathways
of Desire: Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men, sociologist Hector
Carrillo (2017), focuses on “sexual migration”, that is, “international
migration processes that are motivated, fully or partially, by the sexuality of
those who migrate” (Carrillo, 2017, pp. 4) to explore the lives of Mexican
gay transmigrants in San Diego, California. A significant contribution of
this work is its attention to a wide range of sexual scripts that are available
to Mexican gay transmigrants in constructing sexual identity. Carrillo per-
suasively counters prevalent accounts of Latino homosexualities that focus
primarily on the pasivo/activo model in organizing male same-sex sexual
relationships. As Carrillo argues,

the sole use of the activo/pasivo model hampers our ability to

examine the incorporation of a global gay sexual schema into the
Mexican world of homoerotic desires, and it keeps us from giving
due consideration to the variety of gay subjectivities, identities,
venues, enclaves, groups, and communities that are recognizable
throughout Mexico.
(2017, pp. 39)

Anthropologist Martin Manalansan’s (2003) ethnographic study of Filipino

gay men in New York City similarly focuses on the lived and embodied
experience of transnationality and the formation of same-sex sexual cul-
tures. Interdisciplinary scholar Carlos Ulises Decena’s (2011) study of same-
sex desire among Dominican men in New York City is another significant
ethnographic study that explores race, class and cultural formations in the
context of gay immigrant men of color. Gender and sexuality studies scholar
Gayatri Gopinath’s (2005) cultural analysis of South Asian diasporic litera-
ture, film and music interrogates notions of “queer female subjectivity in the
diaspora, as it is this particular positionality that forms a constitutive
absence in both dominant nationalist and diasporic discourses” (p. 6).
Contributing to this scholarship, I also attempt to challenge epistemolo-
gies of a monolithic gay identity and subjectivity and disrupt a pervasive
research focus on heterosexual international population movements and
diasporic formations. The analysis in this chapter follows this scholarship

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in drawing on specific moments in oral life history narratives and conversa-

tions to show how Muslim American gay men evoke multiple registers in
constructions of gendered and racialized transnational subjectivities.
Significantly, in focusing on narrative and conversations, I show how cer-
tain words and cultural scripts travel across cultural and national borders,
and the contexts of such cultural and linguistic border crossings.
In-depth ethnographic and cultural analyses of Muslim gay men and
women in the United States are sparse, and “queer sexual migration from
Pakistan, a significant subculture, has mostly gone unstudied” (Rana, 2011,
pp. 120). Indeed, most of the “post-9/11 ethnographies” (Maira, 2009) only
cursorily if at all, document the lived experience of gay Muslim Americans
(for examples of post-9/11 ethnographies of Muslim Americans, see Ahmed,
2002; Cainkar, 2009; Ewing, 2008; Howell & Jamal, 2008; Kibria, 2011;
Leonard, 2003). Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender
Muslims by religious studies scholar Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle (2014) is a
notable exception. Kugle draws on the narratives and biographies of
LGBTQIA+ Muslim activists in Canada, Europe, South Africa and the
United States to illuminate the varied appropriations of Islam as a source of
capital in fashioning nonheteronormative selfhoods and modes of activism.
As the narratives and biographies included in Kugle’s important and neces-
sary scholarship demonstrate, lesbian, gay and transgender Muslims who
reside in modern secular democratic nation-states do not reject Islam but
instead actively engage with religious tradition by reinterpreting the Qur’an.
Others participate in lesbian and gay Muslim groups and seek out co-reli-
gionists in an effort to reconcile their nonheteronormative sexuality with a
professed belonging to Islam.
A few post-9/11 cultural analyses have discursively addressed the issue of
non-heteronormative Muslim sexualities in the West through the lens of the
regimes of governmentality and the disciplining of Muslim immigrants in
the United States (e.g., Maira, 2009; Puar, 2007; Rana, 2011; Reddy, 2011).
These studies reveal the multiple marginalities gay Muslims experience
under the contemporary U.S. regimes of state violence, regulation and sur-
veillance. For example, in an astute analysis of race, sexuality and citizen-
ship, the gender and sexuality studies scholar Chandan Reddy (2011)
examines the contradictions of U.S. immigration law and legal framework
that privilege heterosexual family structures and render homosexuality sub-
ordinate to this heteronormativity. Equally, sexuality is also subordinated to
the U.S. bureaucratic archives that make immigrants legible primarily on
the basis of religious affiliation and country of ancestral belonging. These
regimes of oppression ironically co-exist with “the liberal state’s ideology of
universal sexual freedom” (Reddy, 2011, p. 164) at home for all subordi-
nate groups. In this contradictory location,

the figure of the gay Pakistani immigrant is both a symptom of

globalization and the transnationalization of U.S. capital and a

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new formation developed in the interstices of the nation-state. This

figure emerges in the breach between the nation-state and the polit-
ical economy.
(Reddy, 2011, p. 164)

The post-9/11 expansion of U.S. projects of nationhood and nationalism

to incorporate homosexuality presents a conundrum for nonheteronor-
mative Pakistani Muslim Americans, at once a site for inclusion if pacified
through their appropriation of homonormativity and the promise of free-
dom and sexual diversity on the one hand (Reddy, 2011), and racialized
“Muslim-as-terrorist” (Puar, 2007) who are outside of inclusionary state
projects of patriotism and nationalism on the other. Gender studies
scholar Jasbir Puar (2007) terms the expansion of U.S. nationalism as
“homonationalism”, that is, “a dual movement in which certain homo-
sexual constituencies have embraced U.S. nationalist agendas and have
also been embraced by nationalist agendas” (p. xxiv). Moreover, this
expansion “sanctions some homosexualities, often through gendered,
racial, and class sanitizing, in order to produce ‘monster-terrorist-fags’;
homosexuals embrace the ‘us-versus-them’ rhetoric of U.S. patriotism and
thus align themselves with this racist and homophobic production” (Puar,
2007, p. 46). U.S. nationalist homosexuality then accommodates certain
racialized and classed categories of homonormative U.S. citizens and sub-
jects in post-9/11 projects of U.S. patriotism and nationalism. Invoking
American Studies scholar Lisa Duggan’s (2002) use of homonormativity
in this context sheds light on the “neo-liberal sexual politics” (Puar, 2007,
p. 39) that domesticate and depoliticize gay constituencies through “invi-
tations into nationalism” (Puar, 2007, p. xxv) and the potential for
LGBTQIA inclusion through government policies, notably the repeal of
the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy, the decriminalization of sod-
omy, the inclusion of gays in the Boy Scouts, and the Supreme Court’s
ruling over the unconstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA) in July 2013.
Building on this scholarship, the data presented in this chapter illuminate
the role of transnational South Asian scripts of same-sex eroticism, love and
relationships and evocations of belonging to a global Muslim ummah in the
formation of Muslim American transnational same-sex sexual cultures. At
the same time, as the appropriation of South Asian cultural scripts is played
out in the United States, it also intersects with the appropriation of Western
language of sexuality and selfhood. Paying analytic attention to narratives
and oral life histories illuminates the varied and intersecting lived and
embodied dimensions of gay Muslim American population movements and
identity formation during the contemporary period of globalization.
Moreover, a focus on these transnational registers reveals the varied sources
of capital for gay Muslim Americans with which they draw borders around
themselves as they go through their lives as Muslims seeking a place in the

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global Muslim ummah, as diasporic South Asians with ancestral affiliations

to Pakistan, and as gay men of color in post-9/11 U.S. society.

“I Want a Yaar”: Transnational circulation of South Asian cultural

scripts of homo-sociality
In spite of differences in individual life experiences, class backgrounds and
professional affiliations, my interlocutors invoked culturally constructed
male sexualities informed by the cultural scripts of homo-sociality and
same-sex eroticism, love and relationship in the homeland. The notion of
yaar (translated as “friend” in Urdu and Hindi) discussed later exemplifies
a significant cultural script that recurred in my conversations with my inter-
locutors about the ideal romantic partner. Such consideration reveals the
transnational circulation of Urdu and Hindi language words across cul-
tural, geographical and linguistic borders and boundaries.
Although Pakistani gay men venture regularly into predominantly gay
spaces—for example, the art galleries, bars, clubs and cafes in the Montrose
neighborhood (and beyond) in Houston—they usually experience these
places with other Muslim gay men. Equally, during conversations over din-
ner, at a bar, or sitting in the café, these men readily espouse their preference
for a Pakistani or a Muslim boyfriend. Sitting at a café in Montrose, Aamir
said to me:

I definitely want to be in a relationship with another Pakistani or

Muslim guy. [Pause] We would be able to understand each other
more. [Pause] We would have the same religion and culture. [Pause]
I think our relationship would be more successful because of this….
[Long pause]. Basically, I want a yaar, you know? Tum samajte ho,
nahi? (You understand what I mean, no?) [I want] someone who is
a special friend with whom I can share everything.

On another occasion, Shahrukh, one of Aamir’s friends, similarly invoked

the notion of yaar to describe what was missing in his relationship with
Mario, a gay Mexican American man in his 20s. Shahrukh had been dating
Mario for the past couple of years. According to Shahrukh, even though he
cared deeply for Mario, he was unsure if the relationship had a future:

Patta nahi kya hai (I don’t know what it is). [Pause] Mario and
I have a great sexual relationship, and I know that he loves me but
[Shifts around… Pause] I don’t know how to describe it. [Pause]
I want to be with someone who is a friend. [Pause] a dost (friend).

These brief fragments from everyday conversations converge on the invoca-

tion of the notion of yaar to describe the ideal male relationship or “special
friendship” as Aamir termed it. There are several interchangeably used

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words for friend in Urdu and Hindi, among them dost, humsafar, saathi
and yaar. Earlier, Shahrukh, for example, had used the term dost. The
pauses in the conversation in both instances, as both Aamir and Shahrukh
searched for the right word in English, and code-switching between Urdu
and English in the conversation, are significant and illustrate the difficulties
in translating the notion of yaar into English. For diasporic subjects like
Aamir and Shahrukh who appropriate Western classifications and catego-
ries of sexuality in constructions of selfhood, such pauses are suggestive of
what performance and queer studies scholar José Esteban Munoz (1999)
has termed as “disidentification”, that is, a strategy of resistance that “works
within and outside the dominant public sphere simultaneously” (p. 5), and
indexes “a multiplicity of inter-locking identity components” (p. 8).

Yaar in South Asian cultural and literary contexts

This language use among diasporic gay Pakistanis has resonance in scholar-
ship that has examined and documented South Asian same-sex male friend-
ships through the lens of same-sex eroticism, love and relationships. For
example, in an autobiographical essay in A Lotus of Another Color, one of
the first anthologies of gay and lesbian South Asians in the diaspora (Ratti,
1993), the writer, a gay Indian male, describes his quest for the ideal rela-
tionship in the following manner that underscores the cultural and linguis-
tic specificity of the term yaar:

Over the past few years I have come to realize that my meandering
path through romance, sexual liaisons, and friendship has been,
and still is, but a search for a singular relationship that can encom-
pass all three of these elements. Such a bond is embodied in the
concept of yaari. A yaar is an individual with whom one feels
a deep, almost intangible connection… For me a yaar embodies
elements of both a friend and a lover, and I yearn for just such a
connection with a man in my life…. There is really no English
equivalent for this concept, no word that approaches its breadth
and depth. Friend is not enough. Buddy is superficial, reeks of
Budweiser beers and backslapping in bars… A world of romantic
images revolves around yaari (friendship). There are tales of yaars
dying for one another. Even a wife must many a time take a back-
seat to a man’s yaar.
(Ayyar, 1993, p. 167)

More recent anthologies that traverse a variety of literary genres—autobi-

ography, fiction, poems, plays and prose extracts—from Bangladesh India,
Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka document the rich repertoire of literary
representations of same-sex sexual eroticism, love and relationships in
South Asia over time and space. One anthology is tellingly titled Yaraana

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 AHMED AFZAL

(translated as “friendship” in Urdu; Merchant, 2011). Literary genres

included in this anthology converge on the myriad traditions and contexts
available in historicizing same-sex love, desire and relationships. Another
anthology, Same-Sex Love in India: Readings From Literature and History
(Vanita, 2001) similarly includes excerpts from religious books, legal and
erotic treatises, story cycles, medieval histories and biographies, modern
novels, short stories, letters, memoirs, plays and poems translated from
different South Asian regional languages into English. The anthology
counters

homophobic myths existing in India and elsewhere that homosexu-

ality was imported to…India, from elsewhere, like the West. This
history of homoeroticism is to assure homo-erotically inclined
Indians of a long Indian tradition which did not view same-sex love
as inferior.
(George, 2002, p. 93)

Like these anthologies, ethnographic accounts of Indian, Pakistani and

Bangladeshi men similarly blur the lines between platonic and sexually inti-
mate friendships (e.g., Afzal, 2005, 2015, 2016). Narratives of contempo-
rary same-sex sexual practices among men who have sex with men in South
Asia (Khan, 1997), for example, are suggestive of the embodied experience
of intimate friendships and yaari in contemporary South Asia. In the follow-
ing, I reproduce fragments of one exemplary narrative from a study of sex-
ual practices among men who have sex with men in India and Bangladesh:

We were friends for a long time and then started flirting and making
jokes about how attractive we found each other…. One evening we
were at his house and were lying on his bed and talking. The next
thing I knew we were hugging each other madly. We took off each
other’s clothes and made out for hours. Our affair continued for a
year…. Emotionally and physically we were close as any lovers.
(Khan, 1997, p. 12)

Male friendships in South Asia demonstrate the potential for encapsulating

sexual desire and love, in part, because of the cultural permissibility of the
intense male bonding that is expressed in single-sex institutions, that is,
schools, or through socialization that brings together young men and cre-
ates gendered public cultures of leisure activities, entertainment, sociality
and living, that is, eating, working and sleeping together (Derne, 2000).
Moreover, the permissibility of sexually intimate friendships in South Asia
may also be due to “the close emotional bonding and physical affection
between male friends while discouraging premarital heterosexual social life,
and the prevalence of boarding schools and late arranged marriage ages”
(Dynes & Donaldson, 1992, p. xii).

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 “I WANT A YAAR”

As shown in the discursive analysis above, invocations of the word yaar

by my Pakistani Muslim American gay interlocutors points to the transna-
tional circulation of South Asian scripts of same-sex eroticism, love and
relationships, and the appropriation of the same in the diaspora as a com-
municative practice in everyday conversations. In the contexts discussed
above, homo-sociality, male bonding and friendships emerge from within
dominant patriarchal kinship patterns and socialities. It may be, as anthro-
pologist Lawrence Cohen (1995) has suggested, that homo-sociality holds
the potential to collapse playfulness and penetration into a single desire,
allowing sexual activities to be situated within the domain of friendships
with flexible, individually negotiated boundaries.

Belonging in the global Muslim Ummah

In addition to the South Asian cultural scripts of same-sex sexual desire and
friendships discussed earlier, belonging to Islam provides another register of
subjectification in gay Muslim American transnational same-sex sexual cul-
tural formations and intersects with ongoing religious revivalism in Islam
globally (Kibria, 2011). Islam is variously mobilized in fashioning transna-
tional subjectifications in the West, calling into question Western notions of
modernity and the nation-state that are premised on the separation of reli-
gion and state and a teleological supremacy of secularism that “is connected
to the rise of the modern nation-state” (Asad, 2003, p. 2). Exemplary
research on Muslim Americans conceptualizes religion as a discursive tradi-
tion that acquires meaning through the interaction of ideology with narra-
tive and practice given specificities of time and space (e.g., D’Alisera, 2004;
Ewing, 2008; Metcalf, 1996). Aligned with such thinking, in the following,
I also relate the engagements with heteronormative and literalist interpreta-
tions of Islamic histories, heritage and ideologies to a religiously conceived
transnational subjectivity among my interlocutors in a post-9/11 U.S. soci-
ety in the early twenty-first century.

Reinterpreting the Qur’an

In the late and the early twenty-first centuries, alarmingly literalist interpre-
tations of homosexuality in the Qur’an and the hadith, that is, sayings
attributed to the Prophet Mohammad and perceived as a definitive source of
Islamic knowledge, have increasingly co-opted discourses, representations
and understandings of nonheterosexual sexualities in Islam (e.g., Doi, 1984;
Dossani, 1997; Duran, 1993; Jamal, 2001; Yahya, 2000; Yip, 2004). These
interpretations characterize Islam as a religious tradition and as a faith that
“explicitly condemns homosexuality, which is addressed through the para-
ble of Prophet Lut in the Qur’an” (Jaspal & Siraj, 2011, p. 183). These liter-
alist interpretations positively affirm and reward heterosexuality and
denounce, criminalize and punish any public expressions of homosexuality,

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foreclosing the possibility of accommodation of same-sex eroticism, love

and relationships in Islam.
For Pakistani Muslim American gay men in Houston who are practicing
Muslims, literalist Qur’anic interpretations of homosexuality are a source
of profound anxiety but have not led to a renunciation of religion or rejec-
tion of religious sources of authority. Rather, Islam remains central to their
lives as gay men, and disrupts understandings of Islam as incapable of non-
heteronormative accommodations. The work of Muslim scholars such as
Scott al-Haqq Kugle (2003) provides compelling insights into accommoda-
tions of same-sex sexual eroticism, love and relationships in Islam histori-
cally. Going against the grain of dominant interpretive understandings of
non-heteronormative sexualities and Islam, Kugle (2003) instead argues:

In comparison with many other religious traditions… Islam is a

religion that has evaluated sexual life positively. Articulating the
integral relationship between spirituality and sexuality is one way
that the Prophet Mohammad challenged his society. It remains for
us, today, to continually struggle with that challenge. The system of
norms, rules, and laws created by Muslims in the past does not
absolve us of this challenge…Muslims in pre-modern times cer-
tainly were not shy about discussing matters of sex.
(pp. 190–191)

In light of such calls to challenge hegemonic interpretations regarding the

apparent impossibility of same-sex eroticism, love and relationships in
Islam, it behooves us to ask: How are exclusionary interpretations of same-
sex sexual eroticism, love and relationships in Islam negotiated in the every-
day lives of Muslims in the early twenty-first century? What are the strategies
through which Pakistani gay men position themselves within a global
Muslim ummah? In an attempt to begin to answer such questions, I return
to the narratives of my interlocutors. I reproduce fragments of a conversa-
tion with Aamir to shed light on the everyday negotiations of religion, spiri-
tuality and sexuality and narrative strategies to authenticate selfhood as
Muslim:

Ahmed Afzal (AA): Would you say you are a religious person?
Aamir: I won’t say that I pray five times a day. I fast during Ramadan, and
pray whenever I can. But I know that I have a good relationship with
Allah. I know that I am very spiritual.… I do not feel guilty that I am
gay or believe that Allah does not like me because I am gay. I think he
likes me more now.
AA: What do you mean?
Aamir: I have accepted that I am gay… whenever I have prayed, Allah has
always given me whatever I have asked for. So that makes me think that
Allah loves me more now because maybe, now I am being honest with

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myself or maybe… I don’t know… I just know that I have a very good
relationship with Allah even though I may not be a very good Muslim.

As if to reinforce such inclusive positioning of gay Muslims within a global

Muslim ummah, Aamir repeated:

I wouldn’t say that my relationship with Allah has been harmed by

my homosexuality. I would say that my relationship with Allah has
become even stronger and Allah really loves me. So it makes me
think that I am being really loved by Allah, so how can this be pos-
sible that Allah hates me or that I cannot be a Muslim?

Aamir sought to reinterpret Islam through an individual relationship with

Allah in ways that attempted to reconcile sexuality with religion and position
himself within the Muslim ummah—a point that is also made by informants
in a study of Muslim American gay men (Minwalla et al., 2005, pp. 118–119).
In my interpretation, the construction of an individual relationship between
Aamir and Allah allows an ongoing and lifelong dialogue that incorporates
new concerns, situations and issues, instead of a relationship that is premised
on finality and resolution. For example, Aamir contested literalist and hege-
monic interpretations of the parable of the Kingdom of Lut, one of the key
narratives in the Qur’an that is used to justify the condemnation of homo-
sexuality in Islam (Duran, 1993; Jamal, 2001). On one occasion when this
topic came up, Aamir shared his interpretation of the parable:

In the Qur’an, there are several things that we are not supposed to
do, but we do them anyway. I would say that it depends a lot on the
interpretation. I think, whatever the Qur’an says about homosexu-
ality, like the Kingdom of Lut, I think they were not destroyed
because of their homosexuality but because they were corrupt. They
were raping people… I think it is just a matter of interpretation.

Aamir’s characterization of the destruction of the Kingdom of Lut as a

consequence of corruption and rape rather than a particular sin suggests the
availability of alternative readings beyond the literalist interpretations of
the Qur’an that are typically invoked to assert the irrevocability of accom-
modation of same-sex eroticism, love and relationships in Islam. Aamir’s
reading of the parable is aligned with alternative scholarly interpretations
that are often elided in discussions on the topic. For example, some scholars
attribute the destruction of the Kingdom of Lut to transgressions such as
the absence of appropriate hospitality accorded to strangers (Jung & Smith,
1993; Kahn, 1989). That a hegemonic interpretation of the parable of the
Kingdom of Lut circulates globally speaks to the globalization of Wahabi
revivalist movements in Islam rather than to an irrefutable truth that is on
the contrary open to multiple interpretations.

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Religious leaders and mediations of sexuality

While Aamir attempted to reconcile religion with sexuality by constructing
a personal relationship with Allah and by reinterpreting the Qur’an, other
Muslim American gay men express religiosity through deference to reli-
gious forms of authority and knowledge. For example, Salman’s religiosity
can be gleaned his solicitation of counsel from an Imam at a local mosque
and community center in Houston.
Salman, an openly gay second-generation Pakistani American Muslim,
had just recently completed his graduate education and was in the process
of moving back to Houston where he was born and had lived until his
graduate studies took him to Canada. I had met Salman at Aamir’s Eid din-
ner party when Salman was visiting from Canada. We met subsequently at
a café in Montrose. Sipping coffee, Salman shared me with me:

You won’t believe this, but I was married. I got married to a

Pakistani woman in Houston. We knew each other before we got
married. She was a student here. I didn’t know that I was gay,
although I had always felt attracted to men. I always felt different
and anxious. I just did not know what to do, so I went to see the
Imam at one of the mosques for advice. I went to the Imam and
told him that I was starting to feel very depressed and that I did not
know what to do. I was just beginning to realize that I wanted to
be with other men, and not women. The Imam advised me to get
married. He said, “[E]verything will be alright when you get mar-
ried.” So I followed his advice and got married to my friend from
college. But things didn’t get better. I just got more and more con-
fused. I mean my wife and I had sex… but something just did not
feel right. We eventually divorced.

This experience, however, had not negatively impacted Salman’s deference

to a religious leader in personal matters. When I asked if he still had faith in
counsel of religious leaders like Imams, he had replied without any hesita-
tion: “Anyone can be wrong. It wasn’t the Imam’s fault that things didn’t
work out with my wife”. Salman was in the process of relocating back to
Houston from Canada and planned to continue his work in social psychol-
ogy with a local community health organization in Houston. “I can’t wait
to return. I would love to be in a relationship when I return”, he said me, as
we finished drinking coffee.
Fragments of my conversations with Aamir, Shahrukh and Salman com-
pel a rethinking of dominant and hegemonic understandings of Islam that
represent Islam as irrefutably intolerant of homosexuality. Instead, the data
presented in this chapter suggests the possibility of a religiously conceived
gay selfhood and identity. Indeed, for men like Aamir and Salman, it is this
possibility of accommodation in Islam and within the Muslim ummah that

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allows them to mobilize religion as a source of capital in fashioning trans-

national identities and subjectivities.

Family relationships and being gay

In spite of concerted engagements with South Asian cultural idioms and
religion and an appropriation of a western gay identity in constructing
transnational sexual identity, my interlocutors expressed much stress
and anxiety over coming out to family. Aamir had come out to his
mother as soon as he turned 18 and was surprised at her reaction. Aamir
recollected:

See, the relationship between my mom and me is very special. We

are not just mother and son, we are best friends. My mom is the
best mom in the world… the way she understands me so well… I
fight with her a lot of the time but I think she is the most perfect
mom anyone can ever have. There was a time when I was new to
the gay life and did not go to the bars or anything. That is when I
told her and she was so accepting. She said, “[Y]ou know what,
you don’t have to worry about it. It is the way you were born. You
cannot change yourself.” She says she has no problem with it. We
don’t really talk about it but she knows about it.

In spite of his mother’s acceptance, Aamir worried about hurting her feel-
ings and refrained from talking to her about his gay friends or his visits to
gay bars or his romantic feelings for another man. Aamir explained to me:

I don’t tell her, but she knows where I go. I think if I told her about
these places, it would be too much for her right now. I just don’t
want to hurt her. Even though she tells me she is not sad, maybe she
is. She is my mom after all. It is a very tough reality that she has to
face so… I mean not everyone’s son is like that… I mean in my
culture, these things are not easy.

In spite of coming out to his mother, Aamir had not as yet told his older
brother, fearing his brother’s reaction:

I don’t think I feel ashamed but I do feel very angry, I feel very frus-
trated, like why can’t I share this with him. I really want to share
this and I hate it that I am not accepted the way I am. I think he is
very religious—my brother and his wife cannot even imagine a
thing like that about me. They have a lot of expectations from
me… and they are very religious.

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Although Aamir experienced familial acceptance from his mother, not all
of Aamir’s friends experienced their family’s acceptance. Saif, who worked
at a beauty salon and was in a monogamous relationship with Imran, for
example, had an increasingly fraught relationship with his mother. Saif was
the only child, and the weight of his family’s expectations weighed heavily
on him. I had gone to see Saif at his house in a midrise apartment complex
in Southwest Houston and met his mother, a single parent, who opened up
about Saif to me. I was surprised at her openness. Saif’s mother said to me:

Saif says that he is gay but this does not exist in our culture. Our
religion does not allow it. Saif knows this. He used to read the
Qur’an and was such a good boy when we were in Pakistan. He has
changed since coming to America.

She continued, in tears:

Saif has been posting pictures on Facebook… pictures with his

friend, Imran. My relatives in Pakistan talk about him and they call
me to tell me about the pictures he keeps posting. He has no shame.
He doesn’t realize that he is embarrassing me. His behavior is going
to kill me. His father has passed away and he is my only child. I
have such high hopes for him but he won’t stop. He keeps saying
that he is gay, but I know that he is not gay. He is just being influ-
enced by Imran and his other friends. He just needs guidance.

I couldn’t say much to appease Saif’s mother except to assure her that
being gay did not change Saif and that he was still a good person. I had
hoped that his mother would come around to accepting him and his rela-
tionship with Imran. I had not been in touch with Saif after I finished my
field research in Houston and had returned to the East Coast. I tried but
couldn’t find him on social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter
or Instagram. I also was not able to connect with him during my subsequent
visits to Houston. During a phone call with Aamir in 2009, I asked him
about Saif. A few years ago, familial pressure and disapproval had become
so intense for Saif that he experienced a nervous breakdown and had to be
hospitalized. His relationship with Imran ended in large part due to familial
pressures and stresses. As soon as Saif recovered and returned from the
hospital, Saif and his mother relocated to Pakistan. According to the news
that circulated within Aamir and Saif’s friendship circle, Saif’s family had
gotten him married to a woman and he was now living in Karachi.
Aamir and Saif’s experiences attest to the enormity of familial pressures
and stresses that can accompany public self-identification as gay men. In
spite of the investment that my interlocutors make in constructing a gay
identity, this investment is upended by fears of familial rejection and disap-
proval. Recall Aamir’s assertion that his brother’s religiosity would prevent

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him from accepting Aamir as a gay male. Also, explaining his reluctance to
share all details of his life as a gay man with his mother, Aamir had said: “I
mean in my culture, these things are not easy”. Recall also Saif’s mother’s
statement: “Being gay, it does not exist in our culture. Our religion does not
allow it”. Moreover, familial concerns are also based on perceived adverse
reactions from extended family and kin-based in Pakistan as well as else-
where in the United States. Saif’s mother, for example, was mortified by
Saif’s open display of his sexuality on social media and worried about her
Pakistan-based family’s reaction. Importantly, such pronouncements and
concerns serve to delink same-sex sexual desires and intimacy and “being
gay” from Pakistani culture and Islam and situate it as a product of the
West in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Conclusion
Although South Asian and Muslim queer organizing exists in large metropo-
lises like New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, it is con-
spicuous by its absence in Houston, a city with one of the largest South Asian
Muslim populations of any city in the United States. Rather, for gay Muslim
men in Houston, a gay identity, cultural citizenship and transnational belong-
ing is intertwined with the “mundane humanity of everyday life” (Cainkar,
2009), and embodied in practice and informal friendship circles rather than
in institutionalized forms of public visibility, protest and dissent.
In this chapter, I have referred to ethnographic research carried out
among gay Muslim American men of Pakistani descent in Houston. The
narratives in this chapter contribute to ethnographic studies of Muslim
Americans, and cultural analyses of transnational sexualities and queer
immigrant communities in the West. The research presented in this chapter
highlights two intersecting registers of transnational selfhood and subjecti-
fication for gay Pakistani Muslim American men: (a) culturally constructed
male sexualities informed by patterns of homo-sociality in the homeland
and (b) the increasing centrality of belonging to a transnational Muslim
ummah.
In spite of the strategic use of South Asian cultural scripts and practices
of belonging to Islam, it is homonormative Western scripts of sexuality
that enables these men to have the freedom to fashion new transnational
identities and subjectifications in the United States. The men discussed in
this chapter did not plan to marry a woman but instead saw themselves as
gay men who actively sought long-term sexual relationships with other
men. As one finds the case in the narratives of South Asian gay men (Ratti,
1993) and Latino and African American gay men (Weston, 1996), Pakistani
Muslim American gay men in Houston similarly mobilize homonormative
Western script to construct new sexual identities. The narratives included
in this chapter are significant because they rupture the heteronormativity
assumed in Muslim American and Pakistani American communities and

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constitute important ethnographic registers in the constitution of lived

experience at the margins of the transnational Muslim ummah.

Acknowledgment
I thank Dr. Ahonaa Roy for her feedback, support and collegiality as I
worked on this chapter. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewer for their
feedback that proved useful in making substantive revisions. The chapter is
dedicated to my interlocutors who generously shared their life experiences
with me. I am most grateful to them for their engagement with this research.
The chapter refers to some of the source material from the following publi-
cation: Afzal, Ahmed (2015) “Being Gay Has Been a Curse for Me”: Gay
Muslim Americans, Narrative and Negotiations of Belonging in the Muslim
Ummah. Journal of Language and Sexuality, Special Issue: Queering
Borders: Language, Sexuality and Migration, 3(1), 60–86. Sections of the
article are reprinted with kind permission from John Benjamins Publishing
Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, https://benjamins.com/catalog/jls.

Notes
1 In keeping with ethics and protocol in social science research and to ensure the
anonymity of all informants, I do not use the real names and have also altered
identifying characteristics of all men discussed in this chapter.

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 7
DECOLONIZING THE
POSTCOLONIAL BODY IN
DIASPORIC TIME AND SPACE
South Asians in the Caribbean

Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan

What is meant by “the postcolonial body”? Exploring the politics of

embodiment, this essay unpacks the construction of the Indo-Trinidadian
female body as “postcolonial”, constructed through the ongoing discourses
and processes of coloniality, while assessing the everyday survival strategies
and acts of resistance engaged in by Indo-Trinidadian same-sex loving
women. I describe these acts as decolonial praxis. What does it mean to
decolonize, as a process and as a praxis? According to Emma Pérez, “to
decolonize as a queer theorist is to look beyond white colonial heteronor-
mativity to interpret a raced, classed, gendered, sexed world with differ-
ence” (2006, p. 18). The decolonial is a lens of analysis, but it is also a lived
politic; it is a praxis or the performance of certain acts. Just as coloniality is
a process and system of relations, so, too, is decoloniality, a process aimed
at rehumanizing the world, to breaking hierarchies of difference that dehu-
manize subjects and communities and that destroy nature, and to the pro-
duction of counter-discourses, counter-knowledges, counter-creative acts
and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and to open up mul-
tiple other forms of being in the world. (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, p. 10)
Since everyday bodily acts and interactions are subjected to and shaped
by these relations of power, it opens up possibilities for the body to be used
to dismantle coloniality, challenge and refashion its assumed power rela-
tions, discourses, knowledges, acts, practices and ways of being. Embodiment
refers to how we inhabit the body, including how the mundane, social, cul-
tural, political, and spiritual practices all inscribe meaning onto the body
and form part of bodily praxis. While the term erotic is often used to refer
to sexual behaviour, Audre Lorde (1984) indicated that all aspects of bodily
praxis form part of the “erotic” and can potentially become a site of self-
knowing, referred to as erotic subjectivity. These new knowledges can “cre-
ate a counter-public in which new forms of affective and erotic relations
and rules of public and private engagement” can inform choice as well as
open up new choices and politics (Allen, 2012, p. 329). Jafari Allen (2012)

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describes erotic subjectivity as an alternate way of knowing by looking at

one’s own lived experiences, intentions and desires. This knowledge can
foster bodily autonomy, entailing the use of the body and the erotic to con-
test the power and gaze of others or in resistance to prescribed norms,
which Mimi Sheller (2012) referred to as “embodied freedom”. Sheller
includes such performative acts as music, dance, and worship, as well as the
structural practices of family formation and landholding institutions. As
such, the body, its performativity and eroticism are all closely tied to the
projects of colonization as well as decolonization.
Indo-Trinidadian women’s same-sex loving practices, their erotic subjec-
tivities and performances of embodied freedom, which I categorize as
“queer”, can thus be examined in relation to (de)colonial power relations.
Utilizing queer here causes some tension as it is typically complicit in bol-
stering colonial ideas rooted in Western modernity and centring the white
middle-class (often male) subject. How then does “queer” become relevant
to the “decolonial”? Emma Pérez (2006) notes the utility of queer as a
noun, verb and adjective, which opens up many paths of inquiry into
queerness. According to Pérez, a decolonial queer analysis is one that is
attentive to “the persistent production of colonial relations and how colo-
nial relations are often raced and sexed” (p. 7) by resisting the dominant
white heteronormative ideologies. Queer is not limited to gender and sexu-
ality but extends to the ways in which race, ethnicity, postcolonial nation-
alisms interact with these and other discourses that constitute and fracture
identities (Sedgwick, 1993). In The Postcolonial Body in Queer Time and
Space, Rebecca Fine Romanow (2006) aligns the postcolonial with queer
non-normative space (geography) and temporality, “constructed by the his-
tory of colonization, the process of Othering, and the pressures and reali-
ties of the diaspora and the emerging global communities” (pp. 3–4). These
processes disrupt normative time and space whilst creating a narrative that
tries to gloss over the disruptions and portray these sites as “normal”. But
the postcolonial subject performatively embodies these disruptions and, in
so doing queer, the assumed norms. Gayatri Gopinath (2011) goes further
in her categorization of the diaspora as queer in relation to the nation yet
recognizes that queer within the diaspora is often erased as the search for
origins often hinges on notions of purity, which “queer” besmirches
through its transgression. Gopinath notes that “queer diasporic cultural
forms work against the violent effacements that produce the fictions of
purity that lie at the heart of dominant nationalist and diasporic ideolo-
gies” (2011, p. 4), meaning that cultural forms produced by and from a
queer diasporic perspective can disrupt the fictional assertions of purity, as
made by nation and diaspora.
In addition to their cultural forms, one can interrogate the local and
everyday survival strategies and acts of resistance engaged in by queers
within the diaspora, which I do in this chapter, using interviews conducted
with 40 women who experienced same-sex desire. Thirteen of these women

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were of solely Indian descent; eight were of mixed Indian and African
descent, referred to in Trinidad as dougla; and one woman was of Indian
and Chinese descent. When I say “Indo-Caribbean” or “Indo-Trinidadian”,
I leave that designation open to include these women of mixed race, as I
consider their subjectivities formed as a result of their shared Indian back-
ground and the shared history of oppression within the heteropatriarchal,
settler-colonial system experienced by these other racial groups. The dis-
tinctive experiences made by their mixed-raceness are raised as necessary in
this chapter. Of the 22 women with some amount of Indian descent, 7 par-
ticipated in a mapping exercise where they drew representations of their
safe spaces. For those who did not draw maps, I look at their narratives as
representations of the cognitive maps they have produced through con-
scious and subconscious thought based on their experiences of space.
Using insights from these interviews and maps, this chapter explores mul-
tiple dimensions of Indo-Trinidadian same-sex loving women’s decolonial
queer praxis, their everyday practices of resistance and negotiation that
enact a decolonial politic and are queer, either as a noun, verb or adjective.
First, they self-name their ethnic and sexual identities and employ their
bodily praxis to reject fixed, singular, monolithic identities of (post)coloni-
ality, defined on their behalf by those who had power over them within the
colonial heteropatriarchal system. Second, I address mapping as decolonial
through its disruptions of time and space. It is anti-teleological, not con-
forming to the modern perception of linear time. The maps also position the
queer subject into heteronormative and other policed spaces from which
they may be legally, socially or ideologically marginalized. I then turn atten-
tion to another form of decolonial praxis, exploring the women’s attempts
at self-determination and claiming space through what M. Jacqui Alexander
(2005) refers to as pedagogies of the spirit, the use of the body as a medium
to connect to the spiritual realm and attain understandings of self.
Throughout this chapter, I explore the themes of memory, corporeality and
temporality in relation to this decolonial project.

The Postcolonial body

Subjecthood is created by the intersections of the body with knowledge and
power. As Indo-Caribbean women’s subjectivities can be traced through
indenture and post-indenture (including the meanings given to race, gender,
social class, education and family dynamics), conditions specific to colonial-
ism, I use the term postcolonial to refer to their bodies and subjectivities,
which were/are socially defined and interpreted through the codes of social
acceptability that are generated within the power dynamics at work in the
multiple sites of colonization. It is useful to think of colonization not as a
singular act but as a process involving ideological as well as material systems
and institutions in political, social, cultural, and economic realms of experi-
ence. The body is pivotal in these experiences, being the medium through

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which the world is experienced; knowledge about our bodies also deter-
mines how we are interpreted and treated by others. How are Indo-Caribbean
female subjectivities produced? What meanings do these bodies have, and
for whom are these meanings relevant? What knowledges about the body do
young Indo-Trinidadian same-sex loving women negotiate as they operate
within time and space? And, finally, the central question in this chapter, how
do these navigations and negotiations foster a decolonial queer praxis that
rejects this colonial coding of the Indo-Caribbean body and attempts to
reformulate what these bodies symbolize within the Caribbean space?
Indo-Caribbean peoples are not simply “Indian” plus “Caribbean”, or
the bridging of two places or two identities; that designation includes a
complicated multi-sited colonial history and particular enactments of power
on the bodies of indentured workers. Gaiutra Bahadur (2013) points out
that just as “slaves” were not taken from Africa but, rather, that Africans
were enslaved, so the British also did not recruit “coolies” for the sugar cane
fields, instead creating “an indistinguishable, degraded mass of plantation
labourers without caste or family” (p. 43). This process began in the depots
where Indians of various castes and religions were made to sleep and eat
side by side, some venturing to have sex with people of different castes and
even marrying counter to caste rules. The making of coolies continued
aboard ships and on plantations which served as arenas for reshaping and
redefining acceptable gender and sexual roles.
In 1898, more than two thirds of upper-caste migrants who landed in
Guyana were women, especially Brahmin widows for whom the stigma of
remarriage was more profound (Bahadur, 2013, p. 92). Recruiters targeted
these widows and runaway women, including those abandoned by their
husbands, others kidnapped or lured away from their homes, all for whom
social stigma would mean lives of neglect, abuse and poverty, prostitution
or suicide. In spite of this, archives such as ships’ logs and reports tended
to describe women aboard indenture ships as sluts or as victims; women
who made accusations of sexual misconduct were themselves accused of
being of “immoral character” (Bahadur, 2013, p. 120), flirty, forward or
“take[ing] liberties” with the men (Bahadur, 2013, p. 60). Archival records
also contrast the spaces of India and the Caribbean when it came to wom-
en’s freedoms. One archdeacon used the example of taking one’s husband
to court as a freedom that indentured women had that would be unthink-
able in India. As Bahadur says, “relationships taboo in India became neces-
sary in indenture” (2013, p. 92), noting that the scarcity of women, coupled
with their limited access to resources and mobility facilitated their engage-
ment in polyandry and infidelity and their leaving abusive or negligent
men for others who would be more caring and compassionate to them and
their children. Yet, at the same time, Bahadur notes that marriages were
arranged by colonial officials, who did not want women to remain unat-
tached to a man. Marriages were performed in depots and on ships by
their captains and by magistrates, who also “resolved” marital issues and

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break-ups based on their own judgements of what would be best, even if it

was contrary to the women’s wishes.
Indentured women’s new home in the Caribbean was not without con-
straints. They were caught in the tension between competing patriarchies,
requiring active strategizing and negotiation (Mohammed, 2002, 2003).
According to Patricia Mohammed (2002, 2003, 2016) Indo-Caribbean
women “colluded” with attempts to re-establish the “classic patriarchy”
through religious retentions and their being used as symbols of virtue in the
then emerging nationalist discourses (Niranjana, 2011) while also challeng-
ing the emerging gender system “through their new wage earning status and
their sexuality” (Mohammed, 2002, pp. 32–33). Early and mid-twentieth-
century social movements fostered Indo-Caribbean women’s gender con-
sciousness, noting the differences gender made in their social experiences
(Mohammed, 2003), while in the late twentieth century, Indo-Caribbean
women were exposed to more models of womanhood and femininity, as
well as to the “feminist ideals of equality, choice, individual aspirations, and
personal fulfilment” which compelled “contemporary navigations of both
gender consciousness and feminist consciousness” (Hosein & Outar, 2016,
p. 8). Bahadur demonstrates, however, that the women who entered inden-
tureship were always conscious of their own desires, made personal choices
to improve their lives, and advocated for themselves. The contemporary
navigations of same-sex loving Indo-Trinidadian women includes attending
to their sexual desires and what that desire might mean within their social
and cultural contexts. They live this desire as part of their embodiment or
bodily praxis, but what does this mean in a context where even the memory
of same-sex desire has been erased (King, 2015)?

Memory and embodiment

Subjectivity is intimately tied to memory and (re)membering; it is a piecing
together of parts into a particular configuration in order to (re)constitute
space, time and experience. Gill (2010, p. 7) describes subjectivity through
the identifying and positioning of the subject (1) as agent or actor and (2)
as a reference point or topic of discussion. The individual is dually located
within a context wherein they are both an active agent as well as one who
is acted upon, whether by other individuals, communities, groups or institu-
tions. In this way, the individual is always referential, existing in relation to
other things in the immediate and more general setting. Because of this,
knowledge of the self or other is always part of an intersubjective process
(Maldonado-Torres, 2016). Culture is also intersubjective; it is learned and
shared traits, habits and customs that form part of shared experiences
among a given community. Thus, ancestral memory remains relevant for
producing contemporary worldviews and subjectivities.
After their months-long boat journey, migrants set out to “reinvent famil-
iarity” (Mohammed, 2016, p. 27) and to “reconstitute their own ‘Indias’” in

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the Caribbean (Gosine, 2016, p. 56), for example, by substituting ingredi-

ents for their favourite dishes with what they found in the new lands and by
fashioning their styles of homes and gardens like those of rural India.
According to Andil Gosine,

[t]he “India” that becomes recreated by indentures and their

descendants referenced an India that was stuck in time—an India
that was left at the end of the nineteenth century. Although the
quick advance of communication technologies has offered the pos-
sibility of greater linear and geographic coherence by making infor-
mation about far-away place more easily accessible in real time,
recreations of India in the Caribbean by descendents of indentures
remain wrecked.
(2016, 57)

The India that is being remembered is not only time-bound but also frag-
mented or, as Gosine said, “wrecked”. It is made up of the memories of
people who came from different physical and social environments, who
spoke different languages and worshipped different Gods. The “Indian”
was not homogeneous, so it is impossible for the “Indo-Caribbean” to be.
Religious revival by Hindu and Muslim organizations in the 20th century
attempted to smoothen out this memory, standardize religious practice and
sanitize the image of these diasporic Indians who were seen as illegitimate
for having abandoned Mother India. Crossing the kala pani, or black
waters, was thought to sever one’s caste relations and thus their belonging.
Hindus were the larger portion of the indentured population, and Hinduism
still remains the majority religion among Caribbean people of Indian
descent. Organizations such as the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha were
instrumental in standardizing Hindu practice through its network of man-
dirs and schools; they were able to establish Puranic Brahminical practices
as the ritual norm (Ghisyawan, 2016, p. 154). With their voice, presence
and advocacy they projected a homogeneous Indian culture, conflating
“Indian” with “Hindu” and “Hindu” with high-caste conservative values.
These values also apply to the body, which is living memory or as Gopinath
puts it “a historical archive for both individuals and communities” (2005,
p. 1). Embodiment was a way of remembering a past time and space, with
embodiment of religious tenets being a strategy for remembering and main-
taining cultural practices, hence the emphasis placed on performing Indian/
Hindu culture appropriately.
Gopinath explores how the queer racialized body holds the historical
archives and discourses of sexuality that are “inextricable from prior and
continuing histories of colonialism, nationalism, racism, and migration”
(p. 3). Through these racialized bodies’ queer desires, the “barely submerged
theories of colonialism and racism erupt into the present” (p. 2), meaning
that its influences can still be seen in how queer desire is embodied and

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enacted. Queer desire can provide a means for articulating the erotics of
power that interpolate the society, and allows for the excavation of stories
and bodies of the past that have been erased and obscured by colonial and
postcolonial discourses of belonging. What stories are excavated and dis-
rupted by the same-sex desire of Indo-Trinidadian women in the present
moment?
Aditi was in her early 30s when I interviewed her, but we had known each
other as teenagers. She shared about a relationship she had:

We lived as sisters for years until we didn’t care about people any-
more, not even family. It was the best years of my life, though tough
to be called “lesbian”, “pussy-sucker”, “stink”, trying to go against
“God’s natural order”. She became my family and my life and we
battled everything together. In the business world, we made it
because of our business minds put together. Family, in fact, dis-
owned us and never gave us support in any way but we managed
because we believed we were soulmates and we would be together
in any and every form in life.
(Aditi, February 23, 2012)

Aditi and her partner tried to mask their relationship for a while, knowing
that disclosing their status as a couple would result in ostracization from
their families and communities. The verbal abuse they experienced exempli-
fies some of the societal meanings attached to women’s same-sex desire; for
instance, “against God’s natural order” points to the religious ideal of het-
erosexuality. In the Caribbean, the term lesbian has a lot of negative con-
notations, used colloquially as a derogatory term to refer to women who
have sex with other women as “nastiness” and perversion (Clemencia,
1996; Crawford, 2012). Crawford notes that “lesbophobia” can range from
battery and gang-rape on one extreme, and scorning of meals cooked by a
same-sex loving woman on the other (Crawford, 2012; Silvera 1992).
Coupled with its attribution to Western culture as a foreign term fixed on
one’s sexual preferences, “lesbian” is not necessarily how same-sex loving
women would choose to identify. Aditi continued:

Well I’m no longer involved in all the over-religious shit as you’re

aware of… I had my share of real testing times. My private life
blew out of proportion and, well, the siblings I have no longer talk
to me. I have an estranged relationship with my father who thinks
I disgraced the family…the only person who knew and loved me
for it was Ma…
(Aditi, February 23, 2012)

Here, Aditi uses “it” to refer to her same-sex desire and dating women. She
said that after her mother’s death, her relationship with the rest of her

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family deteriorated. In this passage, Aditi recollects what it was like to be in

a relationship with a woman and the trouble with self-making and self-
concept that was done within that relationship, in relation to her family,
and in contact with the wider community. She remembers the relationship
with her partner as “the best years of my life”, yet she simultaneously dealt
with estrangement from her family. Exploring subjectivities through mem-
ory can be likened to recovering versions of the self in specific contexts. In
the previous quote, she mentions multiple versions of herself: as a girlfriend,
as a sister, as a daughter to her mother and to her father, as a member/for-
mer member of a religious community and as each of the many names she
has been called. She has been each of these selves either from her own or
another’s perspective, due to the performances and positioning of her body.
There have been expectations of how she should ideally embody each of
these roles, and her inability or resistance to doing so resulted in her
estrangement from others with whom she held that relationship.
Aditi was right when she assumed that I was “aware” of her withdrawal
from “all the over-religious shit” Aditi was well known amongst Hindus in
our area as she would sing at religious functions while playing the harmo-
nium or the tabla. She was seen as a role model and was treated with admi-
ration and respect in the community. But being held in high regard also
meant that she was subject to scrutiny. When she started university, I had
heard about her drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, worsened by the
fact that she did so in bars, publicly visible. Not long after that, I heard that
she was lesbian and living with a girl. Finally, I was told that she had stopped
singing, but it wasn’t just that; I was told that she couldn’t sing anymore.
According to the gossip, she had “lost” her voice possibly as a result of her
actions, which were not sufficiently respectable in the eyes of the religious
community. She no longer performed the actions of a role model.
The performance of particular acts in different contexts, emphasizes the
nuances of embodiment, memory, subjectivity and space. Examining the
responses to Aditi’s same-sex desire reveals the varied expectations of each
of her identities/positionalities and the tensions therein. The erotic thus
offers a glimpse into various aspects of Aditi’s social, political and cultural
life, by demonstrating the meaning that her same-sex desire takes on in dif-
ferent contexts. Tension is produced when her same-sex desire does not fit
with the ideals expected of that identity as prescribed by those who have
defined it. It is here that we begin to see the limitations and flaws in the col-
lective memory of the diaspora.
Diasporic memory is selective; they remember the ideal image of self that
they would like to project and reproduce, but it is not necessarily a true or
whole memory of the past. Within memory, there is also forgetting. Who
does this memory serve? For whom is it beneficial to remember and/or for-
get these narratives? Is the lack of a queer presence in indentureship history
a deliberate act of forgetting? Andil Gosine (2016) offers another option;
what we view now as gender transgression was simply unremarkable.

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Gosine offers the example of his own unnamed, unchecked, uncorrected

“funniness”, that he was allowed to embody. His father, mother and aunts
did not attempt to erase this behaviour. He claims the silence around sexu-
ality and sexual diversity is not necessarily an erasure but may just be an
opening up of a space where these sexualities and behaviours are allowed
to thrive without being stifled. Gosine suggests that “perhaps the transgres-
sions of dominant masculinity I engaged in did not go far enough to war-
rant a disciplinary response, but I suspect that, in another context” (2016,
p. 55) a boy who engaged in the activities he enjoyed, like staging picnics
and tea parties with his life-sized Miss Piggy muppet and listening to the
campy Xanadu soundtrack, might have been told to “act normal” (p. 55).
Another aspect of this embodiment that Gosine notes is the non-linearity
and racialization of narratives of progress. The past is not necessarily less
free than the present, just as the global North or “developed” world, is not
necessarily more “free” than the global South or “developing” world.
Gosine does this by comparing his “freer” experiences in Trinidad in the
1980s to present-day Canada as “a much more punishing and disciplinary
space” (2016, p. 56). Gosine uses his own embodiment through childhood
photos to trace how histories and power get mapped onto the queer racial-
ized body within time and space. The women I interviewed used maps to
track their own relationships to embodiment, space, time and power.

Mapping as decolonial Praxis

In my doctoral research on female same-sex desire, identity, belonging and
citizenship in Trinidad, I employed a method of mental mapping wherein
participants draw maps responding to the question, “Where do you feel safe
to express yourself regarding your sexuality?” I call this “subjective map-
ping” as the exercise engaged the women’s cognitive reasoning (whether
conscious and unconscious) as they made sense of their (social and spatial)
experiences of particular spaces. This exercise used “safety” and “sexuality”
as the key guiding concepts, but the method can be utilized for the study of
a multitude of topics. All maps are mediated representations of information
(Kitchin & Dodge, 2007; Kitchin et al., 2013). They are authored docu-
ments presenting information that the map-maker determined was impor-
tant or necessary, yet maps are often taken as objective truths. The emphasis
on “subjective” mapping, points to the individual’s experiences of space and
their learning about space through intersubjective negotiations. Each map-
maker puts their experiences, biases, histories and politics into their cre-
ation. Maps are formed in the imagination, as well as in the socio-economic,
political and cultural contexts of experience (Hall 2004; Kitchin 2008) and
can thus provide insight into competing discourses and knowledges within
these contexts. Mapping thus can be a form of decolonial praxis by chal-
lenging the coloniality of space including conceptions of space, the linearity
of space and time, the meanings of material space, the fixity/movement of

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ideologies through space and individual and collective relations to space.

Here, I discuss two features of subjective maps. First, they disrupt the lin-
earity of time and space through their layering of meaning and drawing
from multiple points in time and space; second, they depict the different
iterations of power at work in those contexts, including same-sex loving
women’s challenges to coloniality and heteronormative power.
Time is treated in interesting ways within subjective maps and the map-
ping process itself. Impactful experiences of the creator influenced what
got mapped and how. In this way, the same person can create maps
responding to the same prompt yet depict different content and produce a
different narrative. Although created at a fixed point in time, the maps
depicted spaces within different temporal frames without removing the
complicated social aspects therein. Jaya divided her map into “Safe” and
“Unsafe”. Her safe spaces were ones where she had found supportive com-
munity, mainly through literature, writing and discussion. As she draws
the map, Jaya recollects the spatial as well as social aspects of these spaces,
reconstructing them on the page. Some women drew while speaking, tack-
ing on icons or words as new ideas came to mind, their hands colouring in
beaches, houses, trees and skies while their minds processed memories and
past experiences to reconstruct space. Jaya drew her map and then nar-
rated, so she had already gone through the initial remembering process
and while speaking was able to construct a clear narrative about the spaces
she drew:

Really one of the first things that came to mind was definitely read-
ing and writing, I guess that’s why it’s so big and focal, and then
community. I consider everything I do online is like an extension of
the reading and writing environment. I guess you can call it a
cocoon; it does seem kind of isolated, but umm, I don’t know… I
think writers are people who umm, this is one of my favourite
quotes by another writer, “Writers have things they really need to
tell you but they can’t look you in the face while saying it”. They
have a hard time being external but they do have a lot that they
want to share. Safe space is a space for me to do that without mak-
ing myself very visible in the discussion.
(Jaya, May 10, 2013)

The three spaces Jaya designated as safe all pertained to reading or writ-
ing but were also part of a community. Pointing to the open book on the
table, she said, “[T]his is a book here. I guess it could be a novel. I also try
to read a lot of work that encompasses that LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transexual] experience and I try to write about it too”. She also blogs
about the LGBT experience, calling it “a kind of literary advocacy” and
“the most authentic way I know to lend my voice to the experience”,
especially using her short fiction and poems to address what she identified

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as the “female, bi-identified, Indo-Caribbean perspective”. In her work,

she captures what it is like to

grow up non-heteronormatively here, as much as I could encom-

pass in that, my experiences of it. And I would talk to other people
and observe other people, about what it was like for them, and fil-
ter their stories into fictional interpretations of that kind of life
which is not necessarily easy, even on the best days.
(Jaya, May 10, 2013)

She finds it “complex and nuanced, and painful when you throw in hyper-
religious opinions and family conflict”. Her reading and writing, her stories
and poems thus reflect her sense of self as an individual, as well as her various
social identities, while capturing the experiences of a community of people.
Although not reflected in her map, Jaya provided insight into what it is
like to grow up in a Hindu home in a rural village in central Trinidad, as a
“female, bi-identified, Indo-Caribbean” woman. Her mother proved to be
an ally and asset: “Even though she’s straight, she talked about women as
beautiful and lovely, interesting and complicated and she always invited
conversation about not just that, but all areas related to sexuality”. Jaya
described this as an “unconventional but helpful approach to sexuality that
my mom had, which was very different from my dad who is more conserva-
tive and more traditional where such things are concerned”. Still, when she
had her “first encounters” at about age 14 or 15, “the theory of what it
would be like to be with girls became more tangible and more scary maybe”.
Jaya wrestled with the typical fears associated with exploring one’s sexual
and romantic desires, not only “scared of disappointing” her parents and
her partners but also scared of exploring this side of herself:

[W]ondering if this thing that you thought about yourself is really

true. It turned out to be quite true. Gradually that fear diminished
and I was able to become more comfortable with myself and just be
open with someone in Trinidad about not being sexually normative.
Obviously, I didn’t use those words at fourteen but it was a big deal.
(Jaya, May 10, 2013)

Another fear Jaya negotiated pertained to her family. She harboured a “fear
of not being accepted for who I was even from a parent who claimed to be
sympathetic. I was really reticent about people and trust to begin with, and
you throw sexuality into that it just became more fraught”. Jaya came out
to her mom at 17 or 18, when she had her first serious relationship with a
woman. She recounted:

Despite being a great advocate of all things sexual, hearing that

your child leads at least part of a lifestyle that is difficult to live

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fully in this society, I think it scares a parent. It definitely gave her

pause. She was surprised but accepting, and she has certainly
become more of an LGBT ally, because of my orientation. I am
grateful that I haven’t come out to the rest of my family. That’s
the seeming advantage of bisexuality; you can have what looks
like a functional relationship with a man and no one would think
that you’re otherwise inclined. So, I guess from that perspective, I
can see how lesbians and gay men say that bisexuality is a conve-
nient cover. I don’t think it is but I can see the rationale behind
that idea.
(Jaya, May 10, 2013)

In this excerpt, Jaya brings attention to numerous tensions in her living out
her sexuality, including that between the family/home and the society that
informs, educates and shapes the household space. The second tension lies
in the delegitimizing and marginalization of bisexuality within the LGBT
community (Hemmings, 2002; Munro, 2015). Jaya’s withdrawal from the
local LGBT community was partly due to this marginalization but also
because most events took place in Port of Spain, where she was uncomfort-
able, and because she found their ways of socializing to be middle to upper
class, pretentious and disingenuous, believing them to be modelled after a
type of queer freedom they had seen in movies or TV about what queer life
is like in global cities in the United States or Europe. She still had commu-
nity, however; all of the “safe spaces” she identified pertained to commu-
nity, a community of peers, of writers and readers, of women who she felt
were honest and authentic. Represented by the image of three girls holding
hands in a circle, Jaya describes a “community of like-minded women (not
necessarily a literary community), who are vocal and liberal, who either
themselves identify as non-heteronormative or as allies” (Jaya, May 10,
2013). Consisting of members located locally and internationally, the group
more often than not communes virtually “to spend time together, to engage
in real time”.
The internet has allowed Jaya to participate in this community. Jaya uses
the computer icon as a symbol demonstrating this bridging of space and
time, of individual and community, through the digital media and the vir-
tual world that it unlocks. She considers everything that she does online as
an extension of the reading and writing environment, including writing her
stories, poems and book reviews, blogging and engaging on social media.
She said:

I am not very placard and knocking on doors, so I guess what I try

to do, particularly on Facebook, and I guess through Twitter, is
subtle, and it tends to generate responses that are also not direct,
private responses to things I share in public space, with people who
want to continue the conversation but not through public space. I

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guess that’s how it works, as opposed to being like a big public

soapbox and have those big long fights with people on Facebook.
Also blogging; I guess the main page here is a blog. I mean, I guess,
the reality is, it is easier to be a big supporter of most things online
than it is to support in public space, which I suppose can be equated
to cowardice. But when protesting is concerned, it can have a lot to
do with public safety… with whether or not you’re going to get
punched in the face in Woodford Square,1 as opposed to making a
blog post about it. A lot of that safety gets engendered through
discussion online.
(Jaya, May 10, 2013)

Interestingly, Jaya distinguishes between the public post on Facebook or

other online forums, and the “public space” further distinguished as “public
soapbox”, “public safety” or “Woodford Square”. Online is a different kind
of public that occurs simultaneously and alongside the other kinds of “pub-
lic space” she shuns and avoids. It facilitates one to be and participate in
multiple places at once anywhere in the world, virtually eradicating the
limitations of time and space for sociality, as well as for being political. She
utilizes her online presence to challenge the real pressures and problems
faced in the offline world, problems not limited to “public” spaces, like
schools, communities, religious institutions, but extending into private
spaces, like the home. By asserting existence and voice, mapping confronts
the ways that state practices and discourses position, delegitimize, or seek
to render certain bodies invisible.
Maps are political; they have been used by colonial overlords to demar-
cate territory as they encountered, conquered and claimed lands and seas.
Similarly, subjective maps extend the politics of their creators, demonstrat-
ing their own occupation and co-opting of space while privileging subjectiv-
ity and its role in experience and in ways of knowing and being. Every
aspect of the map demonstrates Jaya’s politics, including her aversion to the
city space, to elitism among the LGBT community and her preference for
online spaces. Although labelled “PORT OF SPAIN”, the “Unsafe” side of
her drawing depicts “how I perceive most interactions in Trinidad”. It
shows skyscrapers with two female figures, one on the edge of the roof of
one building and the other at ground level appearing to peer up at the tower
before her. According to Jaya, the image represents

that fundamental disconnect that people have in public space,

especially when they feel like they have to hide something. So, I can
be either one. I have felt like both at different times. Like I’m out
on a ledge out in society, like too much of me is being seen, like I
want to retreat. And I’ve also felt like I’ve seen people that way and
how it is for them, and I’ve wanted to do something, reach out,
help them, empathize, but I’m afraid to; it’s not how society is

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predicated, so keep your distance and it’s not fair that people just
pass each other with no knowledge of how unsafe or perilous that
person’s existence is, how much of their time is consumed with
concealing huge parts of themselves, and I feel like most of my
public interactions are like that. There are conversations that I
could have with people that never get had, because of how uncom-
fortable it is to engage with people about anything, particularly
sexuality. Like a lot of public local space is not safe. It’s not sup-
portive, not welcoming, just there to fulfil functions and to support
infrastructure and keep society running in a civilized mechanic
kind of way.
(Jaya, May 10, 2013)

In Jaya’s opinion, public space keeps people divided. It does not allow for
meaningful engagement or knowledge of the other but only surface-level
interactions. The figures of herself are the only figures in the cityscape,
pointing to the isolation experienced there.
Subjective maps clearly show that representations are not value-free. This
impression of the space as unwelcoming and unsupportive was crafted
through multiple engagements with the space over time. This was reflected
in other maps as well, with women drawing their family home or churches
to demonstrate their upbringing as well as contemporary negotiations occur-
ring in those spaces. A single representation is layered with time and mean-
ing. The women’s subjectivities exhibit disjunctures in space and time,
demonstrating what Bardenstein (2006) called “diasporic anachronisms”,
where one is affected by events and experiences of different times simultane-
ously. For this reason, I say the maps are anti-teleological, instead represent-
ing what M. Jacqui Alexander called ‘palimpsestic time’, or the lack of
temporal linearity within lived experience. The experience of a single
moment is always in dialogue with past and future moments, even in mem-
ory and thought. Thus, mapping engages both memory as well as futurity or
potentialities.

Self-knowing through the spirit

Only 2 of 20 subjective maps collected in this research depicted religion,
and both did so to designate religious spaces and communities as unsafe
spaces or spaces wherein they were not comfortable. Almost all their narra-
tives, however, contained some reflection on how the women have experi-
enced religion and religious communities. Their personal desires and
same-sex loving identities often conflicted with their religious knowledge,
resulting in their opting to explore more personal spiritual paths.
Sandy, of mixed Indian and African descent, grew up in a Roman
Catholic home. For her, religion was a central part of her self-concept.
Her active engagement in religious schooling, her community church and

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extra-curricular activities pertaining to the church community, youth groups

and prayer circles all served to strengthen her faith while producing a deep-
seated internal conflict. She described her experiences with a spiritual
counsellor:

I have a lecturer who counsels me. Apparently, I need counselling

“cause I’m spiritually sick. This woman named […] and she is a
real real devout catholic. And I get the impression that she was a
lesbian once”, cause she knows too much. She understands it too
well and she told me that I have to understand that it is not real
love; that nothing could come of it. It’s a dead-end road, and I have
to give it time.
(Sandy, October 3, 2013)

But what Sandy experiences emotionally and physically towards the indi-
vidual she believes she loves poses a tremendous obstacle for her embracing
this advice:

But it’s a real paradox you know. How do you stay away from
somebody who in your heart you feel you really love and you could
be with, you enjoy being with? You know, some people [who] you
could like but you never bond with. I am united with this individ-
ual in that particular way. And yes, there is a lot of sex involved,
but it’s more than sex. If it was just about sex, I would have lost
interest already cause I am not sexually driven, but I have a strong
needing to be with her all the time, and it’s fuck up, real fuck up.
Because it is frustrating. Very, very frustrating.
(Sandy, October 3, 2013)

She feels strºngly about her sexuality as well as her spirituality, but feels as
though she is restricted from being both same-sex loving and a Christian.
She continued:

You can’t be a Christian period. And that refusal to let me be, you
know, it is so hypocritical. We say we love God and we all for God
and thing, but we can’t let people live their lives and figure out
what God is for ourselves. We all want to impose what we feel is
right. That made me lose faith in the whole Christian faith, you
know. To a large extent. Because I felt it was as if Christian people
want people to believe what they believe so they could not feel
afraid and alone in this existence and without a God. I don’t know
if that makes sense to you. People feel to need to have other people
involved and towing the same rope as them.
(Sandy, October 3, 2013)

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Sandy’s statements capture the essence of religion, a collective ideology in

which individuals participate, perform and experience. Communities and
peer groups, as well as mainstream and subaltern discourses within a soci-
ety, can provide the views and interpretations through which an individual’s
multisensory (and extrasensory) perceptions are given meaning and can be
made intelligible. Sandy’s experience of the religious community was both
positive and negative. Her sexual practices challenged her concept of self as
a devout Catholic, yet it allowed for a new path of self-discovery. This path
entailed moving away from the strict tenets of religion to a more individual
relationship to the spirit. M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) has explored the
ways in which spiritual knowledge comes to be embodied and made mani-
fest through flesh. Alexander argued that “spirit knowing” is a mechanism
for making the world intelligible, yet

because experience has been understood in purely secular terms,

and because the secular has been divested of the Sacred and the
spiritual divested of the political, this way of knowing is not gener-
ally believed to have the capacity to instruct feminism in the United
States in any meaningful way, in spite of the work of feminist theo-
logians and ethicists.
(2005, p. 15)

Much of my work explores these connections between body and spirit, and
individual’s capacity to bridge these realms of multisensory embodiment
and consciousness.
According to Alexander (2005, p. 15) “spiritual labour and spiritual
knowing is primarily a project of self-knowing and transformation”, but it
is not done in isolation; it requires community to make experience intelligi-
ble through the communal translation of spiritual phenomena, even if indi-
vidual practice differs. Oftentimes, spirituality is aligned with tradition and
thus considered backward and retrogressive for modern society. But schol-
ars such as Alexander (2005), Wekker (2006) and Anzaldua (1987) demon-
strate the essential role spirituality plays in self-determination. Alexander
posits that the sacred is “an ever-changing yet permanent condition of the
universe” and not just “an embarrassingly unfortunate by-product of tradi-
tion in which women are disproportionately caught” (Alexander, 2005, p.
15). She also recognizes its role in sustaining diasporic populations in the
Caribbean, saying that “many individuals would not have survived the
crossing without it; many have been persecuted because of it” (Alexander,
2005, pp. 15–16). Here, she is referring to the outlawing of African spiritual
traditions under the colonial order, but it can further be applied to the
attempts made by missionaries to stem the practice of Eastern traditions like
Islam and Hinduism in the populations they sought to convert to Christianity.
These religious traditions were sources of sustenance to Indian communities
who sought to reconstitute themselves in this new environment.

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This was the case with Alexi’s maternal grandparents, who were fervently
religious:

Her mother is very Muslim. She went to Mecca twice and she wears
hijab. Her dad was Muslim but is now a very serious Jehovah’s
Witness. Her sister is Hindu, so we have kind of the whole, every-
body. But the grandparents are especially… working class mental-
ity, old people, very into their religion, simple, closed-minded.
(Alexi, October 10, 2013)

Especially when Alexi’s mother was a teenager, she had difficulty dealing
with her parents’ rules. She was kicked out of the house for having a black
boyfriend. This made Alexi feel that her own sexuality would not be under-
stood by them:

They would be very upset and I feel like they’re just so old. Why
give them something to worry about and then have to have a
whole conversation with them about it? Just let them live out
their days in peace,

said Alexi. Her mom “rebelled pretty hard against her Muslim upbringing”,
raising Alexi in a home without religious influence.
Instead of rebelling, Vani, who was raised in a very Hindu household,
went with the current, marrying her boyfriend from university, becoming a
parent and a good Hindu wife. The relationship did not last, however, and
Vani returned to Hinduism to rationalize her own emergent same-sex
desires. In her mid-30s at the time of her interview, Vani described her anal-
ysis of the deity called Ardhanareeshwar, the half Shiv–half Durga form.
When interpreted as the balance of male and female energies, it is used to
support heteronormativity. But Vani looked beyond the material form of
the body to interpret this avatar as the harmonious union of these dual
spiritual entities within the individual. She used this symbolism to represent
fluidity of gender performance, including sexual desire. As a spiritual prac-
titioner, Vani employs the system of myths to provide the moorings for her
understanding of self. She uses her memories of the sacred to shapes her
subjective understanding of self (Alexander, 2005, p. 295). In seeking to
answer the question of her same-sex desires (where it comes from, what’s its
purpose, is it right or wrong), Vani and others like her use spiritual knowl-
edge to “justify” their embodiment.
Vani’s experience with Hinduism contrasts against Sandy’s with
Catholicism, contradicting the belief of coloniality/modernity that Eastern
religions are more closed-minded and backward than Western Christianity.
They also contradict the belief that queer sexuality cannot or does not
coexist alongside religion. By subscribing to religious views while actively
pursuing their same-sex desires, these queer women in the diaspora occupy

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a space that simultaneously parallels and transcends that of modernity.

Their embodiment of their sexual desires resists the teleological narrative of
coloniality/modernity that sees confinement in tradition and the past and
liberation in secularism and the future.

Conclusion
While the postcolonial is concerned with the hauntings of colonial violence
in public and private spaces, the decolonial centres alternative ways of liv-
ing and being. Indo-Caribbean communities bear the scars of colonial vio-
lence of the indenture and post-indenture periods and employ cultural
retention as a mechanism for dealing with the trauma left by the web of
colonial violence enacted on them. This trauma can be traced on the body,
read through the performances and acts of individual bodies as well as the
collective bodies of the community. The postcolonial lens watches how
these stories of the past continue to haunt the present, but decolonial praxis
attempts to shake off these ascriptions and instead create a future where
these traumas are not carried forward.
According to Donna McCormack (2014, p. 14), embodiment is a path to
power. Bodily praxis can be used to resist by choosing not to embody
trauma in the same ways, or to at least resist the control of trauma, and act
outside the boundaries that the community defines as acceptable. The
women discussed in this chapter use their bodies to resist all they are told
they must be and instead embody an alternative. Do they do this con-
sciously? Does embodiment need to be consciously decolonial in order to
perform the work of decolonization? It is work aimed at remembering dif-
ferent and silenced stories of the past, uncovering lived realities in the pres-
ent and creating possibilities for a different future. Decolonization is a
question of knowing and of being beyond the constraints of space and time.
It simultaneously attempts to emancipate the past, present and future.
Through their sexual praxis, their maps, their religiosity and their working
to build a life where they can be free, same-sex loving women of Indian
descent embody their resistances to coloniality.

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 8
INTERSECTIONALITY AND SOUTH
ASIAN NON-NORMATIVE
SEXUALITIES
The case of South Asian lesbians and bisexual
women in the United Kingdom

Anna Fry, Surya Monro and Vicki Smith

British South Asian women are an extremely diverse group of individuals

with heritage stemming from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal,
the Maldives, Afghanistan and other countries. They speak many different
languages and follow a number of distinct religions, including Christianity,
Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism (Choudhury et al., 2009).
Immigration from South Asia to Britain has changed markedly, creating
further diversity within this group of women (Brah, 1996; Wilson, 2006).
The British census carried out in 2011 reported that 7.5% of the population
identified as Asian or British Asian, of which 2.5% or 1.4 million people
identified as Indian, 2.0% as Pakistani and 0.75% Bangladeshi. Pakistani
and Indian ethnic group categories have both increased by approximately
0.4 million people since the 2001 census which equates to an increase of 0.5
and 0.6 percentage points respectively (ONS, 2012).
This chapter extends the existing literature that addresses British South
Asian sexualities thorough the lens of race and culture (Jaspal, 2017;
Siraj, 2011, 2012, 2017; Wilson 2006). Key themes include conflicts
regarding sexual and religious identities and strategic concealment of
identity to preserve family and cultural norms and the impact of cultur-
ally shaped patriarchal forces (Christ, 2016), issues of prejudice on the
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) scene (Jaspal, 2017) and
issues around the notion of homosexuality as a “Western disease”
(Wilson, 2006). The chapter approaches the topic by drawing on intersec-
tionality theory.
US scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991) introduced the term “inter-
sectionality” to mean a crossroads where different identities (in her case,
race and gender) intersect and this body of theory was forged by Western
feminists of colour and critical race theorists (McCall, 2005). Intersectionality
theory is rooted in Black feminisms; Black and postcolonial feminisms form

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an important means by which British South Asian women theorise identity

(see, e.g., Gupta, 2003; Pande, 2015). Intersectionality concerns the ways in
which multiple social forces (e.g., patriarchy, homophobia and sexism)
interact or interlock so that these forces combine to forge particular social
positions (see Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). According to McCall there are differ-
ent methodological approaches to intersectionality studies. The first of her
three approaches, anticategorical complexity, deconstructs identity catego-
ries. Anticategorical approaches can be used to dismantle, for instance,
assumptions of heterosexuality. McCall (2005, p. 1771) discusses a further
approach to intersectionality, termed intracategorical ‘because authors
working in this vein tend to focus on particular social groups at neglected
points of intersection.’ It is this approach to intersectionality studies that
forms the framework for the presentation of the narratives in the next sec-
tion of the chapter, as these demonstrate subjectivities of women who are
both non-heterosexual and members of what, in the United Kingdom, are
minority ethnic groups. McCall termed a further approach intersectionality
intercategorical. For McCall, ‘intercategorical complexity…[which] requires
that scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to docu-
ment relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configu-
rations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions’ (2005,
p. 1771). The intercategorical approach is used in the chapter subsequently
to trace themes concerning culture, faith and space.
A semi-structured interview protocol was chosen to allow for an open-
ended question format that would encourage storytelling and the construc-
tion of narratives. Semi-structured interviews ensure that the life-worlds of
individual participants were captured in their appearing, reducing the risk
of interpersonal bias and focussed answers (Langdridge & Hagger-Johnson,
2009). Eleven one-to-one semi-structured interviews with self-identified les-
bian and bisexual British South Asian women of various ages, religious and
cultural backgrounds were carried out in private, safe, confidential settings
in 2016. The questions were structured to be open-ended to allow partici-
pants to freely narrate their life-world and lived experience of being British,
female, of South Asian descent and non-heterosexual and to give partici-
pants the opportunity to be reflexive of their intersecting identities such as
socio-economic status, religiosity and ethnicity. All identifying information
was removed from the transcripts and pseudonyms were given to partici-
pants. Ethics procedures were followed, including gaining participants’
consent for the use of data. Critical narrative analysis was used to under-
stand the data; this is an interpretative phenomenological methodology and
is interested in the stories people tell in recounting the experience of their
life-world (Langdridge, 2008). It included reflection by the researcher (Anna
Fry) on her own experience and a complex process of theme and sub-theme
identification based on the narratives provided by the research contribu-
tors. These include reflection by the researcher (Anna Fry) on her own

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experience and a complex process of theme and sub-theme identification

based on the narratives provided by the research contributors.
The chapter begins by providing three contrasting case narratives of
British South Asian lesbian and bisexual women, as a way of demonstrating
the complex ways in which social characteristics are routed through each
other at an individual level. We then move on to unpick some of the key
themes raised by the data analysis, focusing on the key social structuring
forces of faith, culture and sexual space. The chapter finishes with some
indicative conclusions about sexuality, South Asian diasporic identities
from a British perspective and intersectionality.

Intracategorical intersectionality and contrasting narratives

A range of narratives emerged from different contributors’ interviews.
Occupying a diasporic position meant, for most of the contributors, having
complex relationships across the country of familial origin and the United
Kingdom, which required a significant amount of identity and lifestyle man-
agement. Key themes included the following: cultural identities, specifically
issues concerning the negotiation of both Asian and lesbian, bisexual or gay
identities; challenges associated with heteronormativity and living within
British Asian communities (for those who did so); relationships with family
and friends; and processes of innovation and agency. The following quote
provides an example of the latter:

[W]e make up our own traditions, we will wear a top with jeans or
we wear a bindi but you know we’re not wearing a Sari or I am
wearing my DM’s [Doc Martin boots] and my Sari, that kind
of thing.
(Amber, Hindu heritage)

The three narratives presented in this section consist of a mixture of direct

quotes and summaries of aspects of the women’s stories. Stories from a Sikh
woman, a Hindu woman and a Muslim woman are included to form some
indicative representation of the three largest faith groups found in the
British South Asian population. The narratives address a tapestry of experi-
ences and concerns, including personal stories of spirituality and religion,
relationships with the immediate and extended families, sexual partners
and friendships and the regulation of behaviour to manage the social norms
of both communities of origin and wider British society.

Hajra—Sikh narrative
Three distinct narratives, which relate to the research question, emerged
from Anna Fry’s research interview with Hajra.

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Family ties and bereavement

When Hajra was 15 years old, she had attempted to tell her mother that she
was gay. However, her mother dismissed the idea. Hajra stated:

I think if my mum was alive she would understand even less, cos she,
I just don’t think she would, I tried to tell her when I was 15 and I
said, “what would you do if I’m lesbian”, “what do you think of me
being a lesbian”, she said, “what’s one of them”, all in Punjabi this
conversation was and I said um “it’s a woman who lives with a
woman in the way men and women live together” and she said “oh
we don’t want to do that” very light hearted and I thought Oh God…

Hajra describes how the death of her mother was a catalyst for coming out:
“I just didn’t give a shit anymore. I didn’t have anything to lose”. The loss of
her mother meant that Hajra felt she had no reason to fear her mother’s dis-
approval. However, there are ongoing implications with other family mem-
bers. The pressure to maintain “acceptable” relationships that, for Hajra,
make her “acceptable” to her family means that she does not feel that she can
reach out to her family for support when her relationships break down:

I don’t feel like I can crash and burn and turn up back at my dad’s
house with my bags, I can’t, I don’t really feel like it’s an option and
I feel like it undermines my decisions if I do so whatever happens I
feel like I do have to survive on my own but it’s weird because I do
have my relationship with my family but then I, I do feel like I keep
a wall between me and everybody.

Hajra longs for an “easy life” where she can find acceptance of her sexuality
and where her way of being is seen as normal. This “normality” is found at
the family home of her partner who is not a part of Hajra’s cultural heri-
tage: “K’s family they help. They help normalise something, I feel a sense of
belonging that I have never felt and I think it does make me healthier men-
tally”. Although Hajra states, “I do think me and my mum would have got
to a point where she would have understood cos actually love is gender-
less”, she also cannot imagine what it would be like to tell her mum that she
is gay: “I just don’t know how you would even go to, go about telling your
mum you’re gay”.

The Importance of Indian culture and identity

This narrative consists of five sub-narratives linking relationship difficulties,
cultural limitations imposed on her sexuality to gain acceptance in her com-
munity, Western versus Indian culture, help-seeking behaviours and coping
and resilience. Hajra spoke at length about how she negotiates her Indian,

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English and lesbian identities and how these cause conflict in her life. Hajra
confirms how difficult it is for her to be gay and Asian: “It’s hard sometimes
to just be gay and Asian because you, even though I live within the culture,
I live on the margins of the culture”. Her cultural connectedness is extremely
important to her, and she feels that this connectedness makes her sexuality
more acceptable to her community—“I think [what] has made me more
acceptable is because I am not Westernised”—and to her family— “I think
that’s what makes me acceptable because my dad saw that she still speaks the
language perfectly, she still wants to go to India erm, she wants to have an
Indian life”. Hajra feels that this sets her apart from other non-heterosexual
Asian women that she has met, and in this way, Hajra creates a sense of
resilience and coping. Hajra also believes that she is more accepted in her
community as

[my] behaviour’s beyond reproach basically. They can’t be like

“Oh, I saw Hajra kissing”. You never see me kissing a girl, you
might see me walking with a girl but like we are walking in town
so it’s, I just think it’s because I live within the kind of framework
I’m more acceptable than other people…

However, Hajra acknowledges the stress that this causes her and speaks of
how she feels that it takes a huge amount of “strength of character” to live
as a gay Asian woman. She believes her courage will never be recognised in
her community: “[T]here’s nobody in my life whose Asian who has said ‘oh,
you know what, good on you, good on you for doing what is right for you’.
It’s never going to happen”. The intersection of Hajra’s Asian identity and
gay identity gives rise to a conflict in which Hajra believes her behaviour
diverges from the traditional cultural experience of Asian people. Hajra will
not follow what she believes to be the “rite of passage”: “[Y]ou go to get an
education, you get a good job, you get married.” Hajra finds this way of
being restrictive and feels that she needs to experience every part of herself
as an individual: “[A]side from my sexuality I feel like I have to live every
part of myself”. However, this means that she is unable to be the dutiful
daughter that she yearns to be to find acceptance. She feels that she is doing
her father an “injustice” in not marrying a man from her cultural back-
ground to create a “union of families” and that he will never experience
‘that big Indian wedding and invite all his friends”. Again, Hajra’s lived
experience is conflicted between her culture and her sexuality. This conflict
also exists within her English identity:

[T]here’s loads of different parts of my identity but I just for my

children, they have to speak Punjabi because otherwise it’s gone our
connection to our home land it’s gone and we’re not English for all
our English quirks we’re still not English you know um, that’s
important to me.

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Hajra describes this as an “Indian pressure” for relationships to work and

feels: that if she lets her father know that her current relationship is not
working at the moment, then “I give him scope to criticise my lifestyle”.
This is further emphasised by Hajra’s desire to find a life partner who is
from the same cultural background as herself who would share the same
Punjabi history, language, popular culture, food and music:

[L]ike if my K was everything she is but she was Asian, she would
be absolute perfection because a part of her I can’t share, a part of
myself I can’t share with her and it’s like the err, the jokes in Punjabi
or like what we know about Punjabi history does that make sense.

Religious identity
The third narrative examines the Sikh religion and how Hajra reconciles
her religious identity with her lesbian identity and consists of one inherent
sub-narrative of self-acceptance. For Hajra it was “a massive journey” but
a necessary journey: “[I]t was one of the biggest things that made me feel
bad about it cos it was like, I’m bad, God doesn’t like gay people”. For
Hajra to build a sense of self-acceptance, she feels it was “probably turning
my back on organised religion that made me think actually, you know what,
this is alright”. However, Hajra speaks angrily of acceding to religious peo-
ple: “I find myself sometimes appeasing, appeasing people, religious people,
like, not being open and gay with them… I don’t need to be spending fuck-
ing time with people like that”. Furthermore, she challenges religious norms
and finds self-acceptance in doing so:

[W]hen I go to the Sikh temple I am very aware of it but that said,

I do take my girlfriend and we sit next to each other and sometimes
I touch fingers with her and it is so subtle, subtle things that I do
accept myself as I am…

Hajra’s journey through formal religion towards spirituality has allowed to

her to remain connected to the cultural elements of her religious back-
ground and sense of community whilst reconciling her sexual identity
within a framework of self-acceptance and spiritual healing.

Adeela—Hindu narrative
Adeela is in her late 20s and self-identifies as a gay woman of Indian descent.
Adeela is first/second-generation Indian and describes herself as British
from a Hindu family, although Adeela does not describe herself as Hindu.
Currently employed, after studying at university away from the family
home, Adeela lives with a close family member and is in a serious long-term

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relationship with a woman from a different cultural background. Adeela

has a “massive” extended family which, according to Adeela “is a bit cha-
otic but also fabulous”. Two distinct narratives, which relate to the research
question, emerged from Anna’s interview with Adeela.

“Double life”, Secrecy and self-monitoring around sexuality and mental

ill health
Although Adeela has told her parents that she is gay, she lives with a family
member who is not aware of her sexuality. In this way, Adeela feels that “it
really is a double life; I’ve always felt like that”. This double life has not just
been about Adeela’s sexuality but also about mental health as Adeela
attended counselling secretly for two years due to being “really depressed
um, self-harming um, secretly went to see, I was seeing a counsellor”.
Adeela’s extended family are unaware of her sexuality and this requires
Adeela to conceal her identity. Adeela expresses just how complicated self-
monitoring can be and how difficult it can be to maintain secrecy:

I’ve always had to watch where I am, which were the wrong people
to know, who in my family knows? With such an extended family
it’s difficult actually because there are people that know who I am
and I don’t know who they are.

Adeela’s parents’ fears compound her self-monitoring which increases her

stress: “[T]hey [Adeela’s parents] said you know, if it came up in the com-
munity you know certain members of our family would not treat us well”.
However, Adeela also feels defiant: “[I]t’s a real genuine fear for my parents,
I completely get that, I do but at what point does it become none else’s
bloody business (laughs)”. Adeela experiences stress due to the need for
secrecy as she has been in a relationship for a number of years and “I’m
being asked when I’m getting married and I’m being asked when I’m going
to get a husband and have children”. Furthermore, there is a risk that by
revealing her sexuality, extended family in India may become aware and be
distressed by this news. Adeela’s parents have said that family in India “will
have heart attacks and die”, and although Adeela knows this is irrational,
she believes that this may be true.
Adeela and her partner would like to marry, however; Adeela feels that
she must reveal her sexuality before this can become a reality. This impacts
on her mental health, which then affects her relationship; however, Adeela
has created a strong network of friends who are supportive. Adeela con-
cludes this narrative by acknowledging her role in the secrecy and invisibil-
ity of non-heterosexual women from her cultural background:

I contribute to that I, my part in it, of course I do err so that really

does, in the way society makes it invisible, we do ourselves as a way

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of coping absolutely as a way of sort of getting through the painful

words like I feel now and some people, you know never do, some
people choose to get married and have different lives or just get
married and have a second relationship…

Although Adeela feels a great, deal of distress due to her current situation
there is a tone of defiance and determination throughout her narrative.
Adeela demonstrates her self-acceptance and determination to make the life
she wants for herself without secrecy. However, this is often constructed
within the confines of her culture and community.

Coming out
The second narrative describes Adeela’s coming out process and the rela-
tionship with her parents and wider family. This narrative consists of two
intrinsic sub-narratives, cultural considerations and marriage. Adeela came
out to her parents when she was in her late teens: “I came out to my mum
first. I was crying and she said it was not Indian and I was like, my mother
is very British…hard as nails but she is Indian when she wants to be, pisses
me off (laughs)”.
Adeela felt that she had to leave home, but returned after a few days.
However, “it was tense after that”. Adeela describes how, “for the first cou-
ple of years, funnily we just didn’t talk about it (whispers), it just didn’t get
talked about”. Adeela would lie to them about where she was going on the
weekends and whom she was seeing. Eventually, however, Adeela began to
say that she was going to her partner’s house or to pride events: “[T]hey’d
be cool, no reaction but there would be a point where you could see, you
could see this internal bristle um, but err other than that nothing was said”.
This tactic worked for Adeela, and over time, “things got better, it got easier
to talk about things um, it was almost as though I was saying a bit more and
then my parents were trying to say a bit more”. However, when Adeela
ended difficult relationships her parents would use this as an opportunity to
show disapproval of her sexuality, “so they were invariably brought into
those car crashes which was frustrating and embarrassing and a bit of a, to
them, a way of saying, ‘wow look this is what happens”. Recently, Adeela’s
parents have become more accepting, and Adeela was brought to tears
when her mum stated, “[T]hese difficult relationships or these breakups
would happen in any kind of relationship”. However, Adeela feels that her
parents find it difficult to understand her relationship breakdowns as they
were married young and “they have some old fashioned very country Indian
views as well”.Adeela feels that she is constantly deciding whether to come
out to her wider family due to their hetero-normative expectations:

It is a process of constantly coming out or deciding to or even just

err, wider extended family. Ever since I qualified the, ok, when are

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you going to get married or you know, time to, time to get married
um, one of my aunts, one of my great aunts said to me, “ok, you
have to stop err, to stop studying because you will never find a man
who is more qualified than you now”. I’m like fine (whispered). I
had this significant and much restrained urge to punch her in the
face…

Adeela becomes frustrated and angry by these assumptions as she witnesses

family members marrying and having children as this is what she wants for
herself but feels she cannot have now. In her defiant moments, Adeela
becomes angry that her sexuality is viewed so negatively: “I don’t deliber-
ately hurt people, no it doesn’t upset me it pisses me off, it makes me
annoyed, it makes me angry”. In spite of this, Adeela concludes this narra-
tive by stating,

[N]o matter how difficult it might end up being, not because I don’t
want, not because I want to see my parents suffer or fear or double
take or second guess everything but because I am the one who has
to live with myself day in and day out and I will live my life the way
is right for me without hurting other people…

Fazana—Muslim narrative
The themes to come out of Fazana’s interview concern family, faith and
sexuality. Fazana describes how she grew up within the boundaries of her
religion and culture. Her life was very “black and white”, and Fazana felt
“very happy with all the answers that I perceived in the world that I was
living”. As a young adult, Fazana left home for university, and she felt that
her life went into “free fall”. “Right and wrong” no longer felt as simple as
it had within the confines of her family and community, and this resulted in
Fazana isolating herself from her family and losing faith in her religion. It
was during this period that Fazana had her first sexual experience with a
woman. This experience caused Fazana a considerable amount of anxiety
as she struggled to reconcile her experience with her understanding of the
world through a lens of Islam and cultural expectations. However, Fazana
felt that this experience was “something that came very naturally um, but it
was also something that was quite err, difficult for me” as she felt the need
to conceal the relationship from her family.
During early adulthood, Fazana was developing an understanding of her
bisexuality. Later in life, Fazana chose a male life partner, and for Farzana,
her bisexuality is hidden from her family and community. The concealment
of her sexuality has the potential to create stress. Fazana describes how her
parents suggest that there should be no “gay mosques” or “gay charities” or
anything that encourages homosexuality. However, Fazana does not hide

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her acceptance of homosexuality within her faith from her parents. Although
Fazana’s parents have been supportive of her life choices under difficult
circumstances, “there are things that they believe are not um, err, they
shouldn’t be acted upon err, in, in a religious way” whereas Fazana believes
that “in Islam and I believe, you know, that your relationship is with your
own God, it’s your personal relationship um and there shouldn’t be any
boundaries” and suggests that this is “‘a progressive generational thing”.
Fazana describes how some of her friends have a sense of duty to act in
a way that is expected by their family and wider community: “[I]f you
don’t then you’re breaking the cardinal sin of being dutiful to your par-
ents”. Throughout Fazana’s life, she has made life choices that would not
necessarily be acceptable to her community such as marrying a man who
was not Muslim and who would not become Muslim, getting divorced
and becoming a single mother. At times, this has meant Fazana has expe-
rienced derision from her wider family. At one time, her wider family
disowned her and her parents were under pressure to disown her too.
However, she now feels supported by her parents: ‘[W]e have a very dif-
ferent relationship as adults um, I mean my dad is always telling me how
proud he is of me”.
The interview material provided by Hajra, Adeela and Fazana all illus-
trate the ways in which different social forces are woven through each other
at the level of individual subjectivity. They provide illustrations of intra-
categorical intersectionality; for each of these women, identity cannot be
reduced to either sexuality or gender or ethnicity or faith. The women were
affected by—and negotiated agentically—key social structuring forces in
different ways. The next section of the chapter provides more intersectional
analysis using an inter-categorical approach, focusing on three key social
structuring forces, as revealed in the interviews. These are faith, culture and
the ‘space’ associated with the British LGBT “scenes”.

Religion and sexuality

The research contributors addressed issues of religion and faith in varied
ways. The research findings highlight conflicts and disconnects between
sexual identity and religion. Saraah describes a common social discourse
within her experience, “How can you be Sikh, how can you be Indian,
you’re gay?” and her response is “I was born Indian, I was born gay”.
Saraah’s experience is rendered invisible within her religious heritage. The
invisibilisation of queerness in the context of religion was a common theme
amongst research participants and across the different religions.
Some of the research contributors experienced a crisis of faith when they
began to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual. For example, as noted earlier,
Fazana found that when she went to university and began to explore her
bisexuality, she ended up questioning her Islamic faith. For some women, a
questioning of faith of heritage developed into distancing from organised

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religion. This distancing was evident in the narrative provided by one of the
women with a Hindu heritage:

I do so say I’m the worst Hindu in the world but I don't identify as
Hindu, I feel, if I ever have to be at a mandir (Hindu temple) for
anything religious I feel soooooo uncomfortable, I feel so out of
place, I feel so, I feel like a fraud, I feel like I’m not a Hindu, I’m not
an Indian, I feel like a complete fraud… (Adeela)

In another example, Anisa (who is of Muslim heritage) is defiant when she

states, ‘I’m not religious, I don’t believe what my parents believe…if you are
going to judge me based on who I am going to love well that isn’t worth the
chapter it is written on’. Anisa goes on to say:

What is so frustrating and irritating is that people assume, not only

the South Asian community, they are the worst for it, but also, um,
the non-South Asian community assume you are religious, you are
a Muslim, you’re a Pakistani Muslim, no I’m not, I’m Pakistani, I’m
not religious um, so I, I want to say that out and hopefully more
and more people will say it and it will eventually it will stick and
people will not assume.

Anisa discusses the double standards that she experiences concerning

morality and religiosity in her community. For example, she speaks of the
number of drug dealers in her community “that have been caught but that’s
ok along as you’re not gay”. Anisa speaks of the very high levels of preju-
dice towards homosexuality within her community:

My dad has done all sorts and the whole community has known
about it but you can commit murder, yeah, you know, it’s always
compared to being gay, I was going to be punished the same way a
murderer would be, you know, so it’s just ridiculous.

For Anisa, it seems that taking a non-religious path is part of developing her
own moral framework. In different ways, each of the women who contrib-
uted to the study was working to find ways to manage their identities and
heterosexist religious heritages and social contexts. Some of the women
found ways to rework or negotiate religion in ways that are somewhat
accommodating of their sexual identities, as Hajra’s narrative about devel-
oping her sense of spirituality (see the earlier discussion) shows.

Culture and sexuality

Some of the participants spoke of a perceived disconnect between being of
South Asian descent and being non-heterosexual resulting in a lack of

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connectedness with the South Asian community, social isolation and invis-
ibility. This disconnect is also perceived by non–South Asian groups, as
experienced by participants, resulting in further invisibility and social
isolation within the LGBT community (see the following discussion).
Perdie-Vaughans and Eibach (2008) define this experience as intersectional
invisibility and propose that non-prototypical individuals are disadvan-
taged as they struggle to have their voices heard and understood. Participants
demonstrated that non-heterosexual British South Asian women who stay
connected to their South Asian communities and remain within the family
home sacrifice the visibility of their sexual identity in return for financial,
emotional and practical support. However, good connections with family of
origin were not always sacrificed by coming out as LGB. For example,
Amber acknowledges that she is not ‘the typical Asian girl of my age, I mean
I never really have been’, and she explains this as a result of her ‘disconnect’
from her family and the influence of a significant family member in India.
Amber has identified as a feminist from a young age, which may be one
reason why she has been able to negotiate a relatively agentic identity whilst
not rejecting her culture.
The research contributors each have their own unique family and cul-
tural context. For example, Amara lives in the family home and describes
her parents as having ‘very traditional ways’. Therefore, Amara does not see
her experience of being non-heterosexual as defined by being British but
contained within the nucleus of her family, religion and tradition. Although
Amara has come out to her parents, she does not consider herself out, as her
sexual orientation remains hidden to the extent that her parents have once
again begun traditional marriage introductions. Amara has tentatively
explored the Sikh LGBT community in an attempt to find a same-sex part-
ner. However, her discussion of this process reveals the extent of cultural
divergences concerning identity:

I ended up meeting people who were very different to me um, in

that respect, they weren’t, they weren’t Asian or they were um
Asian but actually not, usually you have Asian who are, who are
not quite as culturally um, I don’t know what the word is um, well,
more westernised if you like…

In a different example of the unique and culturally situated circumstances

of each woman, Zainab, who has Hindu heritage, did not learn to speak
Hindi as a child. Therefore, she feels other in all her social interactions and
disconnected from South Asian culture: “[Y]ou can’t draw meanings from
something unless you understand what they are talking about”. Zainab
explains: “I think I’ve always lived with a sense of being other of being dif-
ferent from the majority um, I think I was in accepting of that’s the way
things are and then part of me also resents that too”. At university, Zainab
felt ‘other ‘, as she was unable to understand the music and the language of

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her peers in South Asian social clubs: “[I]f you don’t know the language,
you don’t know the words, so you don’t connect to that music as much as
you would otherwise so there is something about that, feeling apart from
the Asian community in that sense”.
A further example provides evidence to dispute culturally normative
notions found in Britain that same-sex sexualities between women are a
“Western” phenomenon. Hajra, a Sikh British LGB woman, discussed her
experiences when she was in India:

I had a partner in India actually, that’s an interesting thing actu-

ally, not a partner but involved, she was my, she’s one of my best
friends which was interesting actually because again it’s that
thing of it’s a western, western thing, this was in a village in India
you know like, she fell in love with me and I think I did too, I
think I did, I think it was like, I don’t know, she was quite amaz-
ing actually and it, it’s one of those things, she’s married to a man
now. She can never tell anybody.

Here, as discussed in some of the earlier narratives, heterosexism has to

be negotiated, and closeting is a strategy used to manage heterosexism.
The findings indicate that these pressures and coping strategies are
transnational.
These findings, and those from the three narratives provided earlier in the
chapter (Hajra, Adeela and Fazana) all emphasise the importance of culture
in shaping the life trajectories and lived experiences of LGB British South
Asian women. South Asian cultural norms and practices can be a resource,
be cherished and/or be reworked and synthesised with Western norms.
However, some aspects of South Asian cultures, notably heterosexist expec-
tations and pressures, can shape British South Asian LGB women’s lives in
highly constricting ways. These have structural implications, for example,
same-sex partnerships not having validation via the institution of marriage,
double lives and closeting and fractious ongoing relationship with the fam-
ily of origin.

Analysis of coming out

As the earlier narratives show, British Asian non-heterosexual women nego-
tiate their coming out (or closeting) processes in varied ways. Typically,
coming out was catalysed by pressures to marry. For Adeela, for example,
deciding whether to come out was an ongoing process, provoked by
repeated moments of pressure to marry, as shaped by the expectations of
the wider family. Some women indicated the need to manage the social
embarrassment that could affect their immediate family, if they were
to come out to the wider family. Whilst the majority of women came out
to their immediate family, they were very aware of how the wider family

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would not be accepting, and several engaged in very careful monitoring of

their identity, especially on social media:

[M]y family in India um, it’s a weird one because people who I have
been careful not to add to facebook, you know, this wouldn’t have
been the case 10 years ago um, yeah but yeah um, and suddenly we
are living in a global world where you are so much more connected
that you know, in a way I never envisaged growing up um, and one
thing, do I need to be careful who I add in, in terms of what I say
on facebook cos I am actually quite careful, I do, I kind of make it
clear that I, I um, support um, gay rights and things so they know I
am gay friendly but then careful not to say anything that directly
relates to me. (Zainab, Sikh)

This illustrates one aspect of diasporic identities for these women; they
negotiated coming-out/closeting processes across a range of international
sites. However, wider family and cultural pressures are not always predomi-
nant in the coming out processes that women experience. For example,
Amber experienced a disconnect from extended family and enabled greater
freedom regarding coming out.
The literature indicates that many non-heterosexual South Asian women
do not reveal their sexuality (Wilson, 2006). Siraj (2017) found that
remaining in the closet caused a considerable amount of conflict, stress and
anxiety which impacted on lesbian women’s sense of freedom and expres-
sion of their sexuality. The fear of being “ostracised”, “disowned” and
“shunned” by both family and the wider Pakistani community led the par-
ticipants of this study to remain in the closet revealing the complex rela-
tionship between structural social systems and social relationships that
marginalise British Pakistani lesbians as a result of their ethnic, sexual and
gender identity.
In summary, processes of coming out and closeting were complex and
contextual, with some women coming out and closeting repeatedly and in
different ways to immediate family and wider family members. Whilst some
of them remained closeted, this did have implications in terms of emotional
and mental health.

LGBT space
This study showed that some of the women who contributed to the study
found connections and resources within wider LGBT communities; for
example, Fazaana came out within a relatively supportive space associ-
ated with an LGBT student union group. Some support from statutory
services was also evident; for instance, Zainab found a sense of belonging
in LGBT youth groups where an Asian youth worker who organised
Diwali celebrations gave Zainab somewhere to express her intersecting

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identities: “[T]hat was actually quite nice”. For others, such as Hajra, the
internet can be a good source of finding information and support about
LGBT issues. However, several of the research contributors discussed the
Eurocentricity of British LGBT social spaces. For example, Hajra
describes her disconnectedness from mainstream LGBT organisations
such as night clubs and support services, “because I felt very isolated
from being Indian because I was lesbian but I felt very isolated from
being a lesbian because I was quite traditional”.
The marginalisation of British Asian women, but also their agentic efforts
to build LGB identities that work for them, are illustrated by Amber’s story.
Amber felt very isolated as an Asian woman exploring the LGB scene in
England. The people she met were naive to her culture and tradition and

because I’m light skinned um, people weren’t really sure about
where I was from but once, but once I told them I would get lots of
stupid comments like, are you going to have an arranged marriage?
…I did feel very isolated.

Amber’s early experiences of cultural ignorance and isolation within the

LGB community emphasised for her that “representation really does mat-
ters”. Amber found this representation in a local nightclub that combined
both Eastern and Western music. Furthermore, Amber met her wife at a
very young age and established a group of close and very diverse friend-
ships. Nevertheless, “there is no confusion or ambiguity about my sexual-
ity at all in my immediate family”. Amber is aware of the assumptions
people make when they see her in traditional clothing in queer spaces,
“there was certainly a huge difference when I went to queer spaces; peo-
ple, including doormen, barmen etc, would ask me what I was doing
there um, people always assume I’m religious but I’m an atheist”.
However, she has overcome this in some ways by wearing a bindi, “a very
visual signifier of Hinduism”. In this way, Amber is able to maintain vis-
ibility as an Asian woman. Furthermore, Amber is “out where ever I go”
and is therefore able to maintain her visibility as a gay South Asian
woman to some extent.
There are some small faith-based LBGT organisations in the UK. The
establishment of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim LGBT organisations challenge
the hegemonic whiteness of the LGBT “scene”. However, it may be prob-
lematic for those who are not religious, producing additional layers of invis-
ibility (Orenstein & Weismann, 2016). This issue is reflected in some of the
narratives; for example, Anisa feels isolated from the British South Asian
LGBT community as organisations and media articles currently distinguish
themselves in terms of religious identity. As an atheist, Anisa explains, “You
know, they talk about the religion and how it’s ok for them to be gay with
the religion, that doesn’t represent me”. Recently, Anisa has seen articles
about gay Muslims, but she feels they do not represent her.

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Overall, therefore, some of the women do have experiences of the main-

stream British LGBT communities, but these are often of marginalisation
and a lack of awareness amongst LGBT people from other cultural back-
grounds. Where queer or other spaces that are more transnational and dia-
sporic exist, these may be more fertile in terms of identity construction and
expression.

Conclusion
This chapter demonstrates the complex ways in which different social
forces intersect in the lives of British South Asian LGB cisgender women.
Culture, family structure, religion, gender and sexuality all play an impor-
tant role. For some women, other dynamics are also central; these range
from access to—and experiences of—the British LGBT ‘scenes’ to personal
circumstances such as bereavement. The findings from the chapter empha-
sise the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding sexual-
ity and identity, different social forces are routed through each other for
each of the women and an attempt to reduce their experiences and view
them through simply a prism of, for example, ethnicity or sexuality would
misrepresent them.
For all of the women, having a diasporic identity shaped the ways in
which they managed their sexual identities. The interfaces between different
cultures were often mentioned; sometimes these were a source of conflict
and anxiety, although in other cases, hybridised forms of sexual or intimate
identity were developed by the women in an agentic way. In some cases,
women rebelled against community norms typically associated with the
familial country of origin, sometimes by taking on British-oriented cultures
(e.g., music cultures) sometimes by engaging in traditional practices but
quietly subverting them (e.g., touching hands with a same-sex partner in the
temple). Another aspect of negotiating diasporic identities concerned lan-
guage, including finding words for communicating non-heterosexuality to
older family members. A further issue was having to find ways to cope with
the racism and/or alienation that some women experienced in the white
British LGB communities, which, in some cases, led to women feeling that
they did not fit with either their culture of origin or the LGBT “scene” in the
United Kingdom.
This chapter has built on existing literature about the way in which non-
heterosexual British South Asian women come to terms with their sexuality
in relation to the intersecting forces of culture, nation, and morality. For
example, Siraj (2012) found that although non-heterosexual women were
able to explore their sexuality through Imaan, a Muslim LGBT support
group, they continued to experience conflict to a significant degree. Religious
intolerance towards homosexuality meant that the women chose to remain
in the closet. However, participants were able to utilise their religion in cre-
ating a framework for understanding of their sexuality within the confines

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of the closet. This study found that for some of the contributors, conflicts
concerning cultural norms continued, negatively impacting on their well-
being and agency. However, as indicated earlier in the chapter, women also
exercised considerable agency in developing their own sense of morality,
micro-cultures within their relationships and immediate circle and a sense
of national identity.
The intra-categorical approach to intersectionality developed by McCall
(2005) is very useful in showing the interplay between culture, sexuality,
and religion—as well as other forces—at the level of lived experience. Inter-
categorical analysis provides a means of ‘drilling down’ a little deeper into
specific forces and women’s relationship with them. For the research con-
tributors, these forces acted in marginalising ways because of contradictory
dominant norms, notably heterosexist norms associated with traditional
cultures and with traditional interpretations of religion which conflicted
with lived experiences of homosexuality or bisexuality, placing women in
very difficult positions regarding their relations with families and communi-
ties of origin.
Intersectionality theory emphasises the agentic way in which subjects
interface with, resist and modify social forces such as sexism and racism.
Agency was very apparent in the narratives of the women who contributed
to the study. Some of them consciously reworked different identities, devel-
oping hybridised versions of queerness that combined cultural signifiers and
activities from both the countries and faiths of origin and British culture.
Others took strategic positions regarding closeting and partnerships that
demonstrated agency whilst also highlighting the difficulties that some of
the women have to live with.

References
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. Routledge.
Christ, C. P. (2016). A new definition of patriarchy: Control of women's sexuality,
private property and war. Feminist Theology, 24(3), 214–225.
Choudhury, P. P., Badhan, N. S., Chand, J., Chhugani, S., Choksey, R. Husainy, S.,
Lui, C., & Wat, E. C. (2009). Community alienation and its impact on help-
seeking behaviour among LGBTIQ South Asians in Southern California. Journal
of Gay and Lesbian Social Services, 21(2–3), 247–266.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black
feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist
politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 140, 139–167.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics,
and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(4), 1241–1299.
Gupta, R. (Ed.). (2003). From homebreakers to jailbreakers: Southall black sisters.
Zed Books.
Jaspal, R. (2017). Coping with perceived ethnic prejudice on the gay scene. Journal
of LGBT Youth, 14(2), 172–190.

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Langdridge, D. (2008). Are you angry or are you heterosexual?: A queer critique of
lesbian and gay models of identity development. In L. Moon (Ed.), Feeling queer
or queer feelings?: Radical approaches to counselling sex, sexualities, and genders
(pp. 23–35). Routledge.
Langdridge, D., & Hagger-Johnson, G. (2009). Introduction to research methods
and data analysis in psychology (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.
McCall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs, 30(3), 1771–1800.
Office of National Statistics. (2012). 2011 Census for England and Wales. http://
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/index.html.
Orenstein, Z., & Weismann, I. (2016). Neither Muslim nor other: British secular
Muslims. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 27(4), 379–395.
Pande, R., (2015). ‘I arranged my own marriage’: Arranged marriages and post-
colonial feminism. Gender, Place and Culture, 22(2), 172–187.
Perdie-Vaughans, V., & Eibach, R. (2008). Intersectional invisibility: The distinctive
advantages and disadvantages of multiple sub-ordinate group identities. Sex
Roles, 59, 377–391.
Siraj, A. (2011) Isolated, invisible and in the closet: The life story of Scottish Muslim
lesbians. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 15(1), 99–121.
Siraj, A. (2012). ‘I don’t want to taint the name of Islam’: The influence of religion
on the lives of Muslim lesbians. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 16(4), 449–467.
Siraj, A. (2017). British Pakistani lesbians existing within the confines of the closet.
Culture, Health and Sexuality, 20(1), 28–39.
Wilson, A. (2006). Dreams, questions, struggles: South Asian women in Britain.
Pluto Press.

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 9
TRANS/QUEER SOUTH ASIAN
DIASPORA IN THE UNITED
KINGDOM
Whose “Regimes of the Normal” does “Queer”
critique?

Shamira A. Meghani

This chapter takes the British South Asian queer and trans diaspora as its
focus through a close reading of recent self-published writing by trans and
queer British South Asians. Thus, I begin by situating the contemporary
U.K. context which has recently—and more widely than before—been
revealed as deeply riven by contestation within the national imaginary. The
dominance of nationalist fantasies of return to empire (Bhambra, 2017) in
popular newspaper and U.K. government rhetoric (Adu, 2017; Johnson,
2016; Tice, 2017) is contested by growing numbers who have had to con-
tend with the newly visible but long-standing reality of racism (Al Jazeera,
2016; Wescott, 2016) that has violently resurfaced (Burnett, 2017; Sen,
2016) in the wake of the 2016 European Union referendum. Anti-immigrant
narratives provide cover for longer-standing neoliberal policies of austerity,
including the sharp withdrawal of welfare, by which method the fifth-, now
possibly sixth-, richest country in the world has newly introduced housing
deprivation and widespread hunger among working as well as unemployed
people (BBC News, 2015; The Trussell Trust, 2017). LGBT people suffer
socio-economic and health disenfranchisement (Rutter, 2015), particularly
young trans and queer people of colour and especially if they are refugees
(Micro Rainbow International, 2013).
I note the recent minimising of the welfare state partly because welfare
policies have a deep history in post-war minority U.K. political life. In 1994,
Alan Sinfield observed that while post-1968 British sexual subcultures used
revolutionary rhetoric, they were, in fact, dependent on Keynesian welfare
capitalism for their formation. This is foundational for understanding how
minority political life was constituted, and then attacked under Margaret
Thatcher’s Conservative government. It also tells us how gender, sexual and
ethno-racial minorities can continue to be popularly represented as though
their “marginal interests” have been greatly and unnecessarily accommo-
dated by the mainstream, at the same time as declining material conditions

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impact marginalized people in particular. Sinfield’s challenge, published

during another of capitalism’s predictable economic slumps, was that we
should resuscitate “a broad and substantial socialist project”, that is, one
that does not capitulate to attributing the “continuous distress” of the
majority world to the failure to take up capitalism adequately (Sinfield,
1994, p. 43). He suggested then that “young people will reinvent [socialism]
in a while, since it is the most plausible alternative” (Sinfield, 1994, p. 43),
and a broad and globally conscious socialism is, I think, in resurgence in the
U.K., albeit largely under the auspices of the Labour Party, which has, in my
opinion, not sufficiently repudiated the racist, anti-immigrant narrative that
resurfaced in the context of the Brexit vote. But what does this national
picture have to do with U.K. queer and trans South Asian diasporic life,
politics, and writing?
Informed by disparate experiences of home, migration, and life in dias-
pora communities, as well as the racial and cultural politics of the majority,
and various iterations of mainstream and radical LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisex-
ual and transgender) subcultures, South Asian trans embodiment and iden-
tity in the U.K. should be understood as negotiating multiple sites of power,
resistance, and pleasure. Consequently, trans South Asian representations of
subjectivity and embodiment engage varyingly with the language, culture,
and politics of South Asia, and may choose to be more focused on gender
identity and sexuality in relation to white-majority subcultures. Ethnicity
must be conceptualized as historically contingent (Hall, 1989/2003), and of
course, the same is true of gender and sexual identities. Breadth and differ-
ence in representation are therefore to be hoped for.
Very broadly, I think we need to explore the connections between vibrant
gender and sexual subcultures and anti-racist projects that took shape
under older forms of welfare capitalism. Where were the limits of these
social and political formations? What have they become now under the
neoliberal project of individualism? And what do they have the potential to
become in the ideological frameworks of the present?
The “Commonwealth” of post-independence nations and their diasporic
citizens in the U.K. are usually imagined to be in deferent relation to British
liberalism, where they must learn from a liberal capitalist tradition “natu-
ralized” as white. But in thinking about political change for diasporic trans
and queer South Asians (along with other “Commonwealth” diasporans),
concepts of progress cannot be understood from the perspective of the
main beneficiaries of “advanced” capitalist economies. Lesbian and gay
configurations of coupledom and family, for example, only tentatively exist
as formally equal, because they may be subject to every other battering
by neoliberalism and the vagaries of right-wing politics. State-level LGBT
inclusion in the U.K. has come to pass in the context of neoliberal individu-
alism, from the same party that re-introduced homophobic law through
Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), buttressed by right-wing
tabloid homophobia. Those tabloids and their broadsheet counterparts

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have long sustained racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, most recently turning

their feasting to the bodies of Muslim migrants. U.K. South Asians—associ-
ated in the popular imagination by “race” with the Muslim bogeyman,
even as the popular understanding of Muslim geography extends—are not
the same collective minority in twenty-first century Britain as they were in
the wake of twentieth-century independence movements. Some, especially
in the middle classes, have generationally assimilated into the mainstream
of both right-and left-wing Britain, while our poor and working class, who
are often Muslim, are now viewed far more through “Af-Pak” Islamist
geopolitics.
Turning to representation, the somewhat standard Euro-American “com-
ing-out” narrative, which in fiction and autobiography was focused on the
gay individual’s self-discovery (Saxey, 2008), was reinvented for a growing
contemporary obsession with an assumed specifically Muslim homophobia
(Meghani, 2015). Building on Jasbir Puar’s important critique of a homona-
tionalism that took shape in the context of hysteria about the Muslim ter-
rorist (2007), and critiques of “gay imperialism” (Haritaworn et al., 2008),
I have argued that early twenty-first-century diasporic novels, films, and
soaps staged “the queer Muslim” generally to produce a dramatic confron-
tation between the isolated Muslim queer and an almost uniformly hostile
Muslim South Asian community. Such fictional confrontations appeared in
the context of U.K. popular culture that had tended largely to represent
characters one-dimensionally, as minoritized in only one way. Generally,
there has been little U.K. representation of queer and trans diasporic minor-
ities, which, of course, exist in multiple formations. Popular fiction has
reframed “the closet” as a minority ethnic problem, and without much else
in the way of popular South Asian diasporic representation, it may even
come to represent us and our wider communities to ourselves. South Asian
and other former “Commonwealth” sexual and gender identities have thus
broadly been constituted within mainstream liberal politics and representa-
tion in such a way as to polarize political critiques. It is as though we either
focus narrowly on the failings of ethnic minority cultures—an arm of rac-
ism—or, that queer and trans exclusions within ethnic minorities risk
becoming invisible in a critique of this racism. But this pattern is beginning
to change in popular culture, and in literary contexts, there are concerted
efforts to respond to the critique of the lack of diversity in U.K. publishing
(Flood, 2015). Contemporary diasporic author Nikesh Shukla has, with
others, very recently established The Good Agency—building on his edited
collection The Good Immigrant—which will “develop black and minority
ethnic, disabled and LGBTQ writers.”1 In December 2017 they won over
half a million pounds of Arts Council Funding for this project (Flood, 2017).
More generally, in 2011 the Arts Council introduced grants to support writ-
ers and engage more readers, including school students, with the intent of
widening authorship and readership (Page, 2011). This suggests that mar-
ket forces have acted to narrow the literary domains.

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Thus, there is perhaps particular potential at this time for coalitional

work across minoritized communities, and indeed, I think that it is already
beginning to happen. In this context, it behoves us to consider what social
change in “diasporic” cultures needs to challenge in addition to the repre-
sentation and presence of gender and sexual minorities. The persistence of
South Asian racism against Black African Caribbean communities should
also a priority, not least because in part such racism is formed of judge-
ments about sexuality and respectability. In short, the work of framing
another queer and trans politics must be viewed in relation to the longer
politics of “a broad and substantial socialist project” (Sinfield, 1994,
p. 43) to be a sustainable foundation for change. Transforming queer
and trans South Asian diasporic lives through feminist, anti-homophobic,
anti-transphobic, and anti-racist work should simultaneously transform
the lives of other minorities too. As the work of the Combahee River
Collective of Black feminists recognized long ago, we will achieve the best
for the majority if we seek to make change from the position of the multi-
ply disenfranchised.
Diasporic minorities of course have connections across the globe, and a
queer internationalism, in addition to its own merits, perhaps has potential
for disrupting some of the individualism associated with dominant queer
politics. Such a project would also have to disrupt heteropatriarchal
normalcy itself, as well as the way homophobia “sticks” particularly to
minority ethnic identity, to paraphrase Sara Ahmed (2011, p. 125). The
heteronormative conservatisms of diaspora cultures do need to be chal-
lenged, but terminology and approaches from dominant or mainstream
queer cultures do not always help to address the particularities of
exclusion,instead setting up antagonisms that defer change and retrench
conservatism.
With this context and its varied challenges and hopes outlined, I turn
now to two very different pieces of contemporary trans and queer South
Asian personal-political writing to think through creative engagements
with the terrain. I have chosen pieces that address trans and queer commu-
nity, and the experience of desi family, and hope that together they offer
insight in relation to the current political conjuncture. One is a prose piece
by the poet Nat Raha, “Love your sisters, not just your cisters” in the
Radical Transfeminism Zine printed in Leith, Scotland, in 2017,2 and the
other is an essay, “Recipes & Rites”, by the U.K.-based author and artist,
Raju S. Singh, in the edited collection Moving Truth(s): Queer and
Transgender Desi Writings on Family.3 Both pieces undermine assumptions
about family and community, and both the collections of work they write
in are expressly interested in claiming representational space away from
damaging and limiting popular narratives. Both projects have aimed for the
collections to create earnings for authors, even if small, in recognition of the
labour of writers, a facet perhaps also significant in the context of a reduced
welfare state and its impacts on organizing. In contemporary contexts,

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self-publication, via varied models, seeks to challenge the way that intersec-
tional political marginalisation can contribute to the narrow reification of
gender and sexual dissidence in mainstream consumption. While the forma-
tion of subjectivities and subcultures within the wider culture can never be
disengaged from the contextual influence of political and economic condi-
tions, the conscious attempt to engage with these marks both the pieces I
have chosen.
In the biographical essay “Recipes & Rites” Raju S. Singh (2015) uses the
familiar diasporic metaphor of the recipe, not with the purpose of celebrat-
ing the “chutnification” of culture but rather, to resist dominant narratives
about inherent ethnic minority homophobia and to think about their family
of origin’s relation to Singh’s trans and queer self. Singh does not deny the
potentially explosive nature of coming out: in their case, Singh’s mother
confirmed her suspicions of their trans and queer identity by discovering, in
an online search, Singh’s zine, where they had written about themself in the
hope of gathering community. The essay opens as follows:

“Circumstances are always connected.

They always influence and impact each other.
Like my aunt told me when she found out I was transgender.
‘There are consequences y’know, beta!’”
(p. 157)

The narrative of family discovery—in popular fiction a typical moment

for reconfirming ethnic minority conservatism and limitation, providing
dramatic charge—is undercut by Singh’s movement through a recognition
of the potential meanings of a language of “consequence” and through the
recipe metaphor. The recipe—usually defined by ingredients and instruc-
tions—is refined in their observation that their mother’s way of cooking is
without a list of measured ingredients, drawing on “know-how” and
“learned traditions” (Singh, 2015, p. 159). As a metaphorical basis for a
recipe for revisioning the self in the context of revisioning family relations,
the process of adding new ingredients and subtracting those you haven’t got
for those you have becomes about the connection between those new recipe
ingredients and the way they influence and impact each other. Singh pro-
poses that ingredients need each other, and some salt, to work well and only
become their tastiest self when left long enough.
Singh’s (2015) initial “defensive” resistance to the term “consequences”
(p. 157) is absorbed first in a confrontational mode against all the conse-
quences that they have had to live with: neglect, abuse, and trauma that
affected school concentration, leading to a “drinking problem and chronic
illness” in the context of “facing discrimination on so many levels along the
way” (Singh, 2015, p. 158). But through the temporal extension offered by
way of leaving ingredients to become something new together, consequences

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begin to be understood as a mode of movement across time rather than

action–cause–effect in a singular moment of narrative sum. Thus, the “con-
sequences” Singh’s aunt warns of become less a threat of devastating rejec-
tion. In time, such “consequences” include being taught to tie the Sikh pagh
in the style of the Kenyan Panjabi diaspora, which is understood as a
responsibility as well as a right, and in context, learning their family’s
migration history. While the narrative evolves to include a visit to South
India to meet queer comrades (Singh, 2015, p. 164)—clearly an important
moment—the U.K. is the home context. The threat of rejection by family of
origin is clearly contextualized by the need for other queer and trans desis,
because while “white queer space” could be found, it meant “standing out
like a sore thumb […] either hyper visible or invisible.” Questions of visibil-
ity, so often central to the pleasures of queer disruption within community,
take on a valence of threat in that same context. Singh continues: “parts of
me got sacrificed in the process and I was always leaving pieces of myself in
different places, almost forgetting myself behind” (2015, p. 164). Singh’s
essay collects the almost forgotten and from it makes new nourishment.
This, along with a commitment to patience, means that their transition is
paired with a transformation in their mother, even if family adjustments
are uneven.
Nat Raha’s (2017) refreshingly caustic phrasing in “Love your sisters,
not just your cisters” addresses the sexual neglect of trans women, and
thus takes on the politics of “whiteness, masculinity and cisnormativity”
which encodes “the currents of who and what is desirable within
queer culture”, whether “bourgie and working class, white and of colour”
(p. 25). The assumed comforts of queer community are disrupted at their
sexual core, by questioning “who is deemed fuckable […] in contexts we
may call home […] or call community” (Raha, 2017, p. 25). There is no
sustained discussion of South Asian specificity, but Raha writes as “a
brown queer trans woman”, and her work underlines that queer and
trans diasporas are often part of multiple overlapping cultures “of colour”
located within the discomforts of dominant narratives valorising white-
ness. Her writing is animated by an internationalist commitment which
weaves together a range of threads that outline “the erasure of trans
women and trans feminine people” in queer histories in the global North
and South (Raha, 2017, p. 25). These brief political genealogies situate
the destructive present: the assemblage of trans histories and cultures, and
critique, is, in effect, being sanitized by, as she says, by “the emergence of
trans celebrities and the politics of queer and trans liberalisms: the priva-
tisation of our sexualities, to be spoken of only behind closed bedroom
doors” (Raha, 2017, p. 26).
Raha’s commitment to the project of liberation, and to rejecting the
sanitization and privatization of sexuality, underpins the critique that sex
itself has gone AWOL for trans women and that queer community has

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 SHAMIRA A. MEGHANI

capitulated to dominant narratives of trans desirability. Trans women’s lov-

ers, she points out, are often other trans women, and while some trans
women “do date cis women, trans guys, non-binary peeps, cis guys”, there
is always the risk of being subject to the abuse of power. Given that sexual-
ity is sutured to power, if there is little in the way of resistance to a minori-
tizing liberalism within an ostensibly chosen queer community, the politics
of queer critique still need to be looped back through transfeminism, antira-
cism, and internationalism, as new analyses of gender, race, and class. As
Raha says, the task is “to demolish the pity of respectable, bourgeois-trans
with the sexual liberation we were always promised” and to “work through
power and play, consentfully, lovingly” (2017, p. 29).
The context of what Singh calls a “harsh white Western world” (2015,
p. 158) was in some ways implicit in Michael Warner’s configuration of
“queer” as a critique of the “regimes of the normal” and the valorization of
hetero reproduction. The dominant culture of ethnic minorities in the dias-
pora certainly has commitments to sexual reproduction, but our “normal”
cannot be understood as the “regime”, because in our immediate proximal
contexts we are marginal, and brown reproduction is largely construed
through racist discourse: it is not celebrated. Finding relevant metaphors for
confronting gender and sexual difference and inequity may allow us to
maintain connections and engage our communities in change over time. For
ethnic minority trans and queer people, especially youth, for example, con-
tending with family would be markedly safer if the process of self-realiza-
tion and coming out did not seem to necessarily mean the rejection of
cultures of origin in favour of a dominant queer whiteness that can exclude
in so many other ways. Our cultures of origin do not need to be uniquely
vilified and change needs to be imaginable.
As I hope I have shown, both Raha and Singh emphasize the need for
queer and trans people of colour to carve out creative and intellectual space
against relentless dominant narratives. Both writers offer routes through
negotiating queer and trans life, with families of origin and families of
choice, neither imagined as perfect but both understood as processes of
social change and growth. I think what they show is that there are necessar-
ily varied modes of confrontation within the broad framing of queer poli-
tics, and that these cannot be established in the abstract, but rather, are
informed by the particulars—honestly faced—of cultural and political
genealogy. Such contexts cannot be assumed to be the same for all diasporic
South Asians, but the fixed stamp of conservatism that we diasporic South
Asians are asked to view ourselves through is in all contexts limited. If cul-
tures of origin can over time come to be loving sites of queer transformation
when they are understood as sites with the potential for creative cultural
change, then cultures of progressive gender and sexual politics need equally
to view themselves critically as potentially conservative—but also must be
encouraged and challenged lovingly to not be so.

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Notes
1 For example, the 2017 British television drama series Ackley Bridge was set in
an academy high school attempting to overcome white British and Pakistani
British segregation, and featured a thoughtful and nuanced Muslim lesbian
coming out story. Successfully winning a second and third series for broadcast
on Channel 4, its second series (2018) approached white nationalist racism
within an interracial lesbian relationship and also introduced a gay Muslim
student whose coming out revealed the acceptance of his father and the initial
rejection of his mother.
2 The Radical Transfeminism Zine describes its politics and aims thus: ‘We are
dreaming, and have been dreaming for decades, of forms of radical social trans-
formation, rooted in Black radicalism, anarcho-communism, Gay Liberationist
and other collectivist politics. We have been necessarily working towards alter-
natives to capitalism and practicing them on a micro level (when we can steal
the hours to do so). Our feminism has emerged through the experiences of our
lives of transgressing gender norms (gender norms that are always racialized,
classed and abled); through challenging the gender identity police (psychiatrists)
and the bourgeois politics of trans and queer liberalisms; through imbibing fem-
inist writings and the writings of women and men of colour, of queer and trans
writers, through pulling a transfeminist herstory out of obscurity.’
3 Published by Flying Chickadee, Moving Truth(s): Queer and Transgender Desi
Writings on Family is an edited collection emerging out of a ten-week writing
project led by Aparajeeta ‘Sasha’ Duttchoudhury and Rukie Hartman as a result
of a South Asian Americans Leading Together Young Leaders Institute as ‘a
community-building project […] created from a heart-centred place involving
[…] collective editing and story-development […] providing contributors room
to expand, heal and connect with one another across boundaries of personal
experience […and] overlapping approaches to discomfort, fear, silence, as well
as forgiveness, patience and an active pursuit of a more loving way to navigate
relationships with ourselves and with others’ (Back cover).

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 Part III

GLOBAL ECONOMIZATION
OF SEXUALITIES AND GENDER
TRANSGRESSING POLITICS
 10
TRANS SOUTH
Practical bases for trans internationalism

Raewyn Connell

During the last decade, I have visited and talked with trans support groups
and activists in 12 countries, 5 in the global North and 7 in various regions
of the postcolonial world. This was not a research project; it was an effort
to exchange experiences and share ideas, in meetings made possible by my
travel to a variety of academic conferences. The discussions were very mov-
ing for me, often troubling and always informative. There was an obvious
gap between the precarious lives of the young folk I mostly met and the
experience of a much older trans woman trailing a long academic career.
But there were also shared experiences and hopes. In this chapter, I reflect
on what I learnt from these discussions, particularly those in the global
South.
I have spent a good part of my life working in gender research and explor-
ing Southern perspectives in social science. I live in an economically privi-
leged settler-colonial society, the product of 200 years of conquest of
Aboriginal lands, a society class-divided and increasingly unequal. There
are marginalized trans groups in both settler and Aboriginal populations.
Australia’s masculinized, racist political system and its unsustainable econ-
omy have not served any of those groups well. The questions about social
justice and solidarity raised in my international discussions matter in
Australian society too.
This chapter tries first to describe common problems in the everyday lives
of the trans women I met, the problems that underlie the agendas of support
and campaign groups. Second, it tries to think about the agency of trans
groups and the political environment they face. Third, it asks what it would
mean to make perspectives from the global South central to thinking about
trans experience and solidarity. I hope this will be of interest to a range of
readers—so at times, I revisit ground that is well known to experienced activ-
ists and scholars in the hope that others can find an entry point to the issues.
I focus on people who were assigned male at birth and brought up as
boys, while knowing themselves, and eventually seeking recognition from
others, as feminine or specifically as women. Difficult and sometimes paral-
lel issues come up for trans men, as the amazing João Nery shows in his
autobiography Viagem Solitária (2011), as well as for people seeking to exit

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from gender categories. Nevertheless, in societies that privilege men, boys

and the masculine—that is, most societies in the contemporary world—it is
the masculine-to-feminine or male-to-female displacements and transitions
that attract the most violence, produce the most poverty, and seem the most
disturbing to the gender order.
Gender transitions are affected by class position, race, caste, and local
gender orders, so hijra, travestis, transsexual women, sista-girls, kathoey
and other groups face varied situations. In what follows, nevertheless, I am
looking for the common ground. Issues that come up repeatedly in different
situations are likely to be the crucial questions for international solidarity
and wider organizing.

Issues and responses

The groups I met ranged from government-funded community centres to
non-governmental organization (NGO)–based support groups to campaign
teams and wholly informal networks. The conversations, held in places
ranging from a quiet computer-equipped NGO office to a street-side coffee
shack, a noisy railway station and a very crowded Volkswagen in a rain-
storm, were sometimes very personal, sometimes hilarious, sometimes
intensely political. I won’t quote directly from them, as I don’t want to
violate privacy; I will present points they made and cite published research
on related issues. The following summary does not pretend to be definitive,
but the issues it covers do matter a lot.

Income, work and poverty

When people socially defined as boys or young men in a patriarchal gender
order move towards femininity, their actions can provoke strong negative
reactions from parents, bosses and workmates. If thrown out of homes or
jobs, which quite often happens, they are immediately in a precarious situ-
ation. If they are in a farming community where land is organized through
kinship, they lose land rights. If they are thrown out of school or drop out,
they lose access to education that might make available more opportunities
for secure work.
In some places, an occupational niche opens up. Theatre has traditionally
provided a context for kathoey lives in Thailand—a femininity, Aren Aizura
(2009) notes, different from the stereotyped femininity presented in the
Thai cosmetic surgery industry. A particular kind of theatre, nightclub
shows, was also important when a transsexual/transvestite community
formed in Sydney a generation ago (see the pioneering research by Roberta
Perkins, 1983). Hairdressing and beauty parlours provide an occupational
niche in Colombia and in Brazil (de Souza & de Pádua Carrieri, 2015;
Serrano-Amaya 2018), and doubtless in other countries. Hijra groups in
India can earn fees from performance at weddings and some other ritual

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occasions. Work in these industries is not well-paid, and jobs are certainly
not secure. But where these possibilities do exist, they signal a certain rec-
ognition of trans lives by local communities.
Sex work is a major occupational destination, and that is true across
international borders. It provides an income, although rarely above poverty
level, reduced by payoffs to police, landlords and pimps. The clients often
prefer youth, so sex workers, trans or otherwise, are likely to earn less as
they grow older. Skills are certainly learnt but will rarely yield a lasting
career (Castillo et al., 2010, give a realistic account for northern Mexico).

Displacement and housing

Losing one’s income or family home means living in a housing crisis.
Transitioning women are often unwelcome in other people’s houses or in
women’s refuges. In a wealthy community, there may be a state-funded or
foundation-funded trans emergency shelter. My hometown of Sydney has
one—for a population of 5 million people—but in most communities, there
is none.
The result may be living on the streets, living in very cheap apartments or
short-term hotels or becoming a migrant. Migration from region to region
or across international borders seems a very common experience for trans
women, sometimes, as Amy Ritterbusch (2016) puts it, at gunpoint.
Migration often provides no relief from insecurity, either economic or phys-
ical, especially when moving between different languages and legal regimes.
This is very clearly shown in Viviane Namaste’s (2015) interviews with
trans women from Latin America who had migrated to France: as one
described their situation, “vraiment précaire, vraiment précaire” (really,
really precarious).
Some groups have responded by creating a form of communal living.
This does not necessarily mean stand-alone communal houses, although
there is quite a history of these, sometimes combining housing with a com-
munity centre. These projects, too, can be precarious, especially if they are
in a legally uncertain situation such as squatting. A more common alterna-
tive is sharing apartments or rooms, perhaps forming a network in a par-
ticular neighbourhood that can provide support through crises.

Safety
The sex trade is not strong on occupational health and safety. Workers are
vulnerable to aggression from clients, neighbours and police, and the par-
ticular streets where street workers must spend their time are often in areas
known for their violence. For the men who dominate the industry, beatings
and death threats are common techniques of labour control. Natatxa
Carreras Sendra (2009) recorded, in a group of about 45 vestidas in street

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sex work in Puebla (Mexico), six deaths by murder and one probable mur-
der within 15 years.
Trans groups are disproportionately exposed to violence from the state.
Stories of trouble with police are common. The study of trans sex workers
in northern Mexico reports a high level of police harassment and many
arrests: 83% of travesti and transgender sex workers had been gaoled at
some point, compared with 7% of sex workers who were not trans (Castillo
et al., 2010). Prison is a dangerous environment for any trans group. In a
number of regions, there are threats from vigilantes, state-backed death
squads or armed para-statal groups that try to control territories and popu-
lations. Trans groups are targeted along with homeless people, homosexual
men and other marginalized groups. Murderous violence of this kind is
euphemised as “social cleansing”, limpieza social, in Central and South
America, the regions where it is best documented - though certainly occur-
ring in other regions too (DFensor, 2012; Ritterbusch, 2016; Serrano-
Amaya, 2018).
Trans women and travestis have responded sometimes by flight, some-
times by striking bargains with local power brokers to gain a space for liv-
ing. Afsaneh Najmabadi (2014) describes the intricate negotiations that
transsexual women in Iran (where transition is legal) undertake with police,
bureaucrats, religious authorities and doctors. Fernando Serrano-Amaya
(2018) describes an interview in Colombia with a very impressive trans
woman, Zoraya, who on one occasion was called to appear before the para-
military force controlling her village during the civil war. She defused a very
tense situation with a joke and saved her life, and the result was a deal that
enabled her to stay on for a time under their protection, although her situ-
ation remained fragile.

Embodiment and health

Gender is an embodied social structure, and gender displacements and tran-
sitions usually involve changes in the way one’s body is presented. The sim-
plest changes involve dress, jewellery, cosmetics or pitch of voice. Contrary
to familiar claims that transition is governed by stereotypes, in dress and
self-presentation actual trans groups are usually quite like other groups of
the same age.
More permanent body modifications are also possible. The medical lit-
erature on the treatment of transgender patients presupposes clinics and
surgeons. But where money is short, embodied transitions are more likely to
involve self-help and informal services (Vartabedian, 2016). Black-market
hormones can be found. Oil or silicone can be injected to change the profile
of breasts and buttocks: there are practitioners in the informal economy
who are experienced in doing this. All body modifications raise health
issues. Oral hormones have side effects in the best of conditions. In condi-
tions of poverty, injected oil may not be sterile, and the silicone is likely to

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be industrial, not surgical. Injected semi-fluids can migrate around the body
and deform it. Some trans women and travestis die this way.
Crowded housing and poor nutrition mean vulnerability to infectious
diseases such as tuberculosis. Violence has a health downstream: injuries,
disability and stress. In sex work, trans workers often have limited chances
of negotiating safe sex. In Carreras Sendra’s (2009) study, 16 of the 45 ves-
tidas died from AIDS. Taken together, these conditions mean a low expecta-
tion of life. Carreras Sendra writes that few of her group expected to live
beyond 40, and many died younger. When I was discussing conditions with
a trans support group in Costa Rica, the expectation of life they suggested
was 32. I don’t imagine these estimates are very far wrong. Knowledge cir-
culates through trans networks independent of medical authorities, some-
times assisted by NGOs. But knowledge isn’t enough for survival; the
surrounding conditions matter.

Families and kinship

Reading the autobiographical narratives in Ruth Morgan et al.’s (2009)
fascinating collection Trans: Transgender Life Stories From South Africa, it
is impossible to miss the importance of families, including ancestors. Family
is equally important in the personal stories I have heard. Not only the
nuclear family but also more extended kin are important in accounts of
both support and rejection.
As Josefina Fernández (2004) writes about travestis in Argentina, the
family is where the story starts. Sometimes traumatically, with sexual abuse,
an angry father, expulsion from home. But some parents come to terms with
the situation and provide care and support, or other members of the family
provide support. According to an account of kathoey lives, in Thailand fam-
ily acceptance is usual (Totman 2003). I hope so.
Family relationships are strongly shaped by generation. In most coun-
tries, older people rely substantially on children when they can no longer
support themselves. Losing a son or daughter means losing an economic
resource or a carer. The care obligations of women who have transitioned
are not automatically defined but may be personally of great importance.
This includes care for children. In communities where a woman’s status is
guaranteed by bearing children, trans womanhood throws up unique prob-
lems. In any case, transitioning women have to relocate in kinship terms, for
instance, acquiring a role as an aunt or sister.

Religion
Many of the life stories I have heard touch on religion. Intolerant religions
are a source of oppression, and the current “anti-gender” campaign (which
I discuss later) is a definite threat for trans groups, in Catholic-majority
countries particularly. But there are also much more positive experiences. In

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some of the personal narratives from South Africa, religious faith is clearly
a great resource in dealing with the fierce stresses of gender contradiction
and transition. As Nazmah, one of the Muslim authors, puts it, “God cre-
ated me like this and he’s got a purpose for me” (Morgan et al., 2009,
p. 202). In India, hijra groups may have a well-established role in the ritual
life of local communities, a presence in temple observances.
Differences between religions matter. In South-East Asia, gender shifts
find more acceptance in majority-Buddhist Thailand than in the majority-
Catholic Philippines (Winter, 2006). Most strikingly, in Shi’ite Islam, there
is a formal acceptance of gender transition, which is not generally found in
Sunni Islam. The Ayatollah Khomeini himself, the leading religious author-
ity at the time of the Islamic Revolution, issued a fatwa (a religious-jurispru-
dence ruling) that transition is permissible. So, in the Islamic Republic of
Iran, gender reassignment is legal—not necessarily desirable but officially
accepted. Religious scholars such as Muhammad Mahdi Karimi-nia have
made a special study of transsexuality in relation to Islamic jurisprudence
(Najmabadi, 2014).

Respect
In societies that give priority to men, those assigned male at birth who later
show femininity or claim the status of women are abandoning sources of
respect, opening them to contempt for weakness, corruption and sin.
Struggles for respect become both important and difficult. This is clear in
the stories told by sista-girls of the Aboriginal community on Tiwi Island in
Australia (Harvey, 2010). They must map out a path among family and
Indigenous culture, a disapproving missionary religion and a hostile state.
Suicides have been common. The difficulty of the struggle is equally clear in
Gayatri Reddy’s (2006) account of a hijra community in Hyderabad.
Presence in a religious community can at times be a source of respect: that
is clear to Nazmah, in the South African narrative just mentioned. NGOs
may play a similar role, providing recognition even in the simple form of a
meeting place.
A key site of struggle for respect is education. Schools can be hostile
places for trans girls, trans boys and non-binary children. Having to drop
out because of bullying is a common episode in life stories. It is not surpris-
ing that support groups and centres typically encourage a return to educa-
tion, and some provide school or post-school courses themselves. Attempts
to include trans experience in mainstream school curricula, for instance, in
social education, have aroused fierce opposition from right-wing politicians
and churches.
More ground has been gained in university curricula. I know of teaching
at quite a number of universities that includes curriculum material about
trans lives and the debates around them. At some universities trans support
groups have formed among the students. For all their reputation as a

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tolerant environment, however, universities and colleges can be sites of anti-

trans pressure and violence. And we should not forget that most of the
world’s population do not have the opportunities or resources to get admit-
ted in the first place.

Political terrain: Agency, allies, opponents

What I have provided here is not a complete catalogue of issues, but even a
partial one may help. To think clearly about change, we need to start with
the material realities faced by trans organizing in much of the postcolonial
world. Outside the citadels of class and race privilege, and from time to
time inside them, trans lives are likely to be precarious and stressful. Poverty,
violence, homelessness, sickness and abuse are widespread.
Yet no one should assume that precarious and stressful lives must be
abject. Rather, I would emphasize that the life projects we call transsexual,
transgender or travesti are in themselves active responses to the contradic-
tions of gendered life. Transition can create “the real possibility of joy”, as
a transsexual woman in Australia wrote (Emery, 2009) and as many of the
stories I have heard agree. These projects, whatever their circumstances,
show creativity, purpose and capacity. In the language of social theory, they
mean agency: action that transforms a situation ultimately may transform
the world around.
This action includes circulating knowledge and creating meaning.
Experiences with parents, on the street, with police and prisons can be nar-
rated and common ground recognized. Telling autobiographical stories is a
skill trans women are likely to develop, frequently having to account for
one’s life to families, neighbours, officials, doctors, bosses, companies or
landlords.
Trans groups respond to problems collectively as well as individually.
Partnerships, friendships and communities are formed, housing shared. A
great deal of information circulates by word of mouth—about work,
threats, body modification, laws and more. This can develop into strong
bonds where there is an established local tradition, such as hijra communi-
ties with recognized leaders and younger supporters, and some travesti
neighbourhoods. Even in the shifting environment of street sex work,
social bonds among the workers are formed which can be crucial for
survival.
So, in many contexts, there is an element of grassroots autonomous orga-
nizing. I don’t want to romanticize this: conditions for organizing are tough
where lives are turbulent with migration, precarious work and problematic
health on top of gender contradictions. Sometimes an older or more experi-
enced person provides informal leadership. In recent years NGOs with
human rights agendas have provided an anchor point for organizing,
although there are problems here to which I’ll return.

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Informal connections can become the basis for organizing of a more for-
mal kind. A community centre in Martires, one of the inner-city areas of
Bogotá in Colombia, provides an impressive model. The Centro de Atención
Integral a la Diversidad Sexual y de Género (CAIDS) was funded by the city
government and opened in 2014 (Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2014); I vis-
ited four years later. CAIDS is located, with some other services, in a dan-
gerous neighbourhood that is a centre of the sex trade. Its director is a
highly capable woman and its participants are mostly women who work in
the trade locally. The building has a restaurant and even engages in urban
farming. Perhaps most important, it provides a point of connection, a place
where stories are exchanged, deaths are mourned and new possibilities
seen. The centre provides meeting rooms, socio-legal counselling, a notable
art room with video facilities, and workshops for certificate courses in
dressmaking and hairdressing. These courses, run by the city’s technical
education department, train for occupational niches actually open to trans
women in contemporary Colombia.
Education courses directed to mainstream qualifications are also part of
the programme at the Casa Trans that opened in 2017 in Buenos Aires in
Argentina. This centre, opened after years of lobbying, similarly offers a
range of services and is supported by local government (UNAIDS, 2018).
However formal organization, or a building of one’s own, does not guaran-
tee permanence; collective projects in other contexts have collapsed.
Neither the Bogotá nor the Buenos Aires centres would exist without
some allies in city government. Some gains for trans groups are won from
the state—support services, legal recognition, or anti-discrimination laws.
In 2014 the Supreme Court of India made a landmark decision, legally
establishing a third gender category and setting out guidelines for imple-
menting it. But state policy can change for the worse. It has, for instance, in
anti-homosexual laws in Nigeria and Uganda which impinge harshly on
trans groups. In 2020, the right-wing Orbán government seized the time of
the COVID-19 crisis to push through the Hungarian parliament a law spe-
cifically repealing legal recognition of gender transition.
Politics at the level of the state normally involves social alliances, and to
get action from the state, trans groups definitely require alliances of one sort
or another. Given the importance of poverty and insecurity, one might think
the key would be socialist and labour parties, unions, landless people’s
movements, or other groups concerned with social justice. Only a few of
them have taken a stand on trans issues. Nevertheless, there is contestation
about state policy concerning transition and discrimination, as Surya
Monro (2005) has emphasized in her research on India and the UK. Major
changes in legislation have usually been sponsored by politicians in left or
centre-left parties, such as Diana Conti, one of the sponsors of the impor-
tant 2012 Gender Identity Law in Argentina. This law legalized “sex
change” and so allowed transitioning women and men to gain documenta-
tion (Argentina Ministry of Public Finances 2012).

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Also involved in the Argentine campaign, alongside impressive trans

activism, were NGOs representing gay and lesbian groups. The term LGBT,
which came into use in the 1990s in the United States, now circulates inter-
nationally and is loosely taken to mean an alliance of sexual identity groups.
Government agencies and NGOs concerned with human rights now often
accept an agenda of sexual and gender “diversity” and build the LGBT
concept, or expanded versions such as LGBTIQ, into their work. This pro-
vided resources for trans organizing in the global North.
More recently, NGOs and LGBT aid programmes from the global North
have provided important material resources for trans organizing around the
global South, sometimes quite unprecedented resources. The LGBT concept
also provides a form of public recognition, however constrained it may be.
But there is a problematic side. That acronym creates a perception of the
“T” (for transgender) as a de-gendered identity category, which rather
undermines the gender project in transitions. The LGBT concept shapes
politics as a defence of sexual and gender “diversity”, a much weaker con-
cept than social justice (although, to be sure, activists using LGBT language
often pursue social justice goals in health care, education and other fields).
Even more troubling, as Viviane Namaste (2011) has shown, the politics of
“transgender rights”’ as it developed in the United States, when imported to
other parts of the world furthers the interests of US corporations and over-
rides local political work by transsexual women proceeding along other
lines.
For trans women, an obvious political alliance is with the women’s move-
ment. Feminist campaigns against gendered violence, rape and sexual
harassment and for gender equality in income, land rights and education
are strongly in trans women’s interests. Interest in trans experience and
practice has certainly grown in academic feminism, especially since the
impact of performative models of gender. Programmes in gender studies in
Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Taiwan and India, among others,
now regularly include material on trans groups. Feminist journals often
publish papers on the subject.
Outside the university sector, too, support for trans women is more com-
mon among feminist activists than it was a generation ago. Feminist orga-
nizations at the community level are now more likely to speak of
“intersectional” politics, recognizing multiple structures of oppression,
while corporate feminism often speaks of “diversity”. There remains, how-
ever, a strongly anti-trans fraction of feminists, who are active on social and
mass media. This group holds a rigidly dichotomous view of men and
women, equated with male and female, and their rhetoric portrays trans
women as men violating women’s spaces. There is little chance of negotia-
tion or alliance with such views.
Some strands in international feminist politics have connected with UN
agencies and development agendas, and have gained some leverage from
international agreements such as the 1979 Convention on the Elimination

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of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, known as CEDAW, and the

1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (United Nations, 2000).
In these documents, there are no mentions of trans women or their needs.
The ground has shifted a little towards inclusion. In 2015 a number of UN
agencies issued a joint statement supporting LGBTI people, essentially on
anti-discrimination grounds (UN News, 2015). UN Women is currently
incorporating this stance into its guidelines. For instance, when telling sto-
ries of militant women to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Beijing
Conference, UN Women (2020) included Anastasiia Yeva Domani, a trans
woman working for transgender rights in Ukraine.
The broad context for international trans organizing is a global history
of oppression and marginalization which is very imperfectly known. (For
my student readers: here is abundant room for research!) Some moments
are familiar, such as the infamous 1871 Criminal Tribes Act in British-ruled
India that targeted hijra and koti among other troublesome groups. Yet
there are many complications in that story, while in other parts of the world,
both the pre-colonial gender orders and the course of events under colonial-
ism were different.
What we can confidently say is that by the twentieth century, in most
regions of the world, institutional structures existed—in law, religion, mar-
riage, education, employment—that marginalized, criminalized, discredited
or simply refused to recognize the existence of, the people and situations we
now call trans. How far this reflected popular attitudes, or just the growing
institutional power of states and religions, is an open question.
But there is no doubt that explicit hostility to trans groups is now
sustained and expanded through deliberate incitement by certain politi-
cal forces. I have mentioned examples already: the Hungarian Fidesz
government, the paramilitary forces engaged in “social cleansing” and
the anti-trans faction in Northern feminism. The right wing of the
Republican Party in the United States could be added, which pioneered
a bizarre scheme to criminalize trans women’s and trans men’s use of
public toilets.
Since about 2010 anti-trans politics has acquired a new ideological coher-
ence. Ultraconservatives in the Catholic church launched a movement that
attacked gay marriage, gender fluidity and gender transition (which they
lump together as “gender theory”), trying to create a moral panic about
several targets at once. They have been backed by the two latest popes,
and their language and agenda have spread internationally and are now
being systematized in Vatican documents (Bracke & Paternotte, 2016;
Congregation for Catholic Education 2019; Garbagnoli & Prearo, 2017).
There are good reasons for trans groups in Catholic-majority countries, and
countries under authoritarian regimes, to be worried. It seems that orga-
nized hostility to trans groups is now a feature of the political landscape, far
more prominent than it was 20 years ago. The need for solidarity in response
has been growing.

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Southern perspectives
It’s not news that we live in an unequal world. A 500-year history of con-
quest and empire delivered stark differences of wealth and power. In the
twenty-first century, global inequality and exploitation continue to evolve
and produce new power centres, all of them masculinized. Capital from
postcolonial countries, as well as the old imperial powers, flows into trans-
national corporations and finance markets. China and the other BRIC
(Brazil, Russia and India) countries have gained economic weight.
Despite these changes, the governments, corporations and finance mar-
kets of Western Europe and the United States still hold a central position in
the world economy. Here, too, is the centre of the global economy of
knowledge: the prestigious universities and research institutes of Western
Europe and the United States. Ideas coming from this centre provide the
framework for almost all organized research in the rest of the world and
powerfully influence the policies of intergovernmental organizations, aid
agencies and NGOs. (For this background, see Connell, 2016; Hountondji,
1997; Reiter, 2018.)
It is hardly surprising, then, that discussions of gender around the global
South are strongly influenced by concepts and strategies originating in the
global North. To summarize very baldly, in the last few decades the most
influential accounts of gender have focussed on cultural or discursive norms,
gender performativity, fluid identities, diversity and individual rights to self-
expression. Traditional gender norms are understood to be binary, patriar-
chal and heterosexual. Achieving equal rights therefore requires a struggle
against traditional norms.
A particular view of trans issues follows from this. The term transgen-
der, contrasted with cisgender, has become dominant, an umbrella cate-
gory for groups understood as having non-normative gender identities.
This concept fits the LGBT idea when L, G and B are understood as non-
normative sexual identities: the rainbow alliance then expresses the diver-
sity of sex and gender. The difficulties transgender people face are
understood as coming from binary norms and the transphobia of cisgen-
der people, denying trans people the right to the free expression of (or
escape from) personal gender identities. The core of transgender politics,
therefore, is a struggle against gender norms and for human rights and
personal freedoms.
These ideas have grown from the social experience and political culture
of the global North. There is no doubt that many have found them inspir-
ing, and they have helped gain legal and social victories. Yet they can be
questioned on a number of grounds (Namaste, 2011). In particular, we
should ask whether they are the best tools for postcolonial contexts,
where most of the world’s people live. Such questions are now being raised
in many other fields, in debates about the coloniality of knowledge and
the reassertion of perspectives from the global South (e.g., Reiter, 2018;
Smith, 2012).

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All colonized and postcolonial societies have experienced historic disrup-

tion, many with mass violence, forced migration and mass exploitation.
Uncertain economic trajectories, institutionalised racism, predatory elites
and mass poverty in the era of market dominance are common in their sto-
ries. Colonization and re-colonization around the global South have
destroyed the possibility of a stable and consensual gender order governed
by traditional norms. Rather, there have been many attempts to impose
norms: by colonial and postcolonial states, missionary religions, nationalist
movements, commercial media and other social forces.
Colonized peoples have always tried to make sense of, as well as resist,
what was happening to them. Intellectuals in the postcolonial world have
continued this work. Although marginalized in the global economy of
knowledge, these efforts have built up over time into a formidable archive
of Indigenous knowledge, local knowledge, postcolonial and decolonial
thought, Southern theory, anti-racist critique, alternative universalisms
and more (for starting points: Alatas, 2006; Connell, 2014; Rosa, 2014;
Spickard, 2017).
It is not hard to see the relevance of these resources for trans lives and
politics. I have mentioned religion as a significant issue, alternately a source
of hostility and a resource for survival. There is a tradition of liberation
theology, an approach developed by the Peruvian theologian Gustavo
Gutiérrez, that argues the church must seek social justice and exercise a
“preferential option for the poor” (Grudy & Gutiérrez 2013; Gutiérrez,
1973). The Vatican establishment turned against this movement but the
impulse survives and has had important practical effects. There are similar
ideas in Islam. National liberation struggles in the twentieth century devel-
oped ideas such as swaraj, the term used by Mahatma Gandhi that literally
means “self-rule” and implies breaking free from subordination. Gandhi’s
thought went beyond an independent state to the renovation of Indian cul-
ture and direct local production of foods, cloth and other necessities.
Feminist movements have developed a range of postcolonial perspectives
on gender (Mohanty et al., 1991). Many ideas in this large literature are
relevant to understanding the situation of trans groups, including the con-
nection between colonial violence and current gender-based violence, the
intimate connection of gender and caste, and the survival and vigour of
Indigenous movements for gender justice (Chakravarti, 2003; Gargallo
Celentani, 2012; Mama, 1997). Anti-sexist men, too, have ideas to contrib-
ute. Kopano Ratele (2013), working with Black men in South Africa, con-
tests the idea that traditional masculinities are necessarily patriarchal.
Traditions, he argues, are multiple and flexible; they can be, and sometimes
are, used in new ways to support gender justice.
With these resources in mind, we might reconsider familiar moves in dis-
cussions of trans issues. Is establishing identity actually the central issue in
trans lives? Where staying alive is a problem, are fluid subject positions or
performativity helpful concepts? Are norms in themselves bad? For groups

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in poverty, is the rainbow alliance the best way to find relevant support?
Where there is endemic violence on class, race and gender lines, do we need
a special concept of transphobia to explain the brutal treatment of trans
women? In a context of racist oppression under white supremacist regimes,
is the cisgender/transgender distinction the most important to emphasise?
Experiences accumulated in anti-colonial and post-postcolonial struggles
are important for contemporary political work towards trans liberation.
Building solidarity is not always emphasised in arenas that highlight indi-
vidual rights. To grow, movements often emphasise common ground over
difference, as I have done in this chapter. Perhaps political traction can be
found in the gender contradictions in cis lives as well as trans. Struggles for
social justice are inherently normative and the bold embrace of positive
norms and traditions can be critically important. Trans groups, too, can
make claims for economic justice and labour rights that challenge the mate-
rial interests embedded in current power structures.
Finally, anti-colonial struggles, Indigenous movements and decolonial
political work have all found value in South/South connections, sharing
strategies and offering solidarity across the postcolonial world. Even with
very limited resources, there are possibilities here. Writing that takes a
broad Latin American perspective on trans issues seems to point in this
direction (Escobar, 2016; Lewis, 2010).

In conclusion
I hope this chapter has helped to show the value of perspectives from across
the global South. Postcolonial perspectives are not yet widespread in trans
studies or policy discussions. But there are resources here, and they repay
attention.
Recognizing that there are many postcolonial viewpoints, it is tempting
to view trans experience ethnographically. We might escape from the hege-
mony of the global North into a mosaic view of the world, with many-
coloured separate tiles. But the many-coloured tiles do overlap, since they
come out of connected histories, and the world presses them into new rela-
tionships. Seeing diverse situations together matters for connected action,
and the connections now need to be cross-national. We should not forget
that anti-trans campaigns are linked up internationally.
Trans women, the other trans groups I have discussed, and the organizers
of support groups and campaigns, face huge challenges. I have emphasized
the practical challenges, but they are intellectual too. Deconstructionist gen-
der analysis has made its contributions but has not served all groups well.
Trans groups are better served by moves toward more gender-positive the-
ory and politics (or gender-affirmative, if we can separate that phrase from
its clinical history).
A fact that is so obvious it is hardly ever spoken: gender matters to these
groups. Most are not trying to escape from gender relations or gender

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difference. Like many other people in our world, they would like to live bet-
ter in and through gender relations. It is not the existence of a gender order
that makes their lives hard. It is the injustice of the gender order, in concert
with the injustices of class, race, and the global economy.
Small, marginalized groups can generate great energy, but they usually
need support from others if their situations are to change in major ways. I
think that is the case with trans politics. Improving trans groups’ often dev-
astating situations in employment, housing, safety, education and health
can be defended on broad grounds of social equality, the value of human
life, or just common decency. Indeed, I hope those principles will be more
consistently applied by those who have privilege than they have been in the
past.
Reasons for solidarity from other groups in society go beyond benevo-
lence. Trans experience can enrich and strengthen all movements for social
justice. Trans lives at times, perhaps often, approach extremes in horror,
doubt, endurance and joy. Yet they can speak to anyone who will listen, for
gender contradictions of one kind or another are part of the human condi-
tion. It is good that the community centre in Martires has an art room. The
grassroots creativity of gender transitions in dire circumstances is remark-
able proof of human possibility.

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 11
ON THE LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES
OF LGBTI POLITICS
Contextualizing socio-political violence and political
transitions in South America

José Fernando Serrano-Amaya

Acronyms are powerful linguistic tools. They can synthetise complex ideas
and bring together diverse issues. They can create brands and give to con-
cepts a life by themselves. Acronyms look flexible enough to incorporate
new terms and open for all-encompassing terms. However, acronyms can
also suggest connections that may not exist in reality, homogenise disparate
issues and make symmetries between rather different problems. This could
be the case of the acronyms LGBTI—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and
intersex—currently used internationally to describe matters of gender iden-
tity and sexual orientation in local and international arenas.
The acronym LGBTI is nowadays used as an adjective and a noun to
pack subjects and identities. It appears in mass media as a descriptive term
of a community with supposedly shared characteristics and purposes due to
gender and sexual diversity. Cultural industries use LGBTI to distinguish
movies, literature or touristic routes. In popular culture, LGBTI has become
a brand for those seen in the spectrum of gender non-conformity or non-
heterosexual sexualities. The existence of a “global LGBTI culture” is pro-
duced and iterated frequently by mass media when describing celebratory
events or when dealing with the contradictory movement between legal
gains and political backlashes. Somehow, LGBTI has been acquiring a life
by itself, separated from the particular histories and politics unified in the
term and appears more an imagined community (Anderson, 2006) with its
own existence.
Sometimes a synonym for the dupla sexual orientation/gender identity,
LGBTI has been also incorporated in action programs of human rights
organisations, regional alliances and international corporations. Sexual ori-
entation and gender identity has been a topic of discussion in several United
Nations Human Rights Council and General Assembly Resolutions in this
decade (UNHRC, 2018). In December 2011, for example, U.S. Secretary of

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State Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Geneva declaring “LGBT rights are
human rights”. Nowadays, LGBTI are part of the analytical and opera-
tional work of the World Bank (World Bank, 2018) or of the Council of
Europe (2018). LGBTI is more and more a common language in public
policies, the provision of social services and activism. Cities in Argentina
and Colombia, for example, have extensive social services and social policy
frames for “LGBTI communities” that include community’s centres, educa-
tional activities and other programmes that did not exist before.
This suggestion of communality in ideas such as “LGBTI community”
raises resistances and questions. Suspicious of cultural imperialism arises
when LGBTI international organisations create maps of “global gay rights”
(ILGA, 2014) that produce landscapes of the “best” and “worst places to be
gay”. The call made by some countries to protect LGBTI individuals “homo-
phobic states” and the announcement of restrictions on international aid,
gives to the inclusion of LGBTI rights in international politics a colonial
flavour. Social media calls for solidarity with LGBTI communities in those
countries, can reinforce racial stereotypes and be patronising. “LGBTI”, as
a new category of subjects, is often represented in international arenas in
between festivity and the need for protection.
Resistances and critiques are also raised because the acronym assumes a
symmetry in the collectives and their reasons for political mobilisation.
Intersex activism, the latest addition to the acronym, raise topics such as
body autonomy or struggles with medical and legal normalisation (Cabral
& Benzur, 2013; Carpenter, 2016) that cannot be reduced to gay identity
politics. The critique raised in lesbian feminism to the concept of “homopho-
bia” and its derivative “lesbophobia” for depoliticising the reaction of the
patriarchal and heterosexual systems against lesbianism, and for assuming
that social reactions against lesbians have the same nature as the ones
against homosexual men (Kitzinger, 1987), can be extended to LGBTI poli-
tics. LGBTI politics is based on a notion of “phobia” and prejudice as an
explanatory term that assumes common reasons for discrimination and
therefore for mobilisation.
This chapter suggests that the increasing use of LGBTI, particularly asso-
ciated with issues of rights, expresses a reconfiguration of gender and sexual
politics in international, regional and local arenas. Such reconfiguration is
not just about the limits or possibilities of identity politics. LGBTI, as a
packing of disparate identities, mobilisations and struggles, expresses a
reframing of gender and sexual politics as a result of professional activism
and the neoliberal state. In this perspective, LGBTI is not just a term or a
discourse but a conglomerate of political and cultural practices not reduced
to the uses of an acronym.
Following an interest in understanding the practices in which LGBTI is
elaborated, incorporated, contested and resisted in specific political settings,
this chapter is organised in three sections. First, the analytical strategy used
is described. Then debates on international politics around gender and

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sexual diversity are summarised in two trends: the evolutionary trend and
the pragmatic trend. The third section constitutes the main body of the
chapter. It offers two life stories built up in a period of fieldwork in Colombia
in between 2012 and 2014 that illustrate how state policies create victimi-
sation combining experiences of violence and gender and sexual diversity to
allow some citizens to exist. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the
politics underlying LGBTI politics.

On strategy, method and terminology

LGBTI, as a disparate package of identities and politics, can be unpacked
showing the specificities of the political projects associated with each letter
of the acronym. A common understanding in critics to LBGTI is that there
is little shared in the politics of those covered the term. In this analytical
strategy, it is assumed that in dealing with each letter separately, it will be
possible a better understanding of what is blurred with the assimilation of
identities under the same frame. However, there is no homogeneity in each
of the letters. Even more, with this strategy, the analytical problem will not
be solved because there is a constant adding of letters to the acronym that
results in an exponential increment of diversities.
My strategy, instead of focusing into the dismissal of identity claims for
the critique to LGBTI, is to focus into political practices, in particular into
the place given to socio-political violence in the understanding of gender
and sexual politics. This focusing does not intend a dichotomy between
politics and identity or a rejection of identity politics. It intends to contrib-
ute to a different understanding calling attention to the limits and possibili-
ties of LGBT politics in a broader and non-linear comparative perspective.
In this strategy, there is not an assumption that each letter of the acronym
is homogeneous in itself. There is not a political subject in LGBTI politics,
at least in the sense of a unified identity subject. What creates similarities or
differences is the mutual constitution between subjectivities and experi-
ences of violence and of structural injustices. Because of that, my emphasis
on activism, social justice struggles and violence as a lived experience.
The discussion provided in this chapter continues a long-term academic
interest and political engagement with gender and sexual politics and
human rights. In my Master Dissertation in Conflict Resolution (Serrano-
Amaya, 2004) I reflected on my participation in a peacebuilding project in
Colombia. During that project, in the early 2000s, I witnessed the uses and
contentions around LGBT as a collective term to connect activisms around
gender and sexuality that were acted in separation before. Almost all last
decade, I was involved in the design and implementation of social policies,
educational and cultural activities framed under the LGBT acronym. These
references, more than anecdotic, express my position in relation to LGBT
issues. I have seen some of its uses, limitations and applications. This experi-
ence impacts on my approach to the discussion.

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The information provided in this contribution was collected for my PhD

research on homophobic violence in armed conflict and political transitions
(Serrano-Amaya, 2014). Data collection and analysis followed the proce-
dures of the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of
Sydney, Ethics Application Reference 15142. In 2010 and 2014, I under-
took several field trips to South Africa and the Caribbean coastal lands in
Colombia to interview LGBT activists and non-governmental organisation
(NGO) workers. Interviews were requested according to the ethics protocol
authorised by the University of Sydney. Participants provided signed con-
sent to be part of the research and to be interviewed. Because of the current
violence in Colombia, the names of participants were changed for their
protection. Descriptions were reviewed to ensure confidentiality.

Debates on transnational identities

The transnational spread of identity politics through identity labels such as
LGBTI has been a matter of intense debates. In spite of its use as a plain
descriptive category of social subjects or an adjective attached to cultural
objects, LGBTI of is also part of the geopolitics of knowledge about gender,
sexuality and politics. In this section, I review some of those debates, calling
for the need to move from a focus on identity and on the discursive dimen-
sion of categories to their uses and practices in specific contexts. In this
movement, a deeper discussion around understandings of violence and
social conflict is needed. Also, more empirical and context-based analyses
are required.
For the purpose of this chapter, I summarise debates on international
politics around gender and sexual diversity on two trends: one, describe
mobilisations around gender identity and sexual orientation using an evo-
lutionary and diffusionism model. That model is common in discussions
around globalisation as a taken-for-granted explanatory concept. The other
explores the limits and possibilities of globalised identities, such as those
suggested with in the generalising use of LGBTI.
In the first trend, the emergence of lesbian and gay politics is explained as
a process starts first in North American and European countries and then
gradually moved globally. “The emergence of a distinctive lesbian and gay
politics happened first and is the most developed in the countries of North
America and Europe” (Blasius, 2001, p. 10), was stated in the introduction
of a comparative study of sexual politics. This narrative is reified in the
usual reference to 1969 New York Stonewall struggles as the starting point
for sexual orientation and gender identity mobilisations. It also justifies the
idea of progress attached to LGBTI politics.
As a result of this narrative, other ways of political organisation around
gender and sexual diverse experiences have been rendered invisible or subor-
dinated to such a model. The increasing scholarship from or about Latin
American, Asian or African countries has challenged that narrative (De la

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Dehesa, 2010; Gevisser & Cameron, 1995; Manalansan, 2003; Mogrovejo,

2000). This scholarship shows parallel, simultaneous and independent pro-
cesses for political mobilisation and struggles for change in gender and sex-
ual politics, rather than a linear and hierarchical diffusion of identities.
The other trend evaluates the limitations and possibilities of using univer-
salised categories in the calls for global strategies for action. On the side of
limitations, translating gender and sexual categories from some languages
and cultures to others risks assuming those umbrella terms as neutral value.
In his ethnography of “transgender”, David Valentine (2007) argues the
category is based on US politics that delinks gender identity from sexual
desire. Participants in Valentine’s work, mostly impoverished African
American and Latina transgender women, identified both as transgender
and gay, challenging the idea that people identify just with one exclusive
category and use them with a variety of meanings.
If a category causes contradictions in its context of creation, more could
happen when translated to another context. Vek Lewis (2010) argues that
the translation of U.S. version of transgender to Spanish and to Latin
American cultures blurs differences between experiences of gender and sex-
uality. Studies about sexual cultures and sexual identities in Latin America
have shown the centrality of gender hierarchies in framing sexual behav-
iours (Lancaster, 1998; Lewis, 2010; Parker, 2004) and therefore the impos-
sibility of delinking gender from sexuality in the analysis of politics and
cultures. Lewis states that the U.S.-based politics of “transgender” as cate-
gory, also creates divisions between more “respectable” and less “respect-
able” or more “modern” and less “modern” subjectivities. This happens for
example when urban middle-class personas transgenero—transgender per-
sons—use international terms to differentiate them from local cultures and
others social groups, such as impoverished travestis doing sex work.
Life experiences included in transgender as a collective term refer to spe-
cific positions in gender and sexual orders but are not just reduced to them.
In an opposite move to the U.S. transgender as an umbrella term, in several
Latin American countries, some collectives include transgenero in the same
order as transexual or travesti or prefer the collective term trans. Therefore,
the reduction of a conglomerate of social positions to just a matter of iden-
tity as in US transgender continues the problems in globalised terms such as
LGBTI.
One problem in focusing the debate on the translation or adoption of
globalised terms associated with identity politics is setting aside processes
identity construction and political organisation that does not follow such
pattern. Another problem is reducing the discussion to legal or identity-
based right claims, common, for example, in LGBT politics. Therefore, the
need to consider other possibilities to live in the gender and sexual orders
often overlapped by generalising and globalising collective terms.
In the variety of life experiences included in the collective term transgen-
der, travesti is a social category and a self-defining term used in several Latin

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American countries refers to a variety of experiences of exclusion and abjec-

tion in the social structures and not only about a matter of gender identity
or sexual orientation. Travestis are often exposed to a variety of forms of
physical and social elimination that displace and emplace them in social
peripheries. Their life experiences occur in settings of tension between mar-
ginality and resistance. Their contestations to live in multiple structures of
violence express social creativity and struggles for dignity that have little in
common with other political identities included in the LGBT acronym.
Childhood abuse, poverty, family rejection, early exclusion from the edu-
cational system, migration from rural areas to capital cities or sexual exploi-
tation are common topics in the description of life courses of travestis. Their
strategies to rebuild family and kinship networks, to adapt and survive a
variety of violence and to make a life in dignity are less visible but can also
be read in research done in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua or Colombia
(Fernández, 2004; Kulick, 1998; Lancaster, 1997; Valle et al., 1996).
Considering their local, regional and international travelling, life experi-
ences of Latin American travesties challenge homogenised or diffusionist
models about identity construction, belonging and community building.
The arrival of Latin American travestis changed the dynamics of sex work
in several European capitals as described in ethnographic work (Mejia,
2006). In the cases of return, they also bring ideas about how to deal with
authorities, being subjects of rights and strategies to deal with conflicts, as I
identified in the research that supports this article.
On the side of possibilities, globalised identity politics can be seen as a
facilitator of exchanges of knowledge, international alliances and collective
actions, instead of the cause of standardisation of political and subjective
experiences. Dennis Altman (2001), for example, argues for understanding
identity labels and identity politics in the interplay between local and inter-
national struggles for change. Several of the processes associated with glo-
balization, such as migration, neoliberal politics and economies and
massification of culture through mass media, not only result from interna-
tional power relations but also allow autonomy, exchanges of knowledge
and cooperation between organisations and activists. Same can be said
from LGBTI. The rise of “global LGBT human rights” has been a difficult
process of erasures, backlashes and partial gains, as can be seen in the gene-
alogy create by Kollman & Matthew Waites (2009). Still, global LGBT
human rights have created spaces that did not exist before for denouncing
injustices and protecting rights.
What has been less discussed in the critique of global identity politics is
their role in creating certain understandings of violence and victimisation.
Gender and sexual politics, in local and international arenas, have a
strong connection with struggles for injustices, socio-political conflict and
mobilisations for change that are obscured with the focus on identity and
recognition. The homogenising effect of identity labels and packed identi-
ties in acronyms not only confuses political subjectivities but also reasons

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for change and causes for mobilisation. The unpacking of LGBTI requires
also unpacking its underlying ideas about violence.
Concepts associated with violence against gender and sexual minorities
are not descriptive categories but understandings of victimization experi-
ences that require cultural and historical contextualization. As authors in
the field of social suffering have expressed (Kleinman et al., 1997), violence
is not a self-evident experience but the result of complex processes of nar-
ration, representation and subjectivity in particular socio-political settings.
When applied globally, identity labels may not only homogenise identities
but also ways to deal with conflicts.
U.S. gay politics were based on the notion of homophobia as a reason for
collective action. The term homophobia was created in the late 1960s by the
U.S. psychotherapist and writer George Weinberg and is recognised as a mile-
stone in reflection on social attitudes toward homosexuality (Herek, 2004, p.
8). As a concept, “homophobia” has been a political tool for activism, lobby-
ing and inclusion of anti-homosexual violence in public agendas. In an
attempt to make visible particular forms of discrimination, and in the context
of identity politics, activists and some academics have developed concepts
such as “lesbophobia” (Rosenbloom & IGLHRC, 1996), “transphobia” (Hill
& Willoughby, 2005) or “biphobia” (Obradors-Campos, 2011).
The tendency to extend the notion of “phobia” to forms of violence, dis-
crimination and exclusion experienced by lesbian and transgender women
and men assumes that the reasons for their experiences are similar to those
explained under the idea of “homophobia”. Lesbian feminism has criticised
the concept of “homophobia” and its derivative “lesbophobia” for depoliti-
cising the reaction of the patriarchal and heterosexual systems against les-
bianism and for assuming that social reactions against lesbians have the
same nature as the ones against homosexual men (Kitzinger, 1987). The
term transphobia not only creates inadequate analogies but tends to render
invisible specific forms of victimisation (Namaste, 2000; Stryker, 2008). The
violence faced by transgender women is more than the result of prejudice.
It is rooted in social structures of poverty, limited access to education or
health services, and related factors that have recently come into focus in
activism (Transgender Europe, 2012, 2014).
Notions such as “homophobia”, “hate crimes” or “bias crime” were
developed in North America or Europe, reflecting their particular relations
between violence, political cultures and social mobilizations. They are based
on a difference between gender and sexuality that has been fundamental for
the understanding of what both of them are and to develop gender studies
and sexuality studies as semi-autonomous fields of expertise. However, the
separation of gender/sexuality creates problematic separations when
applied to the subjectivities packed inside LGBTI or when applied to other
sociocultural contexts.
As the next sections show, assumptions about violence and conflict
underlying LGBTI, as a package of identities and politics, are problematic

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when dealing with local politics in contexts of protracted conflict and socio-
political violence.

An ethnographic scene and two life stories

In early 2012, I was in Colombia interviewing LGBTI activists, public ser-
vants in charge of implementing social policies to attend victims of armed
conflict and individuals who may have been victimised because of their
sexual orientation or gender identity in events of socio-political violence. In
several occasions, I travelled to Malambo, a town close to Barranquilla, an
industrial city on the Caribbean. I was supported by Edward, an activist
working in an LBGTI organisation. Edward has heard that Nadia, a trans-
gender woman, was looking to be included in the register of victims of dis-
placement because of political conflict. He thought Nadia’s story could be
relevant for his activism and for my research.
Law 1448 of 2011, a new legal frame for the rights of victims of armed
conflict in Colombia, mentioned sexual orientation in relation to victimi-
sation. In practice, sexual orientation was understood in the frame of
LGBTI terminology. By the time, there were already several social policy
schemes implemented in different cities and departments in Colombia.
LGBTI was a known language to deploy issues of gender and sexuality in
policies. As result of Law 1448, public institutions and LGBTI organisa-
tions in areas affected by armed conflict were working together to iden-
tify “LGBTI victims of the conflict” and to facilitate their inclusion in
the register. They were also implementing training programs, developing
new protocols and documenting the needs of victims of armed conflict.
I participated in several of those activities as part of my participatory
observation.
The interview was held in a peluqueria—beauty parlour—where Nadia
lives and works. The house belongs to her sister. Nadia shares the house-
hold with the family of her sister: the husband and four children. Nadia’s
sister kept attending clients during our conversation. Men arrived as clients
to have their hair done. A standard haircut can cost COP 2500, less than
USD 1. One bus journey costs half that price. During the time I was there
several clients arrived. Men were also friends of the women who were pre-
sented in the place. Several conversations and other activities occurred
while we were there. It was a very active and lively place.
During the interview, other travestis present in the parlour commented on
Nadia’s stories. When talking about the possibility of getting some econom-
ics compensation because of being recognised as a displaced person, one of
her friends told her to use that money to get her breast implants. She
answered that she would do it if younger and that she does not need “those
things” to pass as a woman.
When describing aspects of her life, Nadia used masculine pronouns. For
example, when talking about her peers she used nosotros—us, in masculine

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or called them otros gays—other gays. Same time, in several moments of the
interview, she described how she has lived as a woman for long. In the inter-
view, she stated that she wanted to be incorporated in the displacement
register as a “transexual”.
Edward led the first part of the interview. He asked about Nadia’s experi-
ence of displacement and situations of discrimination because of her
“identity”. He introduced himself as a representative of victims and used
terms and concepts proper to the language of human rights and institutions.
On some occasions, he offered Nadia his support as an activist to be
included in the register of victims of armed conflict as “member of the
LGBTI community”.
What I witnessed that day was the struggle, negotiation and redefinition
of life narratives. Edward used a frame of identity politics based on dis-
crimination because of gender identity or sexual orientation to explain
Nadia’s life experiences. Nadia told her story emphasising her struggles
for a dignified live. Meanwhile, I was mediating in between narratives and
struggling to understand how both related to LGBTI activism and victimi-
sation policies. From my perspective, Nadia was emphasising less on
gender and sexual orientation and more into her ways to overcome a con-
tinuum and overlapping of violences. Still, she ended up reframing her
story under the logic of victimisation imposed by LGBTI narratives and
state policies.
To understand how this struggle between understandings of violence and
identity occurred, I introduce first Edward’s life story and then Nadia’s.

Edward’s story
Edward is a young “LGBT” activist, as he called himself. He was born in
1989 in Malambo, a municipality of the urban area close to Barranquilla, a
capital city in Colombian Caribbean coast. In Malambo lives an important
working-class sector for the factories surrounding the city. His father was
an unskilled worker in the informal sector of the economy. His mother has
been in charge of the household. In the second year of his university studies,
his father died. He left university, looking for work to support his mother
and his extended family. LGBT activism has given him an opportunity for
educational and social mobilisation that he may not have had coming from
a working-class family struggling with poverty.
His story shows how the professionalisation of LGBT activism and the
incorporation of LBGT topics in public policies facilitates the emergence of
new subjectivities. It also illustrates how those changes can occur in a short
period. The organisation for which Edward works gives meaning to LGBTI
under ideas of diversity and recognition. Diversity, in general, and gender
and sexual diversity, in particular, have been powerful tools in the develop-
ment of LGBTI activism in Colombia. This is due to the turn toward diver-
sity as a value enshrined in the 1991 Colombian National Constitution.

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A tendency also presented in other Latin American countries (Lind &

Keating, 2013).
This professionalisation of LGBTI activism under frames of diversity in
order to impact state policies resembles what Jane Ward (2008) found in
U.S. queer organisations. Ward studied how neoliberal ideas about diversity
and difference are incorporated in the practices of organisations working
on LGBT-related topics. In her argument, LGBT organisations are learning
from corporations how to manage contentions in order to compete with
others, use diversity to improve their public presence and become experts in
the matter. The result is a tension with political agendas around resistance
or radical change that may have caused their activism. This connection
between LGBTI, neoliberal corporate activism and neoliberal state policies
underlines the two stories I present.
While in university, Edward joined several organisations working on gay
rights and HIV in the Colombian Caribbean region. After finishing his BA,
he took an online course on human rights offered by the National
Ombudsman Office. That experience was fundamental for his career devel-
opment. During the course, he entered in contact with public employees,
police forces and other activists on human rights. He also understood the
mechanisms, concepts and the language of the field. In 2012, he was hired
by a local LGBT organisation to manage a database on violence because of
gender or sexual orientation. Moreover, that training gave him a new status
among his family, classmates and community. In a few years, Edward
moved from being a student working in several informal jobs to become a
representative in national and international bodies of LGBT and victims’
activism.
Edward did not describe himself as a victim of violence. However, vio-
lence was a key element in his life narrative. He recalled the bullying he
faced when he was a child for being perceived as effeminate and less mas-
culine. Because of his work, he has witnessed several cases of violence
against trans women and gay men. One of his close friends was a trans
woman who died after injecting oils to acquire a more feminine body. He
remembered the mocking and negligence of hospital personal because of
her gender identity. Illegal armed actors had presence in his university and
targeted student activism, including gay activism. That was not an isolated
case; LBGT activists have been targeted by illegal armed groups acting in
conflict and post-conflict areas in Colombia, as warned by LGBT organisa-
tions, public institutions and international agencies (Cortés Mora et al.,
2018). For the purpose of this chapter is important to remember that activ-
ism is still a dangerous activity, particularly in contexts of conflict and in
rural or isolated areas.
Risk does not impede activists to take the spaces created by state policies.
The turn taken by Colombian state toward rights and diversity has also
come with a proliferation of spaces for participation of citizens and grass-
root organisations’ leaders. Edward has had the chance to participate in a

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space created by the government as part of the implementation of new legal

frames for the rights of victims of the conflict. “LGBT people” have included
as one of the protected sectors and have representation in that space.
However, state participation policies also promote hierarchies of victims.
It has not been easy for Edward being a representative of the “LGBTI com-
munity” at national participation bodies. He is young and gay. His youth
contrasts with the more mature and professional activism he has found in
representatives of other social movements and with state bureaucracies.
Gender identities and sexual orientation are still seen as a minor topic in
relation to other topics more visible in public agendas around conflict such
as displacement, land struggles or extrajudicial killings of social move-
ments’ leaders. LGBTI is a new topic that creates suspicious among more
established topics of activism. When not suspicious, LGBT topics are quite
exotic, he said. Still, the inclusion of LGBTI people in the implementation
of laws under frames of diversity and in association with women, ethnic
groups and other minorities, often contained in the same box, gives a chance
for making their voices heard, opening spaces and creating bridges, he
explained.
His activism and representative role have put him also in debates with
members of other LGBT organisations. The fact that sometimes he pres-
ents in national arenas the violence suffered by trans women is seen by
trans leaders as patronising and inadequate, among other reasons
because he is not a trans person. Same time, he continued, because he
and his organisation often talk about violence and denounce cases of
victimisation, they have been accused of creating stigma on trans women
or prostitution.
The strategic use of violence against trans women in LGBTI activism
has been denounced by trans activists in Colombia and other countries.
As mentioned earlier, one of the results of the packing of LGBTI is the
assimilation between dissimilar forms of violence under a common frame.
Reports on violence against LGBTI individuals in Colombia make evi-
dent the disproportionate amount of violence against trans women in
conflict and non-conflict settings (Caribe Afirmativo, 2015; Cortés Mora
et al., 2018). Activism uses “violence against LGBTI communities” as
core matter for their struggles. Still, several forms of violence are mostly
against trans individuals and collectives. As a result, LGBTI agendas such
as marriage equality are supported on the denounce of violence against
trans people.

Nadia’s story
The story Nadia shared can be easily subscribed as the narrative of a woman
who is able to get some subsidies by the state because of legal changes in
Colombia. It can be also seen as the common story of violence and discrimi-
nation often associated with trans women. However, what she told is the

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story of how the state produces and reproduces forms of exclusion and
injustices, even with ideas of reparation and compensation for the violation
of basic human rights. It is also the story of dealing with a script that forces
her to retell her life under the frame of violence and discrimination common
in LGBTI narratives. Interactions between remembering, forgetting and
narrating again lead the retelling of her life story and were at the core of her
struggles to become a state registered victim. A retelling that occurred in a
context in which memory work and the emergence of LGBTI as a distinc-
tive political subjectivity became space for personal, collective and state
politics to facilitate political transitions.
Nadia was born in 1966 in Puerto Berrio, a town in the inner lands of
Colombia. When she was a teenager, her family sent her to live in Barranquilla
with her sister. There, she worked as a housemaid in different houses for
periods of one or two years. Once she arrived in Barranquilla in the 1980s,
she entered in the circuits of gay life, such as bars, discos and beauty pag-
eants. She enjoyed partying. It was a time when it was safe spending all
night with el cliente—the client—in public places. It is possible that she used
that term to refer a “trade”, someone just to meet but also suggests some
temporary work in prostitution.
For years she used different female names. In 2011, while participating in
a beauty contest, she was bautizada—baptised—with her current female
name. Her name was given by another travesti, older and well recognised in
the community and after selecting among several names that her friends
were using to call her. Currently, she does not want to change the masculine
name on her identity card because all her other legal documents have that
name. She did not mention the change of her name as a problem in terms of
legal issues.
In the first minutes of the interview, Nadia offered two of the elements
that structured the story she shared. One was her arrival to Malambo as a
teenager. The other was her recent experience looking to be incorporated in
the official register for internally displaced people in Colombia:

I arrived to Malambo around 1980, displaced from Puerto Berrío,

Antioquia. I came here when I was 14 years old. Now, because of
circumstances of life, I started the procedures to be registered as
desplazado—displaced—because when I came here such things did
not exist. I came here because of my parents passed away and the
violence I had to face. I had to face many things that now I can’t
remember.

This description of her arrival and current situation resulted also from dif-
ferent ways she was asked to recall events. Her initial description of her
arrival used the term me vine de la edad de catorce años—“I came here
when I was 14 years old”. Isolated, that expression could imply that she did
it by her own will. When asked to talk more about what happened she

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remembered that her father tuvo que enviar aqui—“he had to send me
here”. That was not her decision but her father’s mandate. And immedi-
ately, she continued:

Nadia: At that time, there was contraguerrilla—counter-guerrilla armies.

Nothing happened to me. I was sent (to live with sister) maybe because
they wanted to do something to me.
Edward: was there any threat?
N: Yes.
Fernando: Do you remember what was happening at that time?
N: No, I don’t remember.
E: Do you think that what caused because you were a young gay?
N: I think so because since I was a kid I knew I would be gay. Maybe it was
because of that.
E: Something happened to you? They told you something?
N: No, they didn’t tell me anything.
F: What happened after that?
N: I remember my father told me “make your bags. You are going to your
sister’s. She has the tickets”. It was all of the sudden. I barely have time
to pack. After that, I didn’t return. My sister was the one who called
home. She was already living here and went for me.

This description illustrates different ways in which events are forgotten and
remembered. In several moments of the interview, Nadia mentioned that
she did not remember certain aspects of her story. She could not offer infor-
mation about the armed groups that were acting in the region where she
was born. She introduced herself explaining that she arrived in the Caribbean
because her parents passed away. Later in the interview, she explained that
after she was sent to live with her sister things in the area went back to
normal. Her father died years after, in events not related with the conflict,
as she made clear in other moment of the conversation. A specific event of
displacement because of actions of armed actors was not offered.
Reducing these tensions between remembering and forgetting to a dis-
pute between truth and fiction may be misleading. The immediate situation
in which the narrative was created needs to be considered. Nadia was relat-
ing to the interview as a continuation of the narrative she had to offer to
the bureaucracies in charge of registering her as a displaced person. The
interview was the opportunity to obtain some support by one of the
interviewers.
The previous excerpt of the interview illustrates his interest in the con-
nection the experience of displacement with her “identity”. Just after
describing the circumstances of her arrival to the Caribbean, Edward asked
Nadia if she experienced discrimination in her family because of her “iden-
tity”. Nadia made it clear that she did not feel any rechazo—rejection—by
her family. All her family knew she was “gay” since she was a child, she

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commented. Edward, my facilitator of fieldwork, has the script of an LGBT

activist and an advocate for the rights of victims of the conflict. In that
script discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity is a
common explanation, departing and concluding point.
The tension between one’s life narrative and the script used by stan-
dardised narratives of how a supposed victim should look has been also
registered in cases of asylum-seeking claimers. Stereotypes and precon-
ceptions about same-sex sexualities shape the way in which events of
victimisation are documented by those trained in legal issues and human
rights claims. Researchers have found that authorities in Canada, the
United Kingdom or Australia when dealing with asylum seekers based on
gender or sexuality, use their preconceptions and stereotypes about
homosexuality to judge the relevance or not of their claims (Millbank,
2002). Those preconceptions are not only based on ideas about gay iden-
tity in the metropolis but also on male homosexuality. Because of that,
asylum seekers are forced to provide a narrative of themselves that
matches the expectations of authorities in receiving countries about what
it means to be “gay” and therefore liable for prosecution in the countries
of departure (Raj, 2011).
Besides, LGBTI identity politics are based on a call for truth telling.
“Coming out of the closet” is mostly a matter of interest in gay identity but
operates as an expected common trope for other identities. However, visi-
bility and the need to tell the truth about oneself are not needed in the life
experiences of transgender people and travestis whose lives have been for
long visible and present in public spaces.
The same call to tell the truth about oneself happens with victims of
armed conflict required to give a narrative able to be confronted with evi-
dence and historical facts. In a context political transitions between con-
flicts, legal changes create new forms of being recognised by the state. Still,
not all those packed in LGBTI have the same relationship with the state nor
make it a core issue in their activism.
Nadia’s narrative differs from the narratives offered by other gay or trans
activists interviewed in Colombia since the state does not appear in her nar-
rative as the reference to define her claims. In her limited interactions with
the state, Nadia has learned not to expect very much from it. When asked
about direct experiences of violence she emphasised that luckily nothing
has happened to her. Differing from other narratives of travestis or trans
women, Nadia said that police no se mete con nosotros—did not assault us.
Paso como toda una dama!—“I pass as a entire lady!”, she explained,
laughing. Not defining an event as violent does not mean it has not had an
impact on someone’s life experiences. LGBTI, as explanatory frame. can
make visible some forms of violence at the same time that ignores others.
Once, Nadia was living with other “gays” and something happened.
Some men went to their house for drinks. Her housemates took money
from them. Once the men realised about the missing money, one of them

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returned to the house. Nadia opened the door and the man stabbed her. She
was in the hospital for some weeks. Her brother helped her with the legal
issues. The judge explained to him that it was problemas de maricas—
“problems between faggots”—and there was not much to do. Nadia decided
not to pursue any other legal step further. Her answer shared the experience
faced by other trans women of a long tradition of denial and a lack of atten-
tion by the state and its protective instruments as well as a common mis-
trust in the state as a space to deal with conflicts.
Failure to convict and lack of adequate research of crimes are common
elements in Colombian legal systems and increases among the most vulner-
able. The Colombian NGO Colombia Diversa registered 542 homicides of
LGBT people between 2006 and 2011 (Colombia Diversa, 2013). In 300 of
them, there were no resultant legal processes. Most of the victims were not
identified. Half of the cases under investigation are still in the preliminary
stages since perpetrators have not been identified. Early cases have been
already archived without any further result. Even more, prejudice in the
justice system and its officers seem to be common characteristics of these
cases (Colombia Diversa, 2013, p. 28). LGBTI Identity politics imposes the
need to tell truth about oneself, but why tell it when there is no one inter-
ested in hearing?
This situation is more complex for travestis. Violence against trans
women has recently entered in regional human rights agendas. On March
23, 2012, during the 144 Period of Sessions of the Organization of American
States, a hearing on the situation of transgender persons was held. Red
Latinoamericana y del Caribe de Personas Trans-Latin American and the
Caribbean Network of Trans People REDLACTRANS reported on the low
life expectancy of trans women because of violence and preventable health
issues, the occurrence of extrajudicial crimes and disappearances and the
violence executed by police and state agents. This amid the lack of attention
by state institutions. Interestingly, the session was called on the “right to
identity of trans people”, as if identity were the main concern.
This recent interest in some international human rights bodies contrast
with a long history or denounces on the multiple violences affecting trans
women in the region that did not get attention in public agendas. Human
rights organisations since the 1970s have paid attention to the links between
paramilitaries, death squads and state security apparatus in para-institu-
tional violence in Latin America (Jones, 2004). “Social cleansing” was the
term that popularized in the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America that sinister
connection between para-institutionality and violence against those posi-
tioned at the margins of society: homeless youth, prostitutes, drug users,
streets delinquents, homosexuals. State terror and para-institutional vio-
lence targeted not only political opposition but also anyone that adopted
stances or belonged to a group that challenges existing social, political and
economic order (Sluka, 2000): in brief, the poor, the undesirable, the “dis-
posable” (Ordoñez, 1996).

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In 1994, a joint report of the United Nations Special Rapporteurs on

Torture and on Extrajudicial Killing mentioned the action of death squads
against “homosexuals” as part of social cleansing operations in Colombia
and called attention of the legitimacy, impunity and complicity of authori-
ties in such crimes.
Colombian lawyer Juan Pablo Ordoñez (1996) was among the first in
denouncing in international arenas violence based on gender identity and
sexual orientation in Colombia in relation to socio-political violence. Of the
20 victims of social cleansing squads between 1992 and 1994 identified by
Ordoñez, 9 had also a feminine name. Despite that information does not
directly imply the gender identity of victims it does offer some clues about
them. Those initial reports mentioned violence against travestis as part of
the action of social cleansing squads and other authoritarian groups. While
violence against homosexuals and travesties tend to be easily classified by
authorities as “passionate crime”, delinquency seems to be an additional
factor added almost exclusively to explain violence against travestis. A lack
of security, the inefficacy of legal system, gentrification policies coupled
with economics and morality were considered the justifications of those
actions. Perpetrators were sometimes members of police forces, groups spe-
cially created for such purpose or just social groups who decide to take
justice by their own hands. Don Kulick (1998) described a similar pattern
of violence against travestis in Brazil, as part of the everyday life violence
that they experience.
I argue that in this kind of violence, victimisation was the result of not
just one factor such as gender identity or sexual orientation or a mere
belonging to a group but a combination of several others as well. Those
factors include the public condition of the vulnerability, the visibility of
gender identity, the positioning of the victim in polarised social divisions
such “decent” and “non-decent” people, the assumed non-productive of
the victim and the inscription of the violent event in a script that justifies
the action: “they deserve it”, “it is their fault”, “it is for the good of
society”. Social cleansing had the power of sending a message, the mes-
sage that certain groups were under surveillance and were potential vic-
tims. Its impact contributed to a generalized sense of fear that involved
broader sectors of society useful for contentious players in socio-politi-
cal conflict.

Back to Nadia’s story

According to new legal frames implemented in Colombia, people who have
experienced displacement because of the actions of armed actors are asked
to give their testimony to corresponding bureaucracies. Some administra-
tive procedures are followed to check the stories offered by victims.
The ones who are accepted in the register as displaced persons are entitled
to compensations. The town where Nadia lives, for example, has been

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receiving a significant number of people displaced by the conflict. It is now-

adays one of the first municipalities with housing projects for victims of the
conflict.
Asked about the reasons to go the institution in charge of registering
internally displaced people, Nadia said:

On February 28th I was interrogated. I was incorporated in the

displaced register to see if I can receive some help. Now in March I
have to go again. I don’t know what ayuda—help—I will be given.
Maybe money, a house. Any help I receive, I will agree with it.
Nowadays I am really bored with my sister. I want to have some-
thing I can consider mine, my own space. People told me to follow
that procedure. I abstained me to do it because my identity card is
not from here but the personero—ombudsman—told me that it
does not mater, a displaced person is a displaced person!

It is possible to argue that Nadia is using one of the few instruments that the
state has created to give some citizens the chance to obtain a limited chance
of compensations of structural injustices. She knew about that instrument
through another travesti who knew the case of a gay man who was dis-
placed with all his community by paramilitares. He got a house in Malambo.
That would explain that in the search of some economic independence she
used that instrument. Her life story showed how lacking access to educa-
tion, growing up in a peasant’s family and with limited family support, her
chances for social mobility were restricted.
However, as she also expressed, what she was expecting to receive from
the state was una ayudita—some little help. That help was facilitated by the
random fact that the ombudsman is a gay man and was welcoming to her
presence. “LGBT people” were recently recognised as victims of the conflict.
Local bureaucracies were aware of the need to collect information about
“LGBT victims”. Nadia remembers the sympathy of the personero. When
he saw her identity card, he asked her how she wanted to be registered: as
a “woman” or a “transexual”. She said that as a “transexual”.
Nadia did not explain her situation as a “lack of rights” and therefore the
law as reparation of the harm she was inflicted. She was responding to what
the state has been for long teaching to some of their citizens. What Nadia
shared is the story of how the state defines relations with its citizens and
how they learn to interact with it. The state offers “gifts” that are distrib-
uted according to the will of the bureaucracies that are in charge of admin-
istering them. In doing that, Nadia seems to struggle with the need to be
defined as a victim imposed by law and LGBTI activism centred on victimi-
sation as policy to create new citizenships and expand governability.
The way she looks at her is more than a history of accumulated violences.
“In spite of what I am, I have been very lucky. My family, mi colleagues,
people in high society, the whole humanity, I have never been rejected for

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nothing or for nobody”. That claim, does not deny the injustices she has
faced but emphasise dignity, when the state and some forms of activism just
look at her as a subject in need or as a site of violence.

Conclusion
This contribution started with a presentation of the reasons for a critique of
LGBTI and an all-encompassing descriptive term and its supporting poli-
tics. LGBTI creates a universalised representation of abstract identities.
It assumes some connections between gender and sexuality based on com-
munalities among grievances. Mixing the language of identity politics with
collective descriptive terms from different origins and politics, LGBTI con-
flates dissimilar and even opposite reason to mobilise.
The discussion presented in this chapter is intended to illustrate how
global, regional, local and micro-local gender and sexual politics and the
politics to deal with protracted conflicts shape and reshape subjectivities.
Both kinds of politics are in constant interaction. Their interactions show
how in contexts of protracted conflict and socio-political violence, denial
and recognition go in parallel. LGBTI politics create an idea of communal-
ity around a supposed shared experience of victimisation attached to some
subjects. It opens a space to renegotiate the relationship with the state.
LGBTI politics also carries a sense of agency, activism and mobilisation.
Somehow it celebrates diversity bringing together disparate collectives and
promising a common political agenda. International LGBTI politics and
professional activism open international dialogues, exchanges and collabo-
ration. They also framed mobilisations in restricted claims for state
recognition.
However, the possibilities of change in LGBTI politics are restricted and
limited. Since LGBTI has the state as its main player, it ends up focusing on
litigation strategies and policy reforms. The responsibilities of other social
actors in the promotion of fear and violence or of other public arenas not
depending on the state are ignored. LGBTI politics in neoliberal states that
emphasises the participation of citizens to displace responsibilities for
change to individuals.
As discussed initially and illustrated with case studies, LGBTI politics
coexist with other gender and sexual politics for change. In Latin American
countries there are also “different geo-temporalities” from western ideas of
LGBTI and queer politics, as Joanna Mizielinska (Mizielinska & Kulpa,
2011) suggested in a study on Polish LGBT activism. There, queer politics
with their “in-your-face strategies” coexist with liberation claims, calls for
assimilation in broader society, celebratory identity building and litigation
strategies based on international LGBT human rights. This disjunction in
temporalities is a result of activist strategies to deal with a complex political
context rather than an underdevelopment or delay in the progress linearity
assumed in Western identity-based LGBT and queer politics. If there is

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utility in LGBTI politics and queer politics, is in contradictory coexistence

with other possibilities for political action instead on its consecration as the
unique or expected path for change in gender and sexual politics.
Unpacking the patterns of violence under the acronym LGBTI is impor-
tant to make visible the vulnerabilities concentrated in particular bodies
and ovoid the tendency to extend its effects to other subjects affected by
different issues. Even more, since the identity politics underlying LGBTI are
based on the opposition visibility/invisibility, inclusion/exclusion, pride/
prejudice, other reasons for victimisation and previous stories of mobilisa-
tion need to be considered in discussions.
As the examples presented before, neoliberal politics are acting at micro-
levels of everyday practices and are reinforced by the promise of inclusion
and recognition of diversity attached to the incorporation of LGBTI in
social policies. LGBTI politics in the context of socio-political conflict and
neoliberal state policies make victimisation the way for some subjects to
exist as collective actors. They allow some subjects their existence as collec-
tive actors under new forms of sovereignty in a relationship of dependence
from state recognition. That is the limit of LGBTI politics as reason for col-
lective action and as explanatory model of life experiences such as those of
travestis, trans women, men and other subjects that do not fit inside the
LGBTI package.

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 12
UNDERSTANDING GENDER IN
NEPAL
Concepts and practices

Gyanu Chhetri

Third-gender persons have always been present in human societies around

the world even though as a numerical minority. The earliest estimate on the
population of third gender people in Nepal was made in 2001 when Blue
Diamond Society (BDS) identified more than 300,000 third-gender people
in Nepal (Nepal Study and Research Center [NSRC], 2010). According to
the Nepal LGBTI Survey 2013, conducted by Blue Diamond Society, their
population was reported to be 967,049, counting those that were affiliated
to its 53 branches across the country. This number is 3.65% of the total
population of Nepal for that time. At present, their population is estimated
to be about 1 million (personal communication with BDS staff, November
2018). However, the exact population of the third gender people is not
known because they were not made visible by the national census of 2011.
Their presence was not acknowledged by states, or even their own fami-
lies and communities, until recently. In fact, they were often forced by their
own families and society to “adopt” one of the “accepted” binary sex iden-
tities—that is, male or female. However, in Nepal and in the Hindu ideology
which has prevailed in the society over time, one could argue that the “third
gender” as a distinct category of people were “recognized” to have been
there in the past. Notwithstanding this, in actual practice, such people were
always treated as an anomalous category. Because of the norms for social
relations set by the dominant religious beliefs, in real life such persons con-
tinued to be discriminated because they did not fit with the prevailing binary
category and perhaps because they were in minority. In fact, most of them
did not dare to “come out” with their true and distinct identity because the
society was not yet ready to accept the existence of yet another gender cat-
egory among humans. The prevailing “collective consciousness” (to use
Durkheim’s concept) denied the third gendered persons a space in par with
the already recognized two sexes.
In this chapter, I argue that the gender and development discourse that
emerged in the 1970s gradually initiated changes in the social recognition
and relations among the “three genders” and thereby initiated amendments
in some of the age-old anomalies in this field. Such gender discourse–related

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research, advocacy and the resulting practices should be credited for estab-
lishing by now a “third group” of gender category besides the binary “male
and female” categories. I argue that things have gradually changed today in
Nepal also for the persons belonging to the category of “third gender”
about their being accepted by the family and recognized by the society and
the state.
To bolster these arguments, I rely on my own observations of and read-
ings on social interactions as well as the nature of the treatment towards
the “third-gender” individuals by their own family and friends as well as
the larger Nepali society and the state. I have referred to individual cases
(as experienced by third-gender individuals) as well as the norms and
values prevailing in Nepali society, to discuss how the third-gender per-
sons have been looked at and treated by their families and relatives as
well as the state. In doing this, I have also discussed some individual cases
to make a point that things seem to be gradually improving in recent
times. I maintain the confidentiality and anonymity of all research respon-
dents. However, there is no denying that there are still some challenges
and hurdles on the way for the third-gender people to be recognized as
normal people by their family, the state and society (as relatives/kin and
citizens).

Who are third-gender people?

Gender refers to socially constructed characteristics of women and men—
such as the norms, roles and relationships that exist between them.
According to the World Health Organization, individuals that do not fit
into the binary male or female sex categories and comprise the “other”
group, are called “third gender”. In sociology, third gender is used to
describe any gender role outside the male and female binary categories. By
now, most of the people understand that “third-gender” persons regard
themselves as not belonging to either male or female identity. Many of them
may like to call themselves as sexual and gender minority. We now know
that they belong to one of the several groups as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-
gender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ). However, the men and women in
society tend to put them under a single category called “third gender”.
Based on their sexual orientation, they are often also referred to as
homosexuals.

Acceptance and recognition: Some examples

The debates and discussion on concepts, recognition and rights of “third
gender” is a recent phenomenon. The term third gender itself is a new con-
cept which encompasses all the LGBTIQ people. Thus, the term third gen-
der is used as an umbrella to denote this group of people. In fact, calling
these people by such derogatory term third is attributed to the prevalence of

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the ideology of binary sex as male and female and two corresponding gen-
ders as men and women. Yet questions can be raised as on what basis cer-
tain sex/gender is attributed as “first”, “second”, or “third”. Besides, based
on one’s sexual orientation people are categorized as lesbian, gay and bisex-
ual. They tend to be inclined towards seeing themselves as either a male or
female category irrespective of their biological sex. In other words, they are
submerged within female or male groups. Transgender persons move from
one category to another, that is, male to female or female to male. They
change sex and yet belong to one of the binary sex/gender categories.
Intersex people are the ones not belonging to either of these categories as
Nanda (1999) calls “Neither Man nor Woman”. In the contemporary usage
of the term, they are the real so-called third gender persons. Because of the
majority-minority issue, all the gender included under “LGBTIQ” must
have been placed together under the group called “third gender”.
Given the prevalence of such notions and values, the idea of a positive
recognition of third or additional genders as normal people was an incon-
ceivable thing in many societies around the world in the past. But there are
exceptions and, in some societies, and religions, the third gender people are
looked at and treated with recognition and respect. For example, in India,
hijara persons (third gender) are treated more as social phenomenon and
they are also regarded as “special group of people” with powers to bestow
blessings on men and women. Thus, they are often invited in rituals and
other life-cycle events like childbirth and naming, initiation rites, and wed-
dings, among others (see Nanda, 1999). In recent times, they are also seen
in Kathmandu, visiting houses to give blessings when there is a marriage, or
a childbirth in families of the Marwari communities. The hijaras do not
wait for an invitation but visit their clients based on their own informal
sources of information as to who is getting married and which family has
had a newborn baby (son) to be blessed.
Unlike hijras occupying a highly institutionalized sex/gender variant role
and that they are able to fortify their interactions among themselves in
India (Nanda, 2000), the Nepali hijaras from most of the caste-ethnic com-
munities (apart from Marwari and other communities from the southern
plains of the country) as third-gender people are not yet to be seen as agents
with the powers to bestow blessings. Their social and cultural role as third
gender persons is not defined specifically in most of the communities in
Nepal. As a result, they choose to perform the role of either sex/gender of
their preference.
At some point, scholars generally assumed that everywhere, physical sex
was viewed as a binary category. But over the years we have come to know
that physical sex tends to be categorized differently by different communi-
ties or social groups. Most societies may recognize only two sexes while
others recognize more than two. Most of the human societies often give
recognition to the “third gender” which also enables them to give “names”

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to each of such categories and they may also ascribe special social status for
each of such categories.
Third-gender persons are accepted in some societies but not in others.
In some societies, same-sex sexual activity is viewed as a heinous violation
of religious and social mores. As a result, persons found guilty of such acts
may be subject to severe punishment including death sentences (e.g., Iran,
Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia). In others, imprisonment or a public beating
may be the legal response (e.g., Pakistan, Romania, and Nigeria). Countries
and societies around the world seem to have different ways of understand-
ing and dealing with people of third gender and their roles and activities.
For instance, Pakistani law recognizes third gender but at the same time
prohibits same-sex sexual activity and same-sex marriage. Bangladesh, on
the other hand, does not recognize any same-sex sexual activity (see
Nanda, 1999; Reddy, 2006). Furthermore, India legally recognizes third
gender, and this lets hijras remain separate from women and men. Even
though India’s Supreme Court has stated that the choice of one’s gender is
the right of every individual, same-sex marriage is still illegal and punish-
able there.
In contrast, full legal recognition to same-sex marriage is offered in
Netherlands and Denmark. Germany, is the first European country to offi-
cially recognize a “third gender” category on birth certificates for intersex
infants. New Zealand is the country with the legal same-sex marriage and
the adoption of children by same-sex couples (see Galliano 2003).
In Nepal, intersex persons are generally referred to by names such as
Hijada and Chhakka. They are also known as a group by different names
in different geographical regions of the country. For instance, they are called
“Fulu fulu” by people in Mountain areas, Singaru in Western Hills and
Maugiya or Kothi in the Tarai region (BDS, 2010).
“Third gender” for some people comprises the identity, while for others,
it becomes a basis for discrimination and violence. More often, people born
with a gender identity other than male or female face rejection or hostility
from people around them in the society. As a result, a significant number of
them tend to conceal their real identity in order to survive or just to avoid
unpleasant and confrontational situations and thereby maintain cordial
relations with everyone around them.
In the 1988 Olympics, Spain’s top woman hurdler, Maria Patino was not
accepted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in the category
“woman athlete”. According to them, she did not meet the IOC’s definition
of woman. As a result, she was barred from competing in athletic events in
Spain’s Olympic team. It was only after two and half years that she was
reinstated by International Amateur Athletic Federation as a female athlete.
And in 1992, Patino was able to join the Spanish Olympic squad again, to
go down in history as the first woman ever to challenge sex examination for
female athletes (Fausto-Sterling 2013).

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Epics and religious beliefs

In Nepali literature, one can find quotes such as “wherever the women are
worshipped, gods also become delighted”. Among Hindus, three god-
desses—Durga (the goddess of power), Laxmi (the goddess of wealth) and
Saraswati (the goddess of wisdom) are worshipped with great devotion. But
women, who are considered Laxmi of the household, are not worshipped.
Among some communities in Nepal, kanya keti (virgin girls) are worshipped.
In Kathmandu, in the capital city, there is a virgin goddess called Kumari,
who is worshipped on occasions even by the head of the state and other
dignitaries as well. A Kumari goddess is selected from among the Newar
community and is recognized as a “virgin goddess”. But as soon as she gets
her first menstruation, she is no more considered as a goddess. This is a good
example of how women are perceived differently based on their sexuality.
Similarly, intersex persons who are half woman and half man are often
teased, but the Ardhanarishwar, half woman and half man, one of the mani-
festations of Lord Shiva is worshipped by Hindus. The same kind of entities
can be observed among the Hawaiians. For instance, in Hawaiian culture,
Laka is regarded as the god as well as the goddess of hula. But in the same
society, Mahu-a gay person is said ridiculed and stared at (see Matzner, 2013).
In the Hindu epic story of Mahabharat, the role and status of an intersex
prince known as Sikhandi are noteworthy. In the same epic story, Arjun, one
of the famous five Pandava brothers, disguised himself during their last year
of exile as Brihannala, a eunuch, to get employment as a teacher of music
and dance to serve the princess of Virat (see Chhetri, 2017).

Why call them a “third”?

I feel that we need to ask and deal with some questions about assigning an
identity label called “third” to the LGBTIQ people. Why are they lumped
together into a single “gender category” and are regarded as belonging to
the category “third”? Why do we have to follow the order as first, second
and third to name them?
Within the third genders, only the intersex or hermaphrodite (those born
with both male and female sexual organs), in actual sense, is a separate
category as per biological attributes. But those that are called lesbian, gay
and bisexual are people differing from others in sexual orientation, not in
biology. Biologically, they still belong to one of the existing binary catego-
ries—male and female. Some transgender persons move or transcend from
one category to another as male to female or female to male. They change
their sex organs by undergoing surgery. Still others change their dress and
behaviour—female imitating male or vice versa.
As we know, men homosexuals are called gay and women homosexuals
lesbian. Why then they are also called gay men and lesbian women? Because
they also want to live together in association with partners and have their

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own family. Thus, also within the LGBTIQ, there is maleness and female-
ness. One becomes and acts as husband and the other becomes wife.
Eventually they become father and mother to their adopted children.
I often feel that there is a need to think of ascribing appropriate names to
recognize the persons who do not belong to or do now want to be assigned
to either of the existing male or female categories. We know why one group
of people were called male and another female. Why not call the LGBTIQ
with different names of their own rather than try to lump them together in
one or the other way? I would say that the very idea of recognizing “third
gender” must have been there to say that there is a group of people who are
neither men nor women (neither male nor female either).

Social and cultural scenario of third-gender population in Nepal

Nepali people in general, whether within the family or in the society, seem
to hold negative attitudes towards the third-gender persons. In the past,
they were treated as “unnatural” by their family, society and the state. They
were not accepted but were rather discriminated against, excluded from
many of the “regular” roles in the family and society. They had to leave
their homes, were often expelled from schools and fired from works upon
being discovered that they were “not normal people”. Social stigma also
leads them out of the family, schools and from the workplaces. Thus, they
are often forced to move out and hide their pain. Families are pressured to
behave with their third-gender children in negative ways because of the
prevailing social stigma.
Opening up and coming out for individuals as third genders in the society
seems to depend upon the attitudes and treatments of the family, society
and the state towards them. Support from the near and dear ones to begin
with seems to make them strong, to come out and fight with societal and
state’s discrimination. Thus, it is family which enhance or hinder their
endeavour to open up and struggle for equality in par with other genders.
Those families that do not care about social stigma tend to accept and sup-
port their third-gender children whole-heartedly. Such families do not have
to lose anything even when their relatives and neighbours are not support-
ive (see Chhetri, 2017, Case 2).
According to Regmi (2016), discrimination against the third-gender indi-
viduals from society as well as from their own parents and relatives persists
in Nepal. However, there are also cases of family support for such individu-
als. Families have been positive and supportive towards their children’s cho-
sen identity. There could be some reason behind their acceptance. Let me
present some case stories extracted in summary from Acharya (2067 B.S.)
of sex change, and cohabitation of lesbian and gay couples:
a) A father with religious nature, accepts his lesbian daughter
Milan and his wife Nirmala only after they adopted a new born
baby girl Minisa (named after borrowing two initial letters

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from each of the parents and sa for sathi i.e. friend) from a hos-
pital in Chitawan After the adoption Milan’s father offered
them to come back home. “Parents often forgive their children
because of their love for grandchildren” Milan said. In this case
we can say that the grandchild became the source of family inte-
gration. In other words, it could be suggested that children can
and do become instrumental for family integrity and solidarity
(Acharya 2067 B.S.).
b) Raj Thapa (20 yrs.) and Sandhya Shrestha (17 yrs.) are a lesbian
couple living together in Pokhara. Sandhya has taken Raj’s sur-
name Thapa. Their families do not accept their homosexual
union. Raj says, “I want to marry Sandhya with Band-Baja”.
While Sandhya says, “if my family forced me to marry another
man, neither I nor the man could be happy”. Raj is working at
Paribartan Nepal (an organization working on the rights of les-
bian) in Pokhara, feels proud to be identified as homosexual of
younger generation. He/She inspires other lesbians like him/her
to come out. She Says, “the new generation have not only under-
stood homosexual relations, but the tendency of taking it posi-
tively is also increasing. However, due to lack of law and
awareness, many young Lesbians are not able to come out”. He/
she wants same-sex marriage to be legal (Acharya 2067 B.S.).
c) Teju Adhikari (23 yrs), a lesbian, lives in Chitawan with her
mother and four sisters. Her father died five years ago. She was
working and supporting her family economically. A marriage
was arranged for her. She tried to convince her family members
about her reality. She also tried to convince the man (to be
groom) that she can’t marry him. When nothing worked out,
Teju decided to run away and did so. A month later she came
back home and told that she cannot marry a man; she must
marry another woman like herself. Her mother was shocked to
hear this. However, Teju’s mother accepted her lesbian daughter
to stay in her house. But she told her daughter that, “she cannot
marry and send her daughter off with a female son-in-law”. In
absence of the father, it became easy for the mother to make
such a decision. However, cultural practice, such as sending
one’s daughter off with a male son-in-law, became a barrier for
her. From this story it becomes evident that Lesbians who are
economically secured are more likely to open up and get sup-
port from their family (Acharya 2067 B.S.).
d) Rupa turned Rupesh Thapa Magar (28 yrs), successfully con-
vinced her family (mother, sister and brother-in-law) that she
was a lesbian. Rupesh and her partner, plan to adopt a foster
child once their economic status improves. According to her
there are many homosexuals hiding themselves in Pokhara. She

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thinks that they are afraid as to what their families would do, or
feel that they might lose their job, and there might be no place
to go. Thus, they cannot come out and hide themselves.
Individual variance can be noticed in this case, in opening. If
one is bold enough and skillful in convincing others about one’s
reality, it becomes easier to come out of the closet (Acharya
2067 B.S.).
e) The story of Arun who hails from Pyuthan is different. He
became Aruna after sex change surgery in Bangkok by spend-
ing one million rupees. Due to his feminine nature, he was liv-
ing away from his home district. After sex change he came
home during Dashain and Tihar festival. She enjoyed the festi-
val by singing deusi-bhailo (songs sung in Tihar festival by vis-
iting houses in the neighborhood) along with other local
women. Sisters are considered important during bhai tika (sis-
ters worship brothers). His brother Suman was happy to have
a sister. “Much joy added”, he said, “when the person I was
considering a brother became a sister and entered home”. He
was so happy to receive bhai tika from his own sister Aruna
this time. He had been receiving the same from a neighbour’s
daughter otherwise (Kantipur. Daily. Nov. 13, 2018). Cultural
value of a sister/daughter became instrumental for re-union of
this family where a sister was so much desired. Thus, it was
welcoming for Arun-Aruna.
f) A child of well-known family (a popular celebrity) underwent
sex change—from male to female. This family had two sons and
a daughter. They lost their daughter in road accident. This fam-
ily, therefore, supported emotionally as well as financially for
sex change surgery of one of their “sons”. Family members were
very much supportive, and thus took responsibility of the cost
to fulfil their child’s desire of transgressing. Now the Transsex
girl wants to get pregnant and give birth to her own child by
using her own sperm, donated before sex organ transplant. She
also wants to breast feed her own baby when she gives birth.
Her mother who has seen her child suffering in the whole pro-
cess of transplant, resists for yet another transplant of uterus
and covetous in her child. She tells her daughter not to take
more pain and risk her life. She is rather suggesting her daughter
to go for surrogacy and use her own sperm (this story is based
on personal communication conducted on November 2018
with a close relative of the family). One can go this far, when
family is supportive.
g) Bhumika Shrestha, a popular transgender (male to female) of
Nepal, who has joined a major political party as a member, was
born a male, but she never felt she belonged to that body. She

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considers herself lucky that she was supported by her family

from a very young age and was accepted the way she was. She
now suggests to families with LGBTI children, “give them all
your love and treat them like regular kids. Family support
makes them easier to deal with discrimination from society and
nation”.
(Shrestha 2012)

The stories summarized allow us to argue that social and cultural norms,
values, and the way people in the family, neighbourhood, society including
the state do make a difference. Besides this, the caste hierarchy, family’s
status in the society, its class status and so on, also influence the treatment
of third-gender persons favourably or otherwise.
These stories together suggest that changes are taking place in socio-cul-
tural norms, values, attitudes, and the like gradually. As a result, in recent
times, third-gender persons are able to open up and come out into the pub-
lic with their chosen identity and are organizing for equality. Their presence
in modelling, fashion design, beauty parlour training as make-up artists,
and restaurants, among others, is becoming very common and accepted by
the society. That is, gradually they are creating own space while the people
and society around them are also able to gradually accept the diversity in
gender identity and relations.

How does the state deal with them in Nepal?

The government of Nepal used to consider third-gender individuals to be
“unnatural” and regard their behaviour as “perverted”. When Mr. Sunil
Babu Panta filed an application to register the BDS as a non-governmental
organization with the government of Nepal, he was told by the concerned
government officials that such an organization could not be registered
unless the stated goal of BDS was to “change the gay people into straight
people”. This was a clear indication that the government and those who
work in the government offices viewed the people belonging to the “Other”
gender as deviants and as people with problems. This was also a denial of
the “third gender” as an independent social class in par with “male and
female”. But things seem to have become better in recent years.
In December 2007, the Supreme Court of Nepal made a groundbreaking
decision on gender identity and sexual orientation, recognizing equal rights
of sexual minorities, including equal recognition before the law. The court
recognized third-gender individuals as “natural people” and ordered the
government to end all discrimination against third-gender individuals by
formulating appropriate laws and amending existing laws to ensure their
rights. The government was ordered by the Supreme Court to issue citizen-
ship certificates or identity cards that allowed people to select third gender,
that is, “other“, to identify an individual’s third sex and gender (“Third

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Gender,” n.d.; Panta & others, 2008). Thus, while Nepal had been issuing
passports under only male (codified as M) and female (codified by F) cate-
gories, Bishnu Adhikari, a transgender (female to male) became the first
person to receive a citizenship certificate in Nepal under “third gender”
category in 2007.
Accordingly, a decision was taken to provide passports to all sexual
minorities, commonly known as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
(LGBT) under the “Other” category. The government of Nepal also issues
citizenship certificates to all sexual minorities under others or “O” cate-
gory. Nevertheless, one cannot get “O” category passports just for being
identified as a sexual minority. The person must have obtained a citizen-
ship certificate under “O” category prior to filing application for the pass-
port. All those who acquired citizenship certificates under “O” category
can now get a separate passport matching their identity (see Chhetri,
2017). For this to happen, Nepal had to amend its passport regulations
and existing machine-readable passport technology to accommodate the
new category.
The court had also ordered the government of Nepal, regarding same-sex
marriage, “to carry out a thorough study and analysis…of; the experience
of nations where same-sex marriage had been recognized” before such law
can be instituted. In January 2014, a committee was formed by the govern-
ment to study international laws on same-sex marriage and prepare the
report. The committee submitted its report to the government in February
2015, but nothing was heard from the government’s side for about one year.
Only in January 2016, a government official informed that the recommen-
dations of the committee were under discussion within the government. In
February 2016, the National Human Rights Commission suggested the
government to introduce a bill to allow same-sex marriage. Perhaps as a
response to such advice, in October 2016, the Ministry of Women, Children
and Social Welfare set up a committee for preparing a draft bill on the issue.
Subsequently, a bill amending the civil code was introduced. But to every-
one’s surprise, in February 2017, the provisions allowing for same-sex mar-
riage (to be legal) were scrapped from the proposed bill. Nothing has been
heard from the government’s side since the proposed bill sat in Parliament.
The new civil code is also silent about this issue. However, in July 2017, a
couple (one partner identifies as third gender) successfully registered their
marriage in Dadeldhura District of far-western Nepal. LGBT activist Sunil
Babu Panta congratulated the couple and said that a same-sex marriage law
is still being discussed in Parliament. Home Ministry spokesman said that
the marriage could be invalid (see “Third Gender,” n.d.). This indicates that
although it is illegal, same-sex marriage is taken positively in contemporary
Nepal.
The government of Nepal had also appointed a third-gender person
(Sunil Babu Panta—a gay person) as a member of the Constituent Assembly
in 2008 (Rana, 2012). This suggests that the Nepalese government has

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significantly changed its position with regard to recognizing the third-gen-

der people in the country.
Nepal is also considered as the first South Asian country to recognize
equal rights for LGBT persons. For instance, former representative for the
Officer of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR), Jyoti
Sanghera once remarked that “Nepal is the only South Asian Country to
recognize equal rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex
(LGBTI) persons”. She had further stated, “We all recall the ground-break-
ing decision on gender identity and sexual orientation issued by the
Supreme Court in December 2007, recognizing equal rights of sexual
minorities, including equal recognition before the law” (The Kathmandu
Post, 2011, p. 4).
However, BDS (2017) stated that the court declaration must have given a
feeling of hope and some relief for the third-gender people in Nepal since
with the new provisions coming into effect, they are less likely to become
the targets of police brutality for engaging in “unnatural and unacceptable”
behaviour. But in reality, such declarations have not effectively guaranteed
their rights. For instance, even after the court decision, in the recent past,
there have been incidents of denial of issuing citizenship certificates and
machine-readable passports under the “third gender” category.

Legal position of third-gender people

The Constitution of Nepal, 2015 has protected the rights of LGBTI in the
three different clauses, viz. Clause 12: The right to have a citizenship certifi-
cate with the gender they are identified with; Clause 18: Prohibition from
discrimination based on sexual orientation by the state or by anyone; and
Clause 42: Right to Social Justice and protection.
Muluki Ain 1854, the legal code of Nepal, recognized only two sexes:
male and female. There was no mention of the third-gender persons. The
old code has now been repealed and the Civil Codification Act (Muluki
Sanhita: Devani Sanhita and Faujdari Sanhita) has been in force since 17
August 2018 (Bhadra 1, 2075 B.S.). According to the new legislation, indi-
viduals can change their body parts (Devani Sanhita Part 2, Chapter 1, no.
36 which means they can change their sex should they so desire (Government
of Nepal 2074 B.S.).
In Family Law, Part 3, Chapter 1, no. 69, under the clause on freedom of
marriage, it is stated that, “each individual, remaining under the law, will
have freedom of marriage, establish family, and spend family life”. It sounds
like one has freedom of marriage, but if you look at who one can marry, the
law is supporting the existing norms of marriage, that is, marriage between
a male and a female only. In Clause 70, the condition of marriage is stated
as “male and female can marry if they agree to become each other’s hus-
band and wife”. Thus, the new legislation is silent on the matter of same-sex
marriage. However, although it is not legalized, same-sex marriage and

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third-gender couples living together is found in practice (as reported in

cases above). In Chapter 10, no. 160 it is clearly stated that government
officials, while exercising legal rights, should not exert discriminatory
behaviour towards any citizen based on their origin, religion, race, caste or
gender, among others. However, in Chapter 10, no. 205, for the partition of
family property, husband, wife, father, mother, son and daughter are consid-
ered equal claimants. This indicates that the third-gender persons will have
to lean either towards son or daughter should they wish to get the family
property.
Third-gender persons agree that Nepal is ahead of the developed coun-
tries in addressing issues and rights of the third gender citizens. The decision
of the Supreme Court is noteworthy. However, the implementation aspect is
not as effective. Even government officials lack awareness of the legal provi-
sions regarding the rights of third gender individuals.

Present position
The credit for public acknowledgement of the third genders in Nepal goes
to BDS. This organization, established in September 2001, started to lobby
and work towards sexual and gender minorities’ rights in Nepal. BDS has
been an inspiration to and a platform for the third gender people in Nepal.
In a country like Nepal, where norms and values regarding sexuality is tra-
ditionally driven, the establishment of an organization like BDS, working
for third-gender persons’ right is a challenging work (Thapa, 2065/66).
The Central Bureau of Statistics had announced prior to the 2011 census
enumeration that the third-gender people would be counted separately.
But their gender category was not included in the detailed census question-
naire. There was only a provision for registering the third gender in the
household listing form. As Kyle Knight, noted, “[t]hey could list them-
selves as third gender, but it would not be counted” since it was only “a
strategy meant to pacify” the individuals belonging to the third genders of
Nepal (The Kathmandu Post, 2011, p. 4). Thus, it is not known if they
were counted in the national census of 2011. Even if they were, their total
population was not published in the census report of 2011. They were
perhaps included within female and male population of Nepal. Their
demography is not recognized and not felt necessary in the history of ten
decades of census taking in Nepal. Although categorical composition of
third-gender people in Nepal is not known visibility of transgender people
is increasing day by day.
According to Tower (2016, p. 7) Nepal is a country where (1) “pre-
Western idea of transsexual” was present, (2) there is a national discourse
on LGBTI, (3) there is anti-discriminatory legislation about LGBTI, and (4)
legal provision in Nepal enables individuals to change their gender. Nepal’s
National Census 2011 was the first census in the world to allow people to
register themselves as a gender other than male or female. The Nepali state

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is considered progressive in allowing individuals to choose and change

their gender.
Recently, something new is occurring in vacancy announcements of orga-
nizations. For example, in the vacancy announcement for UN Women
(United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of
Women) in Nepal for the position of a National Communication Consultant
published in Kantipur Daily on December 3, 2018 (p. 9), LGBTIQ was
included in their “equally encouraged to apply” list among others. Similarly,
in the application forms of government and non-government organizations,
“other” is added along with “male” and “female” category.

Conclusion
The Supreme Court of Nepal has recognized third-gender persons as “natural”
people. The court ordered authorities to amend laws to provide citizenship
certificates to the third-gender persons. Third-gender persons thus are issued
citizenship certificate and passport under the category of “other” gender.
In Nepal, third-gender individuals are calling for public recognition. The
establishment of BDS marked a remarkable change in the public visibility of
LGBTI people. Nepal is one of the first few countries in the world to issue
citizenship identity cards to “third sex” individuals and to include “third
sex” as an official third gender category in the 2011 census. However, third-
gender persons are visible in human right documents, given equal rights in
legal spheres, but at the same time, they are ignored and neglected in imple-
mentations of those rights. They are still deprived of citizenship certificates
based on their new sexual identity. Officials responsible for issuing citizen-
ship certificates are less aware about the new provision and thus create hur-
dles for third-gender individuals applying for the card. Third-gender persons
are not able to inherit parental property. They were counted separately, and
yet they were not visible in the 2011 national census report. They are living
together, and same-sex marriage is practised, but it is not legalized.
Historically third-gender issues were primarily either ignored entirely or
actively repressed and discriminated against. Today, the situation is gradu-
ally changing. Family members are becoming more supportive towards
their third-sex/third-gender children. Society is gradually becoming gender-
friendly towards third-gender individuals. The state is also becoming more
gender-responsive in present-day Nepal.
In Nepal, transgender issues and rights have not received adequate atten-
tion from researchers and academics and thus the issues and problems faced
by such people remain little understood. These subjects demands attention
from researchers and policy makers as well. Of course, policy alone may
not be enough. Society and, more important, family should also accept the
new norms. If the family and society accept the identity of the third-gender
people, the state would be obliged to also recognize them. For this to hap-
pen, third-gender persons as a group also need to come out, maintain group

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solidarity and assert recognition and rights in par with the rest of their fel-
low humans in their own families, communities, and beyond.

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Chhetri, G. (2017). Perceptions about the third gender in Nepal. Dhaulagiri Journal
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender

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 13
OPERATIONALIZING THE “NEW”
PAKISTANI TRANSGENDER CITIZEN
Legal gendered grammars and trans frames of feeling

Sara Shroff

Human rights is a long, hard and previously neglected road to tra-

verse, but we have made a strong beginning as we come close to the
100-days mark of our government. Human rights arouse strong
passions on all sides. In Pakistan, it has become a minefield and we
have to clear the mines carefully, without getting blown away…We
have also taken ownership of the transgender law, which was lying
unclaimed, and have begun operationalizing its provisions.
—Mazari (2018, p. 1)

The title of this chapter is inspired by the preceding passage in which Shireen
Mazari, the minister of human rights, situates the 2018 transgender law in
Pakistan alongside inheritance rights for Muslim women, domestic worker
employment laws, anti-torture laws, and family laws for Pakistani
Christians. Mazari (2018) argues that these crises are entangled in “colonial
legacy”, which the Pakistani state must attend to, alongside international
ones such as “human rights violations in Kashmir”, “human rights abuse of
Muslims in Europe”, and “issues of refugees”. It is clear, therefore, that a
promise for a Naya (New) Pakistan centers human rights, national security,
policy, and law at both home and abroad. This interest in human rights for
many of Pakistan’s marginalized communities by the recently elected gov-
ernment is central to repositioning Pakistan from a country coded as Islamic
extremism to a moderate and modern Muslim nation-state. I argue that this
reconfiguration includes public policy and law concerned with gender and
sexuality as mechanisms to produce, manage, and regulate respectable citi-
zenship and human value. Therefore, the Pakistani state’s claims of “owner-
ship” of 2018 transgender law must be situated within the knotty geopolitical
politics of national security, postcolonial nation-making, and colonial lega-
cies of gender and sexual categorization and regulation.
In May 2018, the landmark The Transgender Persons (Protection of
Rights) Act 2018 (TPA) was signed into law in Pakistan (National Assembly
Secretariat, 2018). The TPA is a direct result of strategic advocacy by trans
community activists and feminist allies. It was in fact the 2009 Supreme

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 T H E “ N E W ” PA K I S TA N I T R A N S G E N D E R C I T I Z E N

Court rulings (Khaki v Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Rawalpindi)

that propelled the issue of legal recognition to widespread news and social
media attention and placed legality at the center of state policy in Pakistan.
This legal and cultural discourse of human rights is playing out in interest-
ing ways at the intersections of Islamic law, middle-class respectability, eco-
nomic productivity, postcolonial citizenship, and national security.
Mazari’s earlier statement signals how the state’s deployment of human
rights is the dominant framework for the categories of human and trans,
emulating the transnationally circulating LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual
and Trans) frame of trans rights as human rights. It is precisely these defini-
tions of human, humanness, and citizenship that trans and gender nonnor-
mative communities must negotiate and navigate. Who is being counted as
a valuable human through human rights is critical to understanding the
recent passage of the transgender law.
I argue that Pakistani trans and gender nonnormative communities are
reworking and resisting these legal grammars of gender and sexuality in
inventive ways. By articulating a structure of feeling (Munoz, 2006;
Williams, 1977), which both engages and resists the totalizing effects of law
and language, these communities complicate our understanding of the cat-
egories of both trans and human (McKittrick, 2015; Wynter, 2003) in a way
that neither rejects nor assimilates into existing frames of the human/e and
of trans/ness. I specifically explore the concepts of wajood (to exist, exis-
tence, presence, being, substance, or entity) and insaniyat (human, humane,
humanity) articulated by trans and khawajasira elders Bindiya Rana and
Bubli Malik. I center their utility of these concepts as public pleas to take up
what I see as the key questions and challenges that they are posing to cur-
rent understandings of trans life and trans legalization: Which bodies and
which ways of life are being afforded legal protection and recognition by
the TPA? Is there a more humane way to frame the right to exist?
Claims for humanity articulated through wajood and insaniyat haunt
the dominant idea of human as individual valued in and through domi-
nant frames of capital, human rights, and citizenship. These linguistic
moves demand a rehistorization of the very meaning of “human/e” as
transcribed in the transnationally circulating slogan, trans rights are
human rights. I argue that trans in and from Pakistan is doing different,
complicated work where it opens up sex, gender, and sexualities as sites
and categories of life and value through and against histories of British
colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, and transnational encounters with
global raciality and global capital in South Asia (Bacchetta et al., 2019).
Pakistani trans communities provide important insights as they expand
the category of transgender and demand for alternative and relational
modes of existence. In this way, the community-driven legal activism, pub-
lic archives, and linguistic strategies speak to the inventive logics being
deployed at the crossroads of self-making and state-making while exceed-
ing the discursive and legal limits of the TPA.

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The chapter proceeds in five sections. I begin with my research methods

and situate my scholarship in relation to Pakistani trans communities. Next,
I trace the local terms hijra, zenana, and khawajasira, terms which speak to
the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial entanglements of naming non-
normativities. Third, I engage in a close reading of the 2009 Supreme Court
rulings to show the histories of social and legal struggles of trans communi-
ties in contemporary Pakistan, unpacking the terms eunuchs, unix, and she-
male that catapulted the movement for legal recognition. These histories are
fraught with police brutality, mistranslations, naming politics, state docu-
mentation, and medico-legal classification of trans bodies and identities. In
the fourth section, I take up the 2018 TPA to trace how trans in Pakistan
moved from gender disorder to gender variance, from medico-legal verifica-
tion to self-determination. I argue that the new law holds the potential to
redefine gender and sexual minorities and to complicate how we see sex,
gender, and sexuality as separate epistemic and experiential realms. In my
fifth and final section, I theorize wajood and insaniyat as practices of world-
making. I take up these two concepts as trans articulations of a structure of
feeling that engages and challenges existing frameworks of “human”, and
“human rights”. I argue that these concepts push us to reimagine these cat-
egories and the way gender is invented and reinvented against dominant
frames of life, value, and the valuing of certain lives over others.

Ethics of researcher and knowledge making

I began this project in December 2016. Over the last several years, I have
spent significant time in Karachi with short trips to both Lahore and
Islamabad. I have had the privilege of connecting and becoming friends
with khawajasira, trans and feminist activists working on the TPA and the
larger issues the communities face. I co-facilitated a meeting with Mehlab
Jameel who invited me to a community meeting organized by Naz Male
Health Alliance in September 2018 to document and archive the TPA policy
process. These activists, and so many more, have been generous with their
time, labor, and worldviews.
Being mindful of safety concerns and my own positionality as a scholar, I
only use public archives and publicly available information. By safety con-
cerns, I mean being mindful of the conditions in which the community con-
tinues to negotiate police brutality, everyday violence (physical, economic,
and emotional), and sexual harassment. Moreover, I am not part of the
trans community directly but rather a feminist and queer ally. As a queer
feminist scholar living in Toronto, I have both class and citizenship privi-
lege. As I study the intersections of feminist and trans politics and public
policy in Pakistan, I want to be mindful of my access and power as a
researcher. Given these concerns, I choose to engage in a discourse analysis
of the many terms already circulating over the last ten years within political
and policy landscapes as legal names for Pakistan’s nonnormative gender,

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sex(ed), and sexualities. These include unix and eunuch, alongside the term
she-male, a recent return to the more respectable Persian/Farsi/Urdu term,
khawajasira, and the adoption of the English terms trans and transgender.
Second, I take up the structures of feeling articulated by trans and khawa-
jasira elders and center their intellectual labor and definitions to understand
gender and sexuality politics in and from the global South, with a focus on
Pakistan. I deploy feminist and queer of color research ethics in my relation
to Bindiya Rana and Bubli Malik as elders and experts from whom I learn
(Banerjea et al., 2017; Chowdhury & Philipose, 2016; Lugones, 1987;
Mohanty, 1994; Smith, 1999; Tuck 2009). I see feminist and queer of color
research ethics as a research practice that remains vigilant about power
dynamics, politics of location and language and class privilege.
Trans activists argue that despite the passage of the TPA, the battle for
trans justice in Pakistan is only partially won, signaling to a long road ahead
(Shaikh & Tunio, 2018). Scholarship about transgender activism, especially
outside the context of the US and Europe, is a relatively new field of inquiry
and research. This requires scholars such as myself to produce contextually
nuanced, conscientious, and situated theory. Thus, my analysis centers the
complexity of violence and resistance (Abu-Lughod, 1990) at the intersec-
tions of nation, race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, transgender, sexuality,
and power. As I do this, I work to remain vigilant about my own privilege—
to enter and exit Pakistan with relative ease in English and with a US pass-
port and to write out and through global South gender and sexual minorities
in a way that makes my communities legible to global North academia.
Thus, I listen carefully and attempt to share in-conversation with my com-
munities and elders and not speak at or for them but rather with them as I
study contemporary gender and sexuality politics within our transnational
context as matters of life and death.

Theorizing from and with the global South

Colloquially and culturally, the term hijra, in Urdu and Hindi—Pakistan’s
and India’s national languages, respectively—refers to a subset of South
Asia’s gender-nonconforming individuals. Hijra has popularly become an
umbrella category and in English is often translated to third-gender, trans-
gender women, eunuchs, men with feminine characteristics, gay men, and
intersex individuals. Hijra, along with local synonyms khusra and khadra,
are seen as popular yet pejorative terms, especially when used by individu-
als outside the community. While hijras are part of the complex queer fabric
of pre/post/neo-colonial cartographies and histories of Pakistan and Islam,
they are in fact a cultural/familial system into which one is inducted.
Hijra also means migration. Rooted in Islamic history, hjr marks the holy
journey from Mecca to Medina and start of the Islamic calendar, signaling
the emergence of Islam as a category of historical experience, religion, eco-
nomics, social formations, and geopolitics (Abbas, 2014; Ahmed, 2016).

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While representing a dual performance of migration and mobility, it also

denotes the beginning of the Islamic hijri calendar. In this way, as hijras
“migrate” from one beginning (biological sex) to another beginning (soul,
embodiment, expression, existence), they remain outside yet central to sev-
eral normative borders of male versus female, masculinity versus femininity,
heterosexual versus homosexual. Their bodies embody a parallel depar-
ture–arrival performance and thus are unable to be contained in binary
gendered categorization (Chavez, 2013; Cotten, 2012).
The term hijra is slowly and strategically being removed from legal lan-
guage. While the term is still widely used within and outside the community,
the use of the term hijra outside the community is seen as a site of marginal
social status, social stigma, sexual objectification, and masculine malfunc-
tion. The 2009 police reports, legal proceedings, and court documents, as
well as the 2019 TAP, make no mention of the term hijra or third-gender.
Hijra culture, including intersex, zenana, moorat, and khunsa in South
Asia, has been reductively categorized as “castrated/men”, “habitual
sodomites”, and “eunuchs”. Such categorizations are remnants of colonial
illegibility, orientalist caricatures and the hyper- individualizing gender and
sexuality identity (Hinchy, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2017; F. Khan 2014; Nagar
& DasGupta, 2015; Nanda, 1989; Preston, 1987; Reddy, 2005). These
framings speak to colonial anxieties around sexualities and the need to civi-
lize public space from intimate and erotic socialities and nonnormative rela-
tionalities, marking them as sexual deviancy and disease. Hijras were seen
as embodiments of failed masculinity. These colonial logics led to their clas-
sification as sexually perverse and criminals who were inherently immoral
and corrupt individuals in 1871. Khawajasira community members argue
that hijra is one of three subcategories of khawajasira; the other two are
khunsa (intersex) and zenana (feminine soul and male genitalia; F, Khan,
2014). The majority of khawajasira are zenanas and only a small segment
undergo surgical procedures.
Zenana also means “of women” or “pertaining to women” and often is a
term used for harems and women-only spaces. The use of zenana—as space-
making, spiritual attachments and sexual embodiments—speaks to com-
plex ways in which corporeal “trans” and “feminine” bodies become the
site of transgressive pleasure, desires and discontents. By disrupting the
binary between the feminine and masculine and space and sexual, zenana
becomes entangled with histories of colonial and heteropatriarchal entrap-
ments of female desires, women’s sexualities, non-manly masculinities, and
trans politics (Wieringa & Blackwood, 1991; Wieringa et al., 2009). Local
and shifting forms of gender and sexuality regimes in Asia are not simply
variations of queer formations in the global North but rather key signals to
the complexity of human desires, communal spatiality, and connective
meditations.
The preferred term is khawajasira, which is rooted in Mughal, Muslim,
and South Asian histories. This is the more “respectable” term being

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reclaimed by the community given its political status in pre-colonial admin-

istrative affairs as well as their revered and sacred status in Muslim/Islamic
spiritualities (Pamment, 2010). The term khawaja is a Persian term now
adopted in Urdu and many South and Central Asia countries, which serves
as a title for teachers and mentors, especially Muslim Sufi saints. It trans-
lates into “protector”, “honorable”, and “master”, Khawajasira infers
“master of secrets” and “guardian of women”, signifying their ability to
manage state secrets during the Mughal period, move through women-only
spaces, and serve as sexually benign protectors and nonconsequential plea-
sure sources. Within the history of the Mughal Empire, the rising South
Asian Muslim spirituality, and precolonial/Mughal era slave trade, both
terms—hijra and khawajasira—came to take on sexual, gender, economic,
and political significance (Jaffer, 2017). Khawajasiras’ and hijras’ ability to
perform multiple gendered roles (to make gender mobile, as it were) marks
them as figures of reverence and revulsion, desire and deviance, as well as
potency and impotency.
The remapping of hijra as khawajasiras speaks to the community’s desire
to be recognized and respected. Historically, while most were working class
and worked as servants for elite households, some held important political
and prestigious positions—as military commanders, political advisors, and
guardians of the harem, and prominent Muslim tombs and graveyards
within the pre-colonial Delhi Sultanate, Mughal, and pre/colonial South
Asian regimes (Hambly, 1974; Marmon, 1995; Redding, 2018). The
reclaiming of the term speaks to the histories in which they held power and
were respected. However, this contemporary communal demand to be
called khawajasira, as evidenced in the trans policy, is further complicated
by the fact that they were afforded legal status as imported slaves because
enslaving fellow Muslims and forcing castration was considered un-Islamic
and prohibited under Mughal/Islamic law (Hambly, 1974). Their bodies
were seen as sites of hypersexuality, benign masculinity, and asexuality
which together made them valuable commodities in the slave market
(Newport, 2018). Jessica Hinchy (2014b) writes, “[k]hwajasarais had a
legal status as slaves, but were politically significant courtiers, government
officials, military commanders, intelligencers, landholders and managers of
elite households as well” (p. 414). However, the relationship of enslavement
and political economy of servitude is further complicated by the relational
hierarchies of discipleship and mastership. This relationality also propelled
the communal structure internally through “discipleship lineages between
khwajasarai teachers (gurus, pirs or murshids) and disciples (chelas or
murids)” (Newport, 2018, p. 104). The contemporary Pakistani system of
the guru/chela or master/disciple relationship traces its lineage to these
complex enslaved/sexualized familial systems of survival.
This move from hijra to khawajasira in legal language is important to
note for several reasons. First, in the struggle to refuse colonial logics, the
latter expunges a Hindi/Urdu linguistic genealogy of trauma and shame.

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Second, because the term hijra is seen as a site of social disorder and sexual
perversion, its erasure allows a movement towards a different respectable
“Muslim” and “modern” figure, while still imbricated with South Asian
Islamic histories. This is both a symbolic and strategic detachment; linking
hijra to Hinduism and Indian-ness and khawajasira to Pakistan and Islam.
Erasing the term hijra from legal language makes a culturally situated com-
munal identity legible internationally under the banner of transgender. As I
have shared earlier, khawajasira and hijra is not simply a sex, gender, or
sexual identity but also denote complex gendered practices, ritual systems,
induction practices, and cultural histories. In this way, both terms—hijra
and khawajasira—are enmeshed in mutually co-constituted South Asian
histories and claim their significance in both Hindu and Islamic scriptures
and social ordering.
This symbolic and strategic detachment becomes more curious given that
the first 2018 TPA draft was, in fact, a cut-and-paste from a previous and
rather problematic government of India bill on trans rights, which has not
yet passed. While the final 2018 TPA passed in Pakistan looks dramatically
different, given the input of the trans communities, the initial replication
signals to larger regional geopolitics between India and Pakistan. The asso-
ciation of the hijra and transgender as preferred umbrella terms in India and
khawajasira and transgender as preferred terms in Pakistan speak to the
ways in which the two nations are trying to create separate, distinguishable,
religious nation-states, one in the image of Hindutva politics and one within
right-wing Islamist politics, rewriting the thousands of years of their shared
South Asian histories.
In contemporary Pakistan, khawajasiras (who are predominantly
working and lower-middle class) rely on income from offerings at wed-
ding and birth occasions, and the majority of their income comes through
sex work and soliciting money. Despite their economic and social mar-
ginalization, they are culturally and spiritually revered for their “mysti-
cal” powers to beget fertility, bless newborn babies, and sanctify marriages
while concurrently feared for casting spells and curses. On one hand,
these mystical powers position them as spiritual, legible performers that
embody magic both light and dark. On the other hand, their illegibility in
colonial law as “criminals” continues to curb them as both exploited sex
workers and valuable grim reapers. Given their entanglements in dis-
courses of sexuality, slavery, the sacred, and as servicers of the state, even
today they are marked as simultaneously indispensable and deficient/
disposable.

2009–2018 laws (Unto ourselves)

The Supreme Court 2009 rulings called for “eunuchs” and “unix” to be
recognized by law as respectable citizens, and for the guarantee of their
right to inherit property, have “respectable jobs” and make a “respectable

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livelihood”. The ruling refers to trans as a disability and as a gender disor-

der, stating that the legal framework for disability can be used to grant
rights to trans persons. The ruling also declares that the police would ver-
ify “real” trans bodies as opposed to “fake” ones in the name of state
protection, which would enable trans people to lead respectable lives (S.
Khan, 2017).
This 2009 legal ruling was concerning in several ways. First, it defined
differently sexed/gendered individuals as disordered bodies and required
they be medically verified to authenticate their “biological disorder.”
Second, the focus on respectable jobs implies that they were in unrespect-
able jobs previously. Sex work, solicitation for alms, and street perfor-
mances at traffic lights continue to be the informal street economies that
many trans individuals navigate within uneven capitalist economic struc-
tures. There is no mention in the rulings of making these economic occupa-
tions and activities legal and safe, knowing that street economies pave the
way for all sorts of vulnerabilities and violences. Given that these forms of
labor are most prevalent among trans and working-class communities, the
legal refusal to decriminalize these forms of work perpetuates violence
against trans communities. Rather, the language of respectable lives and
respectable jobs as moral dilemmas signals the state’s interest is in getting
trans communities off the streets as a way to clean up the streets versus
making streets safer for trans and gender-nonconforming people. This is
part of a wider framework of respectable citizenship that does not recog-
nize or address sex workers’ rights.
According to the court orders, the root cause for social stigma and dis-
crimination was “gender disorder in their bodies” and “gender disability”
(Supreme Court of Pakistan, 2009a, b, c, d). The colonial practice of demar-
cating certain bodies as disorderly was used to control colonized and racial-
ized bodies and sanitize public space from sexual “disease” (McClintock,
1995). This makes the initial 2009 frames of disability, medical verification
and thus rehabilitation (especially through respectable jobs) hardly surpris-
ing. As I have discussed earlier, the term eunuch is a colonial construction of
failed masculinity and does not include the varied and multiple forms of
gender nonnormativity that include both frames of masculinities and femi-
ninities in South Asia. In using the term eunuch, the Supreme Court 2009
rulings reproduce the colonial definitions and continue to criminalize sex
workers and working the streets. Furthermore, the “biological” surveillance
logics in the initial rulings, while inheriting legacies of pre/colonial histories,
is also influenced by patriarchal legal and social orders in Pakistan (Nisar,
2018). This speaks to colonial and postcolonial legacies and anxieties of
who is and who is not a proper man, woman, or eunuch. Each of these
becomes a site in which gender as a category must be managed and disci-
plined, including questions of reproductive futurity, honor, patriarchy, insti-
tution of the heterosexual and heteronormative family (Aslam, 2014; De
Sondy, 2014; Nisar, 2018), and sanitization of Pakistani streets.

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In the context of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), Adnan Hossain

(2017) explains how the new “celebrated” legal category of third-gender/
hijra is being constructed through frames of “innate genital difference as
disability…de-linked from sexual desire” (p. 1419). He cautions against the
blanket celebration of South Asian progressive policies because gender dif-
ference is being discursively produced as gender disability. This stance, he
argues, continues to mark certain bodies as incorrect and disabled. While
the initial Pakistani rulings were also framed on parallel lines of disabled
bodies with medical defects in need of verification to acquire “real” evi-
dence, the subsequent ruling in 2011 and the 2018 TPA in Pakistan removed
the requirement for medical verification.
Muhammad Azfar Nisar (2018) argues that most khawajasira commu-
nity members still prefer to legally register as “men” in Pakistan. They do
not find the new gender classifications particularly empowering as it forces
them to give up the benefits of masculinity and forces them to disidentify
with its perks. While the benefits of masculinity they experience are mar-
ginal in most cases, it has serious consequences for inheritance rights as
“men” and their ability to perform Hajj (the Islamic holy pilgrimage to
Mecca) without the need for a male guardian. Shahnaz Khan (2017) and
Nisar point to the patriarchal socio-legal order within which these hetero-
normative benefits are being granted, which is also a complex process con-
sisting of mechanisms of control through which identities, desires, gendered
practices, and sexualities become identifiable and thus eligible for religious
practices, state benefits, and state and societal legitimacy.
It was also in 2009 that the legal term unix and eunuch were used to
define gender nonnormative individuals in police and policy documents.
Jeff Redding (2015) writes:

These different nomenclatures could be considered the inevitable

(and “innocent”) fumblings that any legal system must engage in as
it confronts people and rights with which it is unfamiliar. Yet, the
ramifications of variables uses of the nomenclatures are important,
not least because they result in uncertainty as to whom the Supreme
Court of Pakistan newly-announced “rights” apply.
(p. 260)

The inclusion of “unix” in official language is particularly instructive. Unix,

a homonym of eunuch, was first used in contemporary Pakistani official
and legal documents in 2009. But the term unix is actually a technical term
for an operating system. It is an operating system first developed in the
1960 and 1970s. An operating system is a suite of programs which make
the computer function. It is seen as a stabilizing platform, multi-user
friendly, and a multitasking system for servers, desktops, laptops, and
phones. Without an operating system, our devices are bootless boxes unable

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to function, communicate, or interface with us or each other. Therefore,

while the pronunciations of the two terms, unix and eunuch, especially for
nonnative English speakers may sound analogous—which is already embed-
ded in racial class politics, educational status, police violence, law and
order—the meanings of these two terms could not be further apart.
McPherson (2011) discusses how unix as an operating system is embedded
in complex and often invisibilized politics of race, sexuality, and gender
embedded in design, technology and discourse of technological invention
and innovation. The other, eunuch, is a pejorative linguistic term to repre-
sent an already marginalized, racialized, sexualized and gendered popula-
tion. The term is also enmeshed in colonialism, criminality, castration,
etymologies of European languages of French, Greek and Latin, Mughal-
era South Asian histories, and, most recently, included in Pakistani and
Islamic legalese.
While the term unix has subsequently been removed from official docu-
ments, its initial inclusion signals to larger dilemmas of mistranslations and
ways in which divergent spellings and racial syntaxes are adopted and come
to name, animate and make meaning of and for complex human experi-
ences, expressions and embodiments. To think of unix as an umbrella term
for all nonnormative identities in Pakistan, while absurd, comedic and non-
sensical, and, of course, inappropriate to say the least, also elucidates who
speaks English and which Englishes are spoken in Pakistan. In this instance,
the deployment of English—an inherited language of colonialism, global
empire, capitalist conquest, and commerce—speaks to how terms are
invented and repurposed as they collide, re/code and literally read certain
humans as racial, technical, and sexualized operating systems. It also fur-
ther complicates how the cultural, racial, sexual logics within these operat-
ing systems or the relationship of technology to race, sexuality, the body,
and material environments is coming into play in Pakistan (Keeling, 2014).
Shahnaz Khan (2017) and Redding (2015) discuss how, in 2009, a small
scribble in a police report about a raid on a social gathering of khawajasiras
created an entirely “new” gender identity as an “operating system” in
Pakistan: police officers filing the report misspelled eunuch as unix. This
slip signals to the trans policy-making process in Pakistan as part of what
Keeling (2014) calls a “Queer OS”, or the operating system of an entangled
techno, social, cultural, political, colonial, racial, sexual and gendered order.
For example, another term circulating in 2009 documents and discourse
was the term she-male, which one of the legal petitioners uses to identify
herself. Almas Bobby, an influential and controversial khawajasira guru
(leader) in Rawalpindi and the president of the She-Male Association of
Pakistan, uses the term frequently as one of her self-identifiers. Given her
popular media presence and her initial involvement in the Supreme Court
2009 ruling, the deployment of the term does not seem surprising. Bobby
was, in fact, one of the two petitioners who filed the legal complaint against
police extortion and violence against khawajasiras after the police arrested

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and stole their daily earnings from their evening dance performances. The
second petitioner was a Supreme Court lawyer specializing in Islamic law,
Dr. Mohammad Aslam Khaki. Bobby and Khaki’s usage of the term she-
male speaks to the internal tensions of self-identification, about who gets to
speak for “community” interests, and how terms get problematically uti-
lized in police raids and legal documents. While problematic at multiple
levels, she-male is not an entirely new vernacular in Pakistan. It remains,
however, a contested term as it comes to imply, as Sigel and Phillips (2005)
note, “chicks with dicks or sluts with nuts.” Most khawajasira and trans
communities in Pakistan find it offensive and disrespectful given its utility
in the pornography industry. It reduces a trans body (especially trans
women) and complex gender performance, embodiment, and sexual desire
to a sexual object mainly for male spectators.

Mediating “Trans” in Pakistan

These sexed, technical and pre/post/colonial terms together take on impor-
tant significance from 2009 to 2018; from legal recognition to transgender
rights; from gender disorder to diversity of genders; from the misnamed
homonym unix to uniting under the transgender umbrella; and, last, from
kinship networks to new legal names. According to the 2018 policy,
Pakistan’s gender-nonconforming communities—who now fall under the
umbrella term trans/transgender—have the right to self-identity, without
medical verification, based on their gender expression and gender embodi-
ment. Self-identity is now recognizable under the law. The 2018 TPA, for
many, reflects Pakistan’s progressive politics. Championed as one of the
most progressive politics and “model” laws to date, it reforms trans as a
“new” identity category in Pakistani/Islamic legalese. This legislative move
and activism speaks to larger transnational debates around feminist, queer,
and decolonial politics at the intersection of linguistic tools and impossi-
bilities of “naming” nonnormative desires, practices, expressions, and
embodiments.
The last 10 years tell an important story of Islamic jurisprudence and
new workings of the Pakistani nation-state as it takes on trans legalization.
It is instructive that contemporary Pakistani legal language has taken on
transgender as a viable umbrella gender category under which many gen-
der-nonconforming communities can claim recognition. The 2018 bill
speaks to fundamental rights as inscribed in Islam, the Quran, and the
Pakistani constitution for transgender communities. In the bill, the defini-
tion of transgender is as follows:

(i) intersex (khusra), with mixture of male and female genital fea-
tures or congenital ambiguities; or (ii) eunuchs, assigned male at
birth, but undergoes genital excision or castration; or (iii) transgen-
der man, transgender woman, KhawajaSira, or any persons whose

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gender identity or gender expression differs from the social norms

and cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at
the time of their birth
(National Assembly Secretariat, 2018, p 275)

This move to mark trans as a “new” legal category suggests several strate-
gies. First, trans serves as a negotiated term that communities are deploying
to represent themselves and to include diverse gender and sexual identities,
practices, and embodiments. Second, while at first glance it may seem that
trans subsumes local vernaculars, it is, in fact, reworking local terms—not
all trans individuals are khusras and khawajasiras but all khawajasiras and
khusras can claim trans when desirable or useful. Third, trans emerges as a
legal category (while defined clearly earlier) it also creates room for broader
understandings of gender and sexual variance.
While I agree that “the word transgender is a trendy signifier” (Towle &
Morgan, 2002, p. 669), this trend was never contained by national borders
and comes to name diverse ways of being and living under the label of trans.
In Pakistan, trans may be new as a formal legal gendered and sexualized
identity, but as a signifier, as a contested site, as a communal yet marginal
frame of living, it is anything but new. Communities in Pakistan are reclaim-
ing the term transgender to be inclusive of nonnormative lives and also to be
transnationally legible. This speaks to the tension with the geopolitics of
naming trans as a new category with stable understandings. The TPA demands
legal recognition and citizenship for gender-variant communities through the
umbrella of transgender rights—passports, ID cards, driver’s license, voting
rights, issues of sexual harassment and sexual violence, protection against
police brutality, inheritance laws and employment quotas, as well as housing
needs and healthcare benefits. Its proliferation in public culture, and non-
profit and philanthropy politics, both influences and maps the turn.
Within popular culture, discussions of “trans” in Pakistan can be traced
since 2011 to the mass cultural and filmic circulation, specifically locally
produced and often internationally funded documentaries, theatre produc-
tions, mainstream television series and development/philanthropy reports.
Films such as Bol (Speak; 2011), True Stories: Transgender: Pakistan’s Open
Secret (2011), Chuppan Chupai (2013) and the BBC’s How Gay Is Pakistan?
(2015) and Inside Transgender Pakistan: Trans and 3rd Gender in Pakistan
(2017) are some examples. In 2015, Teesri Dhun (The Third Tune), a docu-
mentary theater by the transgender community about their daily struggles,
was performed both in Pakistan and the U.S. Finally, Pakistani popular
television series Khuda Mera Bhi Hai (Allah Is Mine Too, 2016) put the
discussion of intersex issues at the center of Pakistani popular imagination,
making trans an issue of “biological defect.”
It is equally important to note that a number of case studies, non-profit
data gathering, development and philanthropy reports also influenced this
shift. Silent No More: Transgender Community in Pakistan: Research Study,

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a comprehensive research report on the trans-women community of

Pakistan, was published in 2016 in collaboration with Naz Male Health
Alliance, USAID, Aurat (Women) Foundation, and Asia Foundation along
with the 2017 The Transgender Community in Pakistan: Issues in Access to
Public Services Report. These representations and reports make visible the
economic, political, and social realities of trans lives through performance,
aesthetics, and expression in distinctive and complex ways. They also signal
to how trans as a gender identity “arrived” in Pakistani nomenclatures rela-
tively recently.
Aniruddha Dutta and Raina Roy (2014) challenge the universalizing
trans category in India, as it does not take into consideration the different
regional gender/sexual variances. For them:

variant imaginations of scale are crucial to challenge these coloniz-

ing implications of the transgender category, such that local or
regional discourses are not compelled to be legible terms of global-
izing understanding of gender, and the latter also become account-
able to the former.
(p. 335)

I find their argument instructive. In the 2018 Pakistani trans bill certain
local vernaculars—khawajasira and khusra—are included. Others such as
hijra (Urdu/Hindi term for enunch), moorat (man and woman), and zenana
(feminine soul and male genitalia) are absent. On one hand, the move to
include khawajasira as part of the trans imaginary replaces and redefines
locally situated categories of “hijra” difference in Pakistan as a site of
respect and recognition within histories of Islam and South Asia. On the
other hand, the inclusion of khusra signals to a locally “recognizable” cat-
egory, especially given that intersex continues to be understood largely as
the main frame through which ideas of transness circulate in Pakistan as a
marker of biological difference.
Alternative ways of thinking about familial systems are also being
brought forward in the 2018 trans bill. Given that most khawajasiras have
either been rejected or abandoned by their biological families and/or have
entered alternative and informal kinship networks in search of acceptance
and asylum, they have limited or no information regarding their biological
families. The bill now allows them to register their gurus and mentors as
their guardian. This legal and policy shift can be analyzed as one which
centers matrilineality as well as patrilineality, signaling a socio-legal rupture
in redefining family outside the heterosexual social structure and biology.
Trans also offers a pathway to identity for individuals that do not iden-
tify with the khawajasira cultural and kinship system. For example, given
that khawajasira in Pakistan is intimately situated in informal and sacred
economies, working-class and sex-work politics, individuals from middle or
upper/middle class find the trans category more desirable and respectable.

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Additionally, the 2018 bill speaks to the right to employment, workplace

discrimination and access to finance to start small businesses. The 2018
TPA, like the 2009 Supreme Court Rulings, does not address sex worker
rights or informal street economies, in which the majority of the community
navigates for a daily livelihood. In this way, trans in Pakistan cuts through
issues of nation, poverty, employment, legal recognition, and criminality, as
well as colonial law, religiosities, ritual economies, marginalized systems of
survival and new middle-class subjectivities.
The inclusion of transgender men in the TPA signals to a new categorical
framing that is mostly absent in popular culture to date. For example, the
Gender Interactive Alliance Pakistan (GIA), one of the oldest khawajasira
and trans community-based organization, provides a current definition of
transgender is as follows:

There is a whole spectrum of possible gender identities. We use the

term transgender as an adjective and a qualifier to describe people
who do not identify with conventional male and female gender
roles. This adjective is an umbrella term which covers a wide range
of possible identities including, but not limited to, intersexual, trans-
sexual, hijra, khwaja sira, butch, cross-dressers, and transvestites.
(n.d., para. 4)

TPA has adapted to some of the gender discourses that have been circulating
as trans, gender-nonconforming, and queer vernacular as evidenced by this
definition from GIA. Historically, there have been no names for female mas-
culinities or transmen, per se. A direct Urdu/local translation is mardaani
aurat (masculine woman) and khawajasira mard (man), but this is not an
identity that individuals use or identify with but rather an adjective used to
describe aggressive, androgynous or women with man-like manners. I am
doing a reverse translation in this rather crude way to demonstrate how an
entirely newer gender category is surfacing through the inclusion of transgen-
der man. The closest, colloquial (and highly contested) term is mai-munda,
which is often used in Punjabi spaces to identify a female as having masculine
or assertive traits. The term mai means woman and munda means boy/man,
thus together comes to mean woman boy/man. Transgender man in the legal
vernacular and butch in the larger understanding of trans are circulating in
community definitions and speak to how trans politics in Pakistan is indeed
opening up space for frames of female masculinities, sometimes through
global North vernaculars, and others times not. The inclusion also compli-
cates how South Asian/Pakistani female desires, sexualities and masculinities
interact with transnational identity frames to create newer frames of belong-
ing and being (Halberstam, 2012; Wieringa et al., 2009).
Depending on the context, trans has different, diverse, desirable and unde-
sirable implications. Finn Enke (2012) argues that “vocabularies and uses
are invented and just as quickly challenged as we discover their unintended

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implications, exclusions, and limitations” (p. 4). This lexicon in Pakistan

becomes important when we think about what Lata Mani (1990) calls “mul­
tiple mediations”. The circulation of trans in Pakistan speaks to how gendered
language mediates and is the very medium through which we make meaning
of ourselves and others. These mediations, especially today when information
flows are faster, are hardly contained within borders, nations and language. As
language emerges and travels to define certain bodies as sites of difference;
bodies and communities speak back. In this way, trans is defining, disrupting,
re/appropriating and expanding gender variance and varieties in Pakistan. It
forces us to rethink frames of indigeneity as fluid and relational. While trans
works within/beyond LGBT identity politics, it cuts through English, local
languages, and underground “oral” communal linguistic vernaculars.

Structures of feeling: Wajood and insaniyat

Ajeeb kissa hai hayat-e-nou ka
ruh aur, qalboot aur
kis-a-bayaan aur ha
na tujhe samjha saka apne wajood ki dastan
na tu jaan saka meri aho baqa ka kissa
The episode of existing (i.e. life) is queer tale
soul is different, form is different
the story being told is also different
neither could i explain to you the story of my existence
nor could you understand the sigh(s) of my survival/existence
Bubli Malik
(Legend, 2016; translation mine)

Bubli Apa is a revered khawajasira guru and the founder of an organization

named Wajood (existence) in Rawalpindi. Bindiya Apa known to many as
Ma (mother) is a grand matriarch, khawajasira guru, and founder of the
GIA in Karachi. Both Wajood and the GIA are community-based organiza-
tions that work for equality, social justice, and civil rights for transgender
communities (or TG/s, words they commonly use) in Pakistan.
I propose we look to wajood and insaniyat as affective histories, as activ­
ist positionalities, and registers of experience of life in-between (Amin,
2016). Wajood and insaniyat underpin the argument I am working through,
which is, trans politics is a site, a mode, and a category of potential for
wider and deeper nonnormative lives, experiences, articulations, desires,
and communities as compared to our current understandings. So rather
than think of trans as “Neither Man Nor Woman” (Nanda, 1999), I want
to consider the ways that Maria Lugones’s (2008, 2010) concept of the
“coloniality of gender” and José Esteban Muñoz’s “feeling brown” and
“brown commons” (2006, 2013, 2018) can offer alternative analytics.
Maria Lugones (2010) defines coloniality of gender and the resistance
against it as “a complex interaction of economic, racializing, and gendering

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systems in which every person at the colonial encounter can be found”

(p. 747). Munoz builds on Raymond Williams’s (1977) “structure of feeling”
to define the notion of “feeling brown” as an affective register that extends
Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) crucial question, “Can the subaltern speak?” to ask
“How does the subaltern feel?” or “How might subalterns feel each other?”
The trans communities gesture to being, feeling, and becoming “brown”
and “trans” in Pakistan through being a minoritized other within wider
circuits and frames of otherness and where otherness in Pakistan is multis-
calar—anchored by colonial legacies, transnational geopolitics of race/gen-
der/sexuality, and postcolonial nation-making. These affective stances signal
to a kind of worldmaking that does not erase painful histories but, rather,
points to broken ways of living in-between, living with pain, harm, struggle,
violence, pleasures, desires, love, and possibilities that together unsettle the
present. This interactive worldmaking is what Bindiya Apa is gesturing to in
the name of her organization, GIA, which is one of the oldest and leading
community initiatives to focus on trans rights in Pakistan.
Bubli Apa’s poem earlier about wajood and Bindiya Apa’s argument
about insaniyat and interactive alliances have adjacency to Munoz’s con-
cept of brownness. Brownness, for Munoz (2006, 2013), is a structure of
feeling and a colonial condition, and “brown commons” is “brown people’s
very being is always a being-in-common” (2018, p. 396). I understand
brownness as “fragmented” affective assemblages that speaks to a racial
minoritarian condition and politics in the global North where certain colo-
nized and racial bodies are read as illegible within the logic of whiteness. I
pay tribute here to Munoz by trying to expand brownness to understand
wajood and insaniyat articulated by Bubli Apa and Bindiya Apa as struc-
tures of brown feeling and commonalities across colonial systems (Da Costa
& Da Costa, 2019). In this way, khawajasira and trans activists’ structures
of feeling and being brown are foundational to decolonizing the colonial
trilogy of sex, gender, and sexualities.
This is also where I put Munoz’s feeling brown in conversation with
Lugones’s notion of coloniality of gender: colonial logics travel, transform,
and shift from and between settler, metropole and postcolonial contexts.
Pakistan is a site of colonial legacies, a postcolonial nation and state-mak-
ing and of globalized neoliberal capital, which determine notions of nor-
malcy. Both Bubli Apa and Bindiya Apa speak about human existence. In
our preoccupation with male and female, biology, and body semiotics and
politics, they argue, we forgo insaaniyat. As a provocation, a plea and pro-
test, insaaniyat foregrounds the recent discussion and discourse of transgen-
der recognition and rights in contemporary Pakistan. Insaniyat and wajood
work as structures of feeling that challenge the coloniality of gender even as
activists strategize and navigate colonial and postcolonial laws, policies,
and states in the context of transnational LGBT discourses of human rights.
While Munoz’s notion of feeling brown is an affective melancholic state
which represents being broken, fractured, and fragmented. Similarly, the

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affective stance taken by the khawajasira community in Pakistan is both an

acknowledgment of brokenness and a fragmented life as well as an illumi-
nation of the hypocrisy of the term humanity in Pakistan. Trans feeling in
Pakistan speaks to the everyday violence on the bodies and lives of khawa-
jasira communities. Trans frames of feeling in Pakistan forces us to contend
with transnational and transhistorical formations and transformations of
the meanings contained within the word and category of human. What does
it mean to be human in Pakistan? How are ideas of human refracted through
colonial-era laws, globalized neoliberal capital, and attendant emerging cul-
tural and political logics, postcolonial state-making, Islamic modernities?
These affective stances are highlighting these processes of breaking, chal-
lenging the logics and coexisting with these capitalist and colonial logics
that underpin these processes.
Matters of gender continue to validate certain human existence and thus
de/value trans experiences of being human as either real, normal, reputable,
or otherwise abnormal, unruly, and risky. My essay answers the urgent call
for “decolonizing the transgender imaginary” (Aizura et al., 2014; Snorton,
2017) by not simply adding a culturally mediated study of Pakistani trans-
gender subjects. Rather, I situate the new legal category transgender in
Pakistan as a biopolitical and necropolitical marker that manages trans
bodies in Pakistan through a new framing of middle-class respectability and
proper citizenship (Haritaworn & Snorton, 2013).
The promise of a “normal life” (Spade, 2011) and the management of
“slow death and life” (Puar, 2017) are entangled in “embodied unhomeli-
ness” (Bhanji, 2012). These entanglements speak to administrative violence
in law and policy that fuels and perpetuates the death of, and daily deadly
violence against multiple communities, especially trans people of color. In
Pakistan, administrative violence is embedded in colonial legacies, postco-
lonial nationalism and statehood, citizenship, public policy and law.
Moreover, as Redding (2018) argues, the Islamic management of life and
death in Pakistan is also central to determinations of which bodies get to
live, be counted or granted rights, be ascribed value, and who, in turn, are
left to die, unworthy of burial grounds, yet remain hyper-visible. The TPA
2018, therefore, is a newer site where these questions of humanity and value
remain contested.
The contemporary collaging of trans nomenclatures in Pakistan speaks to
the Pakistani state’s desire to locate, name, and ascribe value to nonnorma-
tive bodies, desires, practices, experiences, embodiments and existences.
This desire is part of the Pakistani state’s work of rebranding nation and
state as peaceful, pious, and progressive—perfect grounds for global capital
(Shroff, 2019). It also speaks to larger transnational realities where colo-
nized peoples and communities of color that do not conform or are unwill-
ing to reform, are operationalized into existing power hierarchies. These
systems define these lives as either employable and therefore valuable, or
unempowerable and therefore, without value.

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As trans—as a frame, identity, politics, and feeling—travels through

Pakistan’s popular culture, geopolitical locations, policy landscapes, and
legal citizenship claims, it is taking particular framings and political forma-
tions. These names and negotiations provide important un/foreseeable
legal benefits. The re/configuration of trans also speaks to political econo-
mies of desires, pleasures, frames of livability, and justice. They are fore-
grounded in questions of survival or what scholars have called “liberatory,
antiracist, decolonial, and economically transformative ends” (Irving et al.,
2017). As trans names and claims in Pakistan crisscross traumatic transna-
tional histories and move from illegibility to legality and from illegality to
legibility, they are working through multiple racial, national, gender, and
sexual registers. This includes simultaneous negotiations with several
supremacies—English (Mufti, 2016), empire, and binary existences—and
their entanglements with economic empowerment, promise of respectabil-
ity and frames of feeling.
Khawajasira and trans communities in Pakistan exceed the frames of
white and neo-colonial reference employed by this law, or perhaps any legal
framing of individualized human rights. The various identities, kinship
structures, economies, transnational histories, religious and cultural signifi-
cance, and roles lived and articulated by khawaja sira and trans communi-
ties cannot be so easily contained by a liberal human rights framework.
This is because the aforementioned framework assumes the individual as
separable from a collective identity. As I have already argued, khawajasira
and trans histories of Pakistan are embedded within collectivist structures
of belonging and cannot simply be remapped as individualized identities.
These are the tensions that Pakistani khawaja sira and trans communities
are navigating. Within this context, wajood and insaniyat are affective
stances, modes of feeling trans, taken by Bubli Apa and Bindiya Apa as they
illuminate and challenge multiscalar supremacies of religion, sexuality, gen-
der, sex, and class.
Acknowledging that policy is one site of political and possible cultural
change, activists who wrote the policy are well aware of the complexities,
challenges, and limitations of liberal rights-based frameworks. They see the
policy and the rights it promises as a strategic interruption and not a pana-
cea of emancipation. Perhaps this is what Stuart Hall (1986) calls “strategic
articulation” and Gayatri Spivak (1988) names “strategic essentialism.” As
the activists rewrite traumatic transnational pasts and clarify what recogni-
tions and rights are required, they view trans justice as the central battlefield
through which the state is defining, and the community is negotiating, its
right to exist, be considered human, be treated humanely.
The TPA begins to challenge the state, names the community oppression
on their own terms, and strategically interrupts the legality, singularity, and
authenticity of language. In this way, trans in Pakistan compels us to think
towards new legal imaginaries. The complicated ways in which sex–gen-
der–sexual regimes are being resisted and new gender registers are being

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claimed, reclaimed, stabilized and unstabilized become central to trans jus-

tice in Pakistan. Through policy corridors, nonprofit documentations, pop-
ular culture, documentaries films, feature films and activist circles, trans in
Pakistan is making a constellation of new meanings. It is breaking binaries
and challenging existing politics of gender and sexuality as it reworks
frames of masculinities and femininities.
This legal-cultural moment challenges the universality of human rights
and the category of the human. I argue that these emerging grammars and
how they are being negotiated in Pakistan are not metaphors, mistransla-
tions, or misplaced logics. Rather, they speak to and are complicated by the
multiple and newer ways gender is being marked and managed by the
Pakistani state, the demand for protection within a heteropatriarchal
Islamic social order, a new “democratic” turn to Pakistan’s stance of human
rights—and the resistance against it.
The entanglements between language and legality, flesh and feeling, sur-
vival and struggle, subjectivity and soul, are central to how trans justice is
being imagined. I return to Bubli Apa and Bindiya Apa’s declarations of
insaniyat (humanity), wajood (existence), and gender as interactive alli-
ances. They demonstrate that our existences are entangled with each other.
While resistances have to include legal recognition and fundamental rights
(as those are the violent frames within which humanness can be claimed),
it is ultimately about imagining and respecting alternative ways of world-
making and self-hood. Their wisdom, the way they see living and worlding,
complicates the afterlives of coloniality of genders where unnamable
desires are being contained in definitional strategies. For them, worldmak-
ing is ultimately about the “episode of existing” (Bubli Malik, 2016) where
they are not required to explain their reasons for existing. For me, these
desires to exist and resist necessitates gender interactive trans-feminist
worldmaking.

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 14
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
EMPOWERMENT
Microfinance, middle class and the sexual subculture
in contemporary Bangladesh

Ahonaa Roy

Anthropologists and other social scientists have tried to build on the dis-
courses of democracy with special reference to “local” cultural and political
contexts. In this chapter, the observation of cultural semiotics that problema-
tize the identity politics, economic well-being, gender/sexual representation(s)
and socioeconomic class structure—Bangladesh since post-Independence
circumvented and sought to mold local/regional cultural conceptions. The
emergence of State in Bangladesh in 1971—historically, the precolonial and
postcolonial periods, represented by traditional authority—in the sense of
enduring British colonization and its imperialism—to the hierarchy of
authority, the Islamic sentiments coupled with state politics that defined
nationalism and nationhood.
The chapter particularly takes into account the uneven enactment of citi-
zenship. That is to say, the stem escalating violence in the nation-building
project—on the contrary, urbanization, privatization and macro-economic
policies that radicalized the gendering of citizenship in Bangladesh.
Anthropologists have focused, for example, on how “men and women are
differently imagined as citizens” (Gal & Kligman, 2000, p. 3). This study’s
primary reference point is to understand the etiology of multiple sovereign
projects that becomes the locus of distributing rights, thereby, pointing to
the fact that, in the age of globalization, sovereignty and citizenship raises
questions about disparate processes that citizens and their social move-
ments hold for material benefits—and how.
To the globalized context, the question is, How citizenship is embedded
in transnational processes—and, to Calhoun’s (2003) assertion of “cosmo-
politan democracy”. To add further, Aihwa Ong (1999) conceptualizes a
“system of graduated sovereignty, whereby citizens in zones that are differ-
ently articulated to global production and financial production and finan-
cial circuits are subjected to different kinds of surveillance and in practice
enjoy different sets of civil, political, and economic rights” (pp. 215–216).
To Ong’s stating, as “democratic values” that pervades to those historical

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inequalities of classes—to a new form of democratic enshrinement that

nonetheless connotes to a new form of governance.
This chapter, in particular, invokes three such instances in Bangladesh—
the microcredit facilities to women, the rise of the urban middle class and
nonnormative sexual sovereignty, and finally he hijra politics to democratic
rights—noting the citizens’ engagement especially the subordinated groups
(women and sexual minorities) to economic decisions, political and cultural
participation, creating their own alternate vision on democracy.

Microcredit and democratic participation of women

The basic objective to study microfinance in this context is to analyze the
considerable economic stability and gender equality that leads to a process
of new mobility to a large number of “gramin” (village) women in Bangladesh.
Naila Kabeer (2001) investigates the lives of rural women as suggesting to
the fact that, microfinance reinforces the change in gender roles and respon-
sibilities, contributing to an increasing “efficiency” and “efficacy”. That said,
the economic empowerment leads to increased self-esteem and self-confi-
dence in women; empowering to a political and legal awareness, to an extent
that of higher degrees of “bargaining” and decision-making patterns, both
outside and within their own family (see Hashemi et al., 1996).
The contemporary scenario in Bangladesh shows that gender and devel-
opment agenda have not been entirely Western-driven entitlements. This
has strong links with the domestic economic and political traditions—
clearly as how microfinance has strongly influenced the prevailing poverty
alleviation, income, employability and consumption in rural women’s lives.
The effects of microfinance on the empowerment of women, attributed to
the “income-smoothing” and the decrease in vulnerability to familial crises
(Guerin & Paher, 2007). Again, Naila Kabeer’s (1999) study on rural
women and microcredit in Bangladesh, stresses women’s empowerment
that enables them to exercise choice. In broader sense, it stresses the impor-
tance of social relationships and women’s negotiation in the varied institu-
tional domains; like,the family,market and their village community—reflecting
on the increased sense of agency.
Paromita Sanyal (2009) advocates the analytic primacy on reflecting on
the feminist debates that trigger on the “local” interests of women that
further signals women’s consciousness and their mobility. She further sug-
gests, the innate positionality of women in their sexual division of labor—
arising from the perceived indication of their role and transformation from
a radically altered household to the distributing privilege of access the
“market” or the economic control of the activity that has predominantly
been male-dominated.
Social scientists and researchers suggest that microfinance encourages
cooperation within the village addressing economic problems and beyond
(Fernando, 2006). Subsequently, Bourdieu’s (1986, p. 241) idea of “social

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capital” conceptualizes the interlinkages and nexus of the “economic” and

the “social”—further, grounding the power of the group or the individual
who “mobilize” its resources. This form of capital accrues to the “more or
less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition”
(Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 119)—thereby, invoking the idea of
“investment” that observes network, stability of social structure, depen-
dence, assistance, mutual reliance and so on.
What I potentially want to focus here is the understanding of “social capi-
tal” of these rural women in Bangladesh that ultimately generate the conjec-
ture to Bangladesh’s improved civic and gender empowerment. The main
components of social resources are connected with group membership and
social networks. As Bourdieu (1986, p. 249) says, “the volume of social capital
possessed by a given agent … depends on the size of the network of connec-
tions that he can effectively mobilize”. Again, membership in groups creates
social networks further developing social relations so as to improve the social
position of the actors in a variety of different fields/contexts. In other words,
it is the “quality” produced by the totality of relationships between the actors.
Bourdieu’s implication on social capital is related to the voluntary associations
as the “resource” produced by the members collectively (Bourdieu, 2013).
Situating microcredit facilities and the enhancement of social capital,
social scientists have realized how the economic empowerment of the rural
women enables gender equity from “below”—promoting a sanction of
improved individual and collective agency of women, and negotiating intro-
community relationships (Goetz & Sengupta, 1996; Kabeer, 1997, 1999).
It is further argued that the striking gain of this approach further enhances
the human development and creating new economic opportunities; further-
more, Bangladesh, in general, celebrates a strategic or de facto focus on
promoting health and education for women, which adds to the instrumen-
tal link to meet the goal in fertility control (Nazneen et al., 2011).
The women’s movement in Bangladesh beginning with the anticolonial
nationalist struggle has later been successful to spearhead gender sensitivity
and development efforts within the women in grassroots (Chowdhury,
2009; Jahan, 1995; Nazneen & Sultan, 2009). Women’s organization in the
village-based samities (cohorts) doing sewing and handicrafts, has been
much earlier initiative before microfinance. As Nazneen (2008) points out,
women’s development (nari unnayan) precedes women’s “emancipation” or
“liberation” (nari mukti). To the NGO (nongovernmental organization)–
ization in Bangladesh since later half of the twentieth century, “women’s
rights” (nari adhikar) is also increasingly a common language (Chowdhury,
2009). The NGOs seemed to have appropriated a progressive dissemination
of knowledge and social mobilization that occur to mobilize disparate com-
munities (Nazneen & Sultan, 2010).
However, in the history of NGO and development initiatives in
Bangladesh, there has been early activism that builds networks on the neo-
liberal development programs in the context of Western financial

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institutions (Hashmi, 2000; Kabeer, 2000a, b; Karim, 2004). As Lamia

Karim (2004) has argued to the critique of NGOization, that has built a
neo-patriarchal relationship with the rhetoric of “development”; promises
poverty alleviation, women’s empowerment, health and education facilities
to the disenfranchised. But the critique of this “development” configured
forces in multi-axial analysis, realizing the diverse women’s position to pro-
test the logic of power relations in the elite NGOization in Bangladesh
(Chowdhury, 2009).
Furthermore, the UN-centric approach to development, or “Gender and
Development” (GAD), does not fit for poor women to be integrated in the
neoliberal developmental projects; adding to the employability and profes-
sionalization of development is only located within urban, English-educated
middle-class Bangladeshi woman with certain “skills” qualifications and
trainings in the NGO market. These women try to replicate Western femi-
nist goals, accommodating within rural/urban poor not realizing the
Western hegemonic patriarchal norms associated with universal feminist
politics (Kabeer, 1998; Goetz, 2001).
The development NGO discourse on women’s organizations in
Bangladesh concentrates on donor funding agenda since the 1980s and
1990s (World Bank, 2007). That said, the criterion highlights the role of
reducing gender dis-privileged and to enhance gender awareness through
“empowering” strategies of “skills”, “awareness” and “trainings” (Goetz,
2001). In Bangladesh, the two large service-delivery NGOs, BRAC and
PROSHIKHA, analyze the women’s lives in the Bangaldeshi development
context—involving in promoting “gender equity” and gender justice
(Nazneen & Sultan, 2009). In both organizations, rural poor women are
empowered through “productive participation” (BRAC, 2007).
Coming back to microfinance, BRAC’s initiative targets improving the
physical mobility of Bangladeshi rural women, enhancing the ability to par-
ticipate in collective actions and in work and labor. Furthermore, building
on the notion of “social capital”, these women gain agency for themselves
as individuals and collectives to overcome household opposition to gain
freedom and courage to step beyond their familial boundary and the con-
ventional social norms (BRAC, 2007).
Conceptualizing microcredit in the realm of gender and sexuality points
the implication and the embedded processes of social engagement to the
capacity of rural women to act independently and make their own free
choices. Feminists’ reading on agency responds to the radical subversion of
convention that uses interchangeably “freedom”, “autonomy” and “ratio-
nality” (Davies, 1991). Catherine Lee and Anne Logan (2017) provide a
useful lens for the analytical framework in foregrounding the stubborn
patriarchal social structure and status quo that women have victoriously
overthrown through a specific “action”, placing emphasis to the “primacy
of practice” in building the historical change and continuity. Building on
these feminist theologies and agency formations, microcredit and the

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empowerment of Bangladeshi rural women demonstrate the capacity of

resistance and challenge that women acted as some instrumental agents in
potentially determining axes of social differences, challenging patriarchy
and rigid religiosity. Furthermore, microcredit facilitates a new meaning of
gender and activism, harnessing the implicit principles in women’s lives that
has brought together the importance of women’s work, labor and value and
the importance of social engagement with law and legal regulations.
Therefore, the etiology of this particular activism and empowerment restore
the gender and its agency in negotiating the constraints of class, religion and
education and other social positions—pointing to a significant intersection
of broader gender debates and agency formation in contemporary
Bangladesh (World Bank, 2007).

The rise of the middle class in Bangladesh

Conceptualizing South Asia as a region is a complex endeavor. The borders
and national boundaries occupy an interconnectedness and shared history
of anticolonial struggles, nationalist movement, the partition of the Indian
subcontinent in 1947 and the diverse trajectory of the post-partition history
(Palriwala, 2008; Roy 2012; Siddiqi, 2000, 2011; Thanpan, 2005). In the
South Asian region, gender and gender differences have been tied to the
issues of postcoloniality that boldly foreground the weaving of the South
Asian mosaic of the diversity of sexual desires, identity politics, gender(ed)
representation and romance (Azim et al., 2009). Azim (2009) further reiter-
ates the “woman question” in South Asia in the post-independence period,
as designating a symbol of “progressiveness”—to the fact of women’s par-
ticipation in the anticolonial movement that resulted in the idea of women’s
rights and freedom. This legacy carried forward since Independence that
grapples with the issues like “gender equality” and “women’s movement” in
South Asia (de Alwis, 2002).
In the case of Bangladesh, women’s position emerged as defining a cultural
identity, followed by a political identity (Ibrahim, 1998). That said, albeit, the
cultural symbolism of the Muslim identity of women, Bangladeshi women,
points to the very complex positioning that women occupy in the discourses
of modernity and to the markers of progressive Bengaliness that further
defines the poetry, culture and intellectual twist that Bengal shares across
borders. Again, the formation of Bangladesh as a nation-state in 1971 desig-
nates a market for women’s role in the struggle to build its nationhood.
The construction of the identity as “new woman” in Bangladesh is a
“nationalist representation” of the normative middle-class respectable woman
as “bhadramohila” (Chowdhury, 2010). The composite narrative of the
woman and representation reinforces the urban, educated and so-called pro-
gressive women, subsumed within the nationalist ideology, on one hand, and
the neoliberal establishment, on the other (Hussein, 2017). “Bhadromohila”
reinforces the agency of the modern women that inevitably challenge the

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traditional sites of Bangladeshi/Bengali women within the purview of shame

(lojja) and modesty that essentially center on Bengaliness and Muslim (wom-
en’s) identity (Azim, 2010). The transcendence of middle-class women’s iden-
tity in contemporary Bangladesh has seen to overcome such self-exclusion
to a kind of consumption—fostering new status to an analysis that strictly
follows the cultural landscape of the neoliberal economy and its lifestyles.
Therefore, bhadromohila infuses gender relations and representations of
modern Bangladesh, thus linking class, sexuality and gender that broadens
the ongoing debate in this chapter.
In contemporary Bangladesh, by analyzing the current predicament of
young Bangladeshi, middle-class households in urbanized contexts signifi-
cantly invest in education and English-medium schools—relatively inclined
to the source of cultural empowerment (Knights, 1996). The conspicuous
consumption of culture marks status and power—the relationship of peo-
ple’s representation as painted bright, Western and modern. Furthermore,
the middle-classness goes back to the 1970s and 1980s in Bangladesh, with
its economic reform and liberalization that resulted in the private sector
growing significantly (Hussein, 2017). Van Schendel (2009), in his scholar-
ship on the history of Bangladesh, has articulated that middle-class
Bangladeshis and their national identity further build their cultural identity
via means of politics, craft, economics and the traits in migration and dias-
pora. It grows its argument with a focus on the objective conditions that see
Bangladesh as foreign power—referring to international labor migration in
the past (Shahidullah, 1985, pp. 60–64), to bidesh (foreign land)—perceived
as the locus of progressiveness (Gardner, 1993). Bidesh, as Gardner states,
sets an ideal importance, a source of “material empowerment” that trans-
lates symbolically as an image of reordering attitudes, perspectives and
behaviors as inspired by the “desh” (the native land: Bangladesh). Hence,
the most important fact is the discursive construction of the formation of a
middle class that is similar to the middle-class formation in any part of
South Asia. In other words, what I want to articulate is the postcolonial city
that enhances in the transformation to urban forms and practices to global
economic linkages, postcolonial urban lifestyles and new progressive
“urbanism” (Sundaram, 2010, pp. 67, see also Rao, 2006; Simone, 2007;
Lotte, 2012). To make my arguments clearer, I borrow idea from Sanjay
Srivastava (2009, pp. 341–345), referring to the “cultural symbols” as
meaning to the values and ethos that the cultural consumption behavior
underscores to the “desire” associated in the consumption processes. And
the desires further accompanied to achieve a typical “modern” Bangladeshi
lifestyle is recourse to education, housing, geographical mobility, dress,
appearances, behavior and representation—building a middle-class “pre-
sentability”—as adhunik (modern; Mapril, 2011, 2014; Mujeri, 2019).
Adhunik implies a new respectability of class’ position that negotiate the
boundary between “professional/personal aspiration” (Hussein, 2017).
Concerning these social identities refers to Bourdieu’s understanding of

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“symbolic capital”. This illuminates the idea as to how human identity

translates into “cultural goods”—a commodity that has commercial, as
well as cultural, value. Thus, based on “honour” and “prestige”, how indi-
viduals and social classes produce distinctions to varied network of institu-
tionalized relationships—further constructing a household recognition of
cultural legitimization.

Sexuality, space and desire: Queer desirability

A very fascinating aspect of middle class in Bangladesh’s urban context, espe-
cially Dhaka, invokes the very idea of “space” that plays an important role to
(re)produce the localized identity and gender(ed) representation in the realm
of culture and practice (Chowdhury, 2006; Sultana, 2015). Suchi Karim
(2014) complicates the idea on space and sexuality, illustrating the idea as to
how the conceptual and material dimensions of space are central to the pro-
duction of social life. The space here is of crucial importance as it constitutes
the very “embodiness” of space (Low & Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003, pp. 8–10).
This explores the analytics of space devoted to the exploration of examining
how the “body” negotiates that space, further dealing with the local/global
power relations in the context of cosmopolitan climate. The embodied space
further incorporates the metaphor of emergent properties of social relation-
ships by means of “language”, “emotions”, “habits”, “ideologies”, “behav-
ior”, “skills”, through a site of “experience and consciousness” to build a
material form (Low, 2009; see also Low, 2000).
Bangladesh has historically been dominantly heteronormative (Huq,
2006). The materiality of the city’s space that it creates emerges from a
powerful consumer category, as related to the growth of the new middle
class. The family/household reappears with the idea of gentlefolk, con-
structed itself as modern, progressive, educated—“bhadrolok” (gentleman)
and “bhadromohila” (literally gentlewoman)—(re)forms into a new status
in the “modern” Bangladeshi lifestyles. As Jose Mapril (2014) invokes, the
modern supermarkets and the “mall culture” in contemporary Dhaka
exemplify a newer trend of consumption and embodiment of dress—further
revealing how the holders of “capital” is defined by an economic status and
class positions, with a certain form of prestige, power and privilege.
However, the dynamics of sexuality and gender within this Bangladeshi
urban middle-classness provide multiple sexual expressions that explicitly
conflates with relative freedom. The manifestation of these spaces engages
with the desire and constructing their own agencies and practices, as
opposed to the dominant sexual norm of the given Bangladeshi culture. Yet,
these spaces set an image of an integral part of (certain) body movements,
spatial orientations and socializations.
Homosexuality is a “sinful” offense in Bangladesh, both in terms of reli-
gion and the culture. The rise of the new NGOs and development-sector
organizations in Bangladesh since 1990s has been working on health and

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sexual rights. Like India, the enforcement of the colonial anti-sodomy Law
377 thereby preserves the image of state’s position as “unnatural”. But the
contemporary Bangladesh is in a transitory/critical space; that means that it
challenges the earlier structure to establish sexual diversity, especially in
Dhaka. Suchi Karim (2010) conveys about the technological impact that
caters to the different groups in creating communities, forming relations’
and developing activism. Furthermore, she notes, the “online community”
culture that marks an interaction—a space identifying/enabling the urban
“queer” individuals to a certain networking mechanism to meet. On one
hand, consumption of cyberspace by nonnormative sexualities provides
opportunities of being anonymous yet allow the expression of their innate
desires (Dhoest & Lukasz, 2016). Furthermore, the space allows them to
navigate their “selves”, as crucial to maintain a distinct context in which
they could either “disclose” or “conceal” gender, or their sexual selves
(boyd, 2011).
The rapidly growing internet consumption in dating chatrooms, internet
activism, Facebook—solidarity in Dhaka signifies the “critical space” that
states—allows interpreting the negotiation as well as the nexus between the
“virtual” and the “real”. The rapid consumption of internet has impacted
Dhaka city, challenging the sexual hierarchies and providing these “online
communities” where love, sex and eroticism are mediated via technology.
The unique characteristics of these online networks showcase the upper-
class network of globalized gay sexualities, creating a global template for
dating and a new space for socialization; what is striking is the apparent
challenge to the “local” representation as Bangladeshi from a new middle-
classness that converges toward Western forms. Peter A. Jackson (2009)
conveys that the new forms of sex and gender nonnormativity in Asia,
which is different from the historical traditions, show a “cross-cultural bor-
rowing” that forces to produce a larger impression in “global queering”
transformation. This echoes, in brief, what Jackson addresses as “cross-
cultural similarities”—to see the transnational “convergences” emerging in
the context of urban sexual cultures (see also Altman, 2004).

Hijras and democratic representation

In a similar way, setting the initial times from 1999 to the present scenario,
a significant change in the rights, recognition and citizenship of the hijras in
Bangladesh with the announcement of the state’s recognition of these sex-
ual subjects within a separate category of gender. Since 2009, Awami League
government chaired by Prime Minister Seikh Hasina announced plans for
certain welfare services such as health care, housing, education, employ-
ment, and so on (Wallen, 2019). The government has made great strides
since then in improving the living and working conditions and building an
inclusive government and citizenship rights. As I suggest, I tried to draw on

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evidence from the political economy of freedom in this chapter, and the
focus on the hijra rights tries to delve in on the political decision to “offi-
cially” recognize the hijras as “third gender” (Islam et al., 2008; Shawkat,
2016). As to other implications of hijras as nonbinary representation in
India, there are instances of representation in Bollywood films (Pattanaik,
2009) or, otherwise, in culturally not-so-serious modes legitimate their exis-
tence. The politics of “representation” and “recognition” are progressive
and build two striking yet overlapping debates on culture versus law/juris-
prudence, as precisely accounting to debate on the postcolonial gender/sex
politics. As Gabriela Vargas-Cetina et al. (2013) presents the politics of rep-
resentation with the anthropologists’ engagement with identity politics. In
saying this, we (as anthropologists) look at the representation practices to
position the local communities, the “local” choices and the “local” causes
within larger political debates. Thus, much of the anthropological study
takes the form of exploration of the “material agency” on the politics of
display—that is how these subjects are represented. I would like to establish
the argument by saying how representation is beyond material choices as
“representing” the implicit conditions of the human actors constitute more
fluid and less deterministic engagement with the world. In Bourdieu’s
Theory of Practice (1977), it was these practical/practices of “taxonomies”
that order our everyday life that soared up to the power of social reproduc-
tion. As “habitus”, it becomes a system of “categories” that leads to a pro-
cess of “objectification” (Miller, 1987, pp. 19–20).
The intellectual addition to Bruno Latour’s (1999, pp. 24–28) concept
concerning situating above the conventional distinction of society and its
objects that aims to demonstrate the primacy of “agency” as the essential
defining property of persons. Where material forms have consequences for
people; Latour states the “practices” make the possibility of recognizing
and transcending the apparent duality of structures or to any dominant
representation. Latour’s writing very carefully traces the central under-
standing of “agency” that seems to implicate the nonhuman actors having a
substantial impact concerning agency. Passoth et al. (2012) talk about the
“nonhuman agency” and consequently outline “social-technical” net-
works—an agency that produces discrete entities to begin pointing the “sci-
ence” and the “law”. In relation to this, the new modes of existence that the
hijras portray in Bangladesh, implants the representation of Latour’s unique
theoretical position that resonates from the political stance of empower-
ment to the very powerless hijras. “Empowering” becomes analytical preci-
sion whereby the state produces different dynamics of hijra agency—that
technologically installs the subject’s recognition (Kipnis, 2015).
The idea of politics of “recognition” that provides the logic of the nature
of “social justice” (Martineau et al., 2012). The hijra recognition resonates
with the intersubjective recognition that further suggests the universality of
respect. In other words, recognition accounts for the philosophy of securing

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the disempowered with the normative “rights” of the state to wider inclu-
sive strategies. And, on the other hand, “recognizing” with love and emo-
tions to an optimistic realization of personhood.
Various government departments have initiated recruitment of the hijras
in low-ranked office works. In addition, the increasing hijra visibility in the
modes of NGO initiative, foreign recognition through donor-driven empow-
ering strategies and hijra pride marches has witnessed the progressive politi-
cal achievement that further conceal in the process of legal recognition. This
demonstrates the entanglement of the civil society, the state, media repre-
sentation and the support from the international community that collec-
tively features the new mobility experienced within the hijra community.
These increasing social rights, emphasizes the importance of political par-
ticipation that further critically analyze the identity (re)construction pro-
cesses. That said, my emphasis is placed in understanding the structural
changes in terms of institutions and agency construction, indicating signifi-
cant improvements in hijra lives and their living condition. More so, the
creation of newer subject positions as evidenced in the Bangladeshi gender/
sexuality/rights-based scenario marks a certain global-cultural imaginary.
As perceived, the very ontology that underlines these identifications is in
itself reflects democratic social representations, ensuring justice and solidar-
ity to these disadvantaged groups.

Conclusion
The multiple meanings given to the democracy, further suggest that democ-
racy is not a single condition but a process of uneven enactment (Paley,
2002). The uneven enactment interestingly constitutes, the discourses on
programs, participation and community development—emphasizing the
analysis of the involvement of subjects in their own self-management. This
chapter notes Appadurai’s (2002) “deep democracy” that conjures to the
philosophy of the innovative work of economic self-dependence, nonnor-
mative gender/sexual representation, urbanism and urban identity—suggest
the trans-nationality yet the locality efforts to build international networks
within national boundaries. Moreover, unlike using foreign/Western idi-
oms, the chapter conveys the social and political participation of the disen-
franchised population with the state and civil society. This most important
effect of cultural globalization has become the anthropological inquiry to
discover sexuality, gender studies and research. In Bangladesh—aiming to
understand the new mobility and the new freedom experienced—the change
of traditional roles to a new—defines a social identity and an agency forma-
tion. These new appearances and realizations, ultimately incommensurable
from the (post)colonial subject position, implicate the sites of struggle and
new cultural positions, perpetuating a multi-axial analysis of gender/sexual-
ity in contemporary Bangladesh.

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 T he political economy of empowerment

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 INDEX
Abbas, S. 278
ABVA 89
activism xii, xiii, 1, 3, 13, 15–16, 18,
45–46, 63, 74, 76–77, 80, 86–87,
89, 91, 96, 98, 127, 140, 144, 217,
225–227, 230–235, 238, 241–242,
261, 263, 270, 279–280, 285, 287,
290, 295–296
activist xi, xiii, 3, 12–13, 46, 56, 61–62,
73, 75–78, 82, 90, 94, 106, 126,
144, 209, 217, 224, 228, 230–231,
233–235, 238, 242, 245, 255, 260,
262–263, 274–275, 277–279
advocacy 62, 70, 74, 76–77, 80, 165,
169, 247, 260
Afzal, A. 14, 156
agency 2, 4, 5, 7, 12, 14, 55, 75, 109,
157, 179, 182, 196, 200, 206, 209,
215, 242, 284–287, 291, 293–295
Aggleton, P. xvi, 15
Ahmed, S. 205, 278
AIDS xi, 2, 11–12, 39, 45–47, 53,
58–59, 60–62, 65, 67, 70, 72, 74–78,
80, 82–83, 87–89, 90, 92–93, 104,
125, 131n23, 133–134
AIDS activism 46, 74, 77, 80, 87
Alexander, M. J. 177
Alter, J. 97
Altman, D. 14, 38, 131, 243, 293
Ambiguity x, 3, 24–25, 27, 34, 37n8,
44–45, 49, 50, 53, 55, 57, 58n3, 72
Anderson, B. 15, 97, 243
anti-colonial 3–5, 10, 100, 221
anti-colonial resistance 3, 10
anti-racist 199, 201, 220
Anzaldua, G. 177
apartheid 11, 99, 100–103, 105–107,
110, 112, 117, 119, 120, 123–127,
128n3, 129n9, 131–134
297
Appadurai, A. 156, 293
Asad, T. 157
asexual 35, 38n11, 137, 265
Asia x, xi, xii, xiv–xvi, 1, 2, 4–9, 12,
16–18, 20, 24, 38, 46, 58–59, 60, 73,
148, 158, 180–185, 189, 199, 206,
214, 261, 264–265, 267, 272, 279,
280–282, 287–288, 290, 294–295
autonomy 6, 14, 107, 161, 226, 230, 286
Bacchetta, P. 97, 279
Bahadur, G. 177
Bandhopadhyay, M. 15
Bangladesh xiv, 12–13, 17, 20, 41, 88,
147–148, 158, 180, 249, 268, 279,
283–289, 290–296
belonging xii, 5, 26, 33, 37n3, 55, 65,
107, 120, 122, 140, 142–145, 149,
155–157, 165–166, 168, 183, 194,
230, 240, 247–248, 250, 254, 257,
273, 277
Bengal 24, 33, 37n8, 98, 279, 287–288
Bersani, L. 131
Bhikshu. N, J. 38
Bhutan 88
Bingham, D. 81
biographies 11, 67, 144, 148
biological sex 248, 264
biology 250, 272, 275
biopic 63–64, 66–67, 70, 72, 74–76,
80–83
bisexual 3, 9, 41, 45–46, 52, 75, 87, 103,
137, 169, 171, 178–179, 180–182,
188–189, 196, 199, 206, 225,
243–244, 247–248, 250, 255–256
bisexuality 171, 179, 188–189, 196, 244
black feminism 180
Blackwood, E 15, 282
Blasius, M. 243
 Index
body 30–31, 97, 108, 113, 167, 234, 253
Boellstorff, T. 15
Bollywood 62, 65, 67–69, 80, 80n6,
82–83, 291, 295
border xvi, 3–4, 8–9, 20, 24–25, 41,
49, 63, 70, 95, 139, 140, 142–146,
156, 177, 211, 222, 264, 271, 274,
279, 287
Bourdieu, P. 293
Boyce, P. 15, 38
boyfriend 67, 73, 82, 138, 146, 176
BRAC 286, 293, 295–296
Bradway, T. 131
Brah, A. 131, 196
Brahmin 25–26, 36n2, 94, 164–165
British 5, 9, 24, 49, 63, 116, 125, 139,
157, 164, 178, 180–182, 185, 187,
189, 191–199, 205n1, 206, 218, 261,
283, 295
British colonialism 3, 261
Butler, J. 15, 58, 131
Cameron, E. 132, 244
capital xiv, 4, 13, 36n2, 142, 144–145,
153, 219, 230, 233, 250, 261, 275–
276, 281, 285–286, 289, 293, 296
capitalism 1–3, 9, 10, 17–18, 38, 69,
198–199, 205n2, 206
care xi, 12, 14n1, 27, 37n9, 51, 62,
132, 146, 166, 213, 217, 251, 290
Caribbean x, xi, 160, 162–166, 170,
175, 177–179, 201, 228, 232–234,
237, 239
Carrillo, H. 157
caste ix, xiii, 5–7, 10, 12, 25–26, 34–35,
36n2, 79, 80, 82, 85–87, 89, 97–98,
163, 165, 210, 220, 223, 229, 230,
244, 248, 254, 257
Chakrabarty, D. 15
Chakraborty, C. 97
Chatterjee, I. 38
Chatterjee, P. 15–16
Chowdhury, E.H. 279, 293
cinema 63–67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 77, 79,
80–82
cisgender 195, 219, 221
citizens 2, 7, 107, 109, 113, 115,
122–124, 128n3, 129n13, 145, 199,
227, 234, 241–242, 247, 257, 266
citizenship xii, 2–3, 9, 11, 13–14, 16,
18–19, 24, 63, 102, 110, 133, 137,
142, 144, 155, 158, 168, 179, 205,
241, 254–256, 258, 260–262, 267,
271, 276–277
298
citizenship rights 290
civil society 3, 12, 292
class xiii, 5–6, 8, 10, 12–13, 17–18, 23,
25, 35–36, 39, 61–63, 66–68, 77, 79,
80, 86–89, 90–91, 93, 97, 104–106,
124, 137–138, 143, 145–146, 159,
161–162, 171, 176, 200, 203–204,
205n2, 209, 210, 215, 221–222, 229,
233, 254, 261–267, 269, 272–273,
276–277
Clothey, F. 38
Coleman, M. 131
Colombia xii, 210, 212, 216–217, 224,
226–228, 230, 232–236, 238–240,
243–244
colonial 1, 3–5, 7–9, 11, 13–19,
20–21, 24, 36, 38–39, 49, 60, 63,
71, 79, 87, 100, 129n10, 130n15,
133, 160–163, 166, 172, 175, 177,
220, 223, 226, 260, 262, 264–267,
269–270, 273, 275–277
colonialism 5, 8, 9, 14–16, 23, 82, 162,
165, 218, 261, 269, 279
coloniality x, xii, 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 14, 16,
19, 160, 168–169, 176–178, 219,
274–275, 278
colonial knowledge 4, 21
colonial state 14, 20, 220
coming out 8, 119, 120, 130n21, 153,
157, 183, 191–193, 200, 202, 204,
205n1, 206, 238, 251
community ix, x, 9, 11, 14, 16–17,
19, 20, 25–27, 29, 32–34, 36, 37n3,
37n10, 38, 62, 77, 82, 87, 99, 105–
106, 121, 123, 126, 129n10, 137,
139, 140, 142, 152, 164, 167, 169,
170–175, 177, 183–196, 200–204,
205n3, 210–211, 214, 216, 222,
224–226, 230, 233–236, 241, 250,
259, 260, 262–265, 268, 270–277
compulsory heterosexuality 101,
106, 119, 123
Connell, R. 16, 38, 223, 279
context xi, 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14–15, 17–18,
25, 27, 36, 37n10, 41, 43–44, 46,
49, 53, 56, 60, 63, 79, 83, 86, 89, 97,
100–102, 107, 109–111, 117, 119,
120, 122–124, 126, 128n4, 129n9,
129n11, 140, 143–145, 147–149,
164, 167–169, 190–191, 193,
198–204, 210, 215–216, 218–219,
221, 224, 228–229, 231–232, 234,
236, 238, 242–243, 263, 268, 275,
277, 283–286, 288–290, 294
 Index
corporeal 94, 162, 264
cosmopolitan democracy 283
Cotten, T. 278–279
Crenshaw, K. W. 196
criminalisation 101, 109, 120, 126,
127, 128n6
criminalisation of homosexuality 101,
126–127
cultural symbolism 287
culture ix, 15, 39, 60, 66, 68, 103–105,
110, 120, 126, 131, 146, 155, 188,
191, 196, 289, 293
Custen, G. F. 81
Dalit-Bahujan 24–25, 34, 36n1,
37n3, 38
Davis, A. 15–16
de Certeau, M. 15
De Sondy, A. 279
Decena, C. U. 157
decentering 18
decolonial x, xii, 3, 10, 18, 63,
160–163, 168, 177, 179, 220–221,
270, 277, 280
decolonial praxis 160, 162, 168, 177
decolonization 161, 177
deep democracy 292–293
Deleuze, G. 38
democracy 10, 12, 157, 283–284,
292–293, 295
democratic 8, 18, 100, 102, 144, 223,
278, 283–284, 290, 292
Derne, S. 157
Desai, A., 131
desirability 8, 204, 289
desire xiv, 1–3, 6, 8, 10–12, 16, 23,
25, 27, 34, 40–43, 47–55, 57n2, 59,
63, 73, 88–89, 98, 110, 118, 120,
122, 132, 134, 141, 143, 148–149,
155–158, 161, 164–168, 170, 173,
176–177, 185, 223, 229, 244, 253,
256, 264–265, 268, 270, 273–280,
282, 287, 290, 294
development ix, xi, xiii, 6, 10, 15, 17,
19, 43, 45, 50, 58–60, 71, 87, 90,
103, 126–127, 130n20, 133, 142,
197, 203, 217, 233–242, 244, 246,
271, 284–286, 289, 292–296
diaspora 127, 131, 134, 139, 143,
147, 149, 157–159, 161, 167, 176,
178–179, 196, 198–201, 203–206,
244, 288
diasporic anachronism 173
299
difference 1, 6, 15, 17, 48, 54, 60,
100, 120, 125, 160, 199, 204,
219, 221–222, 227, 231, 234, 268,
274, 287
discourse x, xv, 1–4, 6–8, 11, 13–15,
19, 20, 23, 41, 43, 45–53, 56–57,
88, 90, 96, 101, 106, 117, 123–124,
130n17, 130n20, 134, 137, 139–140,
143, 149, 160, 164–166, 168, 172,
175, 189, 204, 206, 222, 226, 246,
257, 261–262, 266, 269, 272–275,
280, 283, 286–287, 292, 295–296
discrimination 32, 64, 70, 72–77, 85,
90, 202, 216, 218, 224, 226, 231,
233, 235–238, 245, 249, 251, 254,
256, 267, 273, 294
discursive x, 10, 48, 58, 100, 110, 118,
130n20, 144, 149, 219, 228, 261,
268, 288
discursive space 10
disenfranchisement 198
disjuncture 120
Duberman, M. 120, 131
Duggan, L. 131n23, 131, 145, 157
economy 5, 9, 15, 19, 36, 39, 44,
65–66, 89, 108, 110, 145, 205, 209,
212, 219, 220, 222, 233, 265, 279,
283, 288, 291
education 12, 35–36, 88, 90–91, 93,
128, 138, 141, 152, 162, 184, 210,
214, 216–218, 222–223, 226–227,
230–233, 241, 269, 285–290, 293
embodiment xiv, 25, 28, 34, 160,
164–168, 175–177, 199, 212, 264,
269–270, 276, 289
employment 12, 27, 67, 69, 218, 222,
250, 260, 271, 273, 290
empowerment 13, 35, 46, 92, 105, 258,
277, 283–288, 291, 293, 296
Enke, F. 273, 279
epistemology 20, 134, 178
Epprecht, M. 14, 16, 103, 132
equality ix, x, 17, 102, 106, 127, 132,
164, 181, 217, 222, 235, 251, 254,
258, 274, 284, 287, 293–294
equity 46, 285–286
erotic x, 23, 25, 27, 34–36, 264, 294
eroticism 9, 40, 58, 60, 140, 145–151,
161, 290
Eskridge Jr, W. N. 129n7, 132
ethnic 18, 96, 162, 180–181, 193, 196,
200–204, 206, 235, 248
 Index
ethnicity 79, 100, 104, 127, 129n10,
143, 161, 181, 189, 195, 199, 263
ethnography 40, 90, 157, 229, 245,
281, 295
eunuch 24, 250, 263, 267–269, 279
eurocentric 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 194
exclusion 1, 5, 13, 15, 23, 34, 44, 75,
80n6, 109, 125, 150, 200–201,
230–231, 236, 243, 274, 294
experience ix, x, 2, 14, 34, 43, 50, 54,
56, 67, 89, 110, 118–120, 127, 137,
143–144, 148, 156–158, 162, 164,
169–170, 172–176, 181–196, 199,
201, 209, 214, 217, 219, 221–223,
227, 230–243, 255, 263, 274, 289
exposure 44, 51, 109, 115
Fabian, J. 55, 59
family 25–36, 37n9, 54, 65–69, 76–79,
86–87, 91, 112, 115, 138–139, 144,
153–157, 161–163, 166–167, 170–
173, 180, 182–195, 199, 201–204,
205n3, 211, 213–214, 230, 232–237,
241, 247–248, 251–258, 260, 267,
272, 284, 289
Fanon, F. 4, 10, 16
feminine 12, 26–29, 34, 37n10, 89, 96,
122, 125, 203, 209–210, 234, 240,
253, 263–264, 272
femininity 8, 9, 26–28, 34, 122, 164,
210, 214, 222, 264, 281, 294
feminism xi, 3–6, 15, 17, 19, 20, 38,
119, 131, 133, 175, 177–178, 180,
197, 205n2, 217–218, 223, 226, 231,
279–280, 293–296
feminist xi–xiii, 3, 6, 10, 13–20, 59, 60,
132–133, 164, 175, 178–179, 191,
196, 201, 205n2, 217, 220, 223, 244,
260, 262–263, 270, 278, 280, 284,
286, 293–296
festivity 226
fluidity 14, 36, 41, 49, 52, 176, 218
Foucault, M. 4, 16, 19, 43, 55, 59,
110, 117–118, 130n18, 130n20,
131–133
freedom 1, 8, 12, 106, 108, 110, 117,
144–145, 155, 159, 161, 163, 171,
179, 193, 256, 281–282, 286–289,
291–292
Fuss, D. 130n21, 132
Gal, S. 283, 293
Galliano, G. 249, 259
300
gay 3, 11, 15–17, 19, 41, 45–48,
51–54, 57n2, 58–59, 61–64, 67,
70–80, 80n3, 80n4, 81–82, 88–89, 91,
100, 103–109, 111, 119–120, 124,
126–127, 128n1, 129n9, 129n11,
130n17, 130n21, 131n23, 131n24,
131–134, 137–159, 169, 171, 180–
190, 193–194, 196–197, 199, 200,
205n1, 205n2, 205–206, 217–218,
225–229, 231, 233–239, 241–244,
247–248, 250–251, 254–256, 259,
261, 263, 271, 290, 293
gay identity 46, 48, 62, 74, 80, 82, 143,
153–155, 184, 226, 238
gay rights 12, 46, 59, 61–62, 67, 70,
74, 76–77, 79, 193, 226, 234
gaze 12, 24, 58, 79, 161
gender 1–20, 23–27, 29, 34, 36, 37n4,
37n8, 38, 46–51, 56–60, 74, 80,
85–89, 96, 99, 100–101, 105–106,
108, 111, 122, 130n15, 131–134,
137, 143–145, 148, 161–164, 167,
176, 178, 180, 189, 193, 195, 197,
198–202, 204, 205n2, 206, 209–210,
212–224, 225–235, 238–240,
242–295
gender classification 268
gender construction 47
gender difference 268, 287
gendered 1–3, 5, 8, 12–13, 15, 23,
46–47, 50, 74, 85–87, 97, 101, 108,
122, 125, 131n24, 144–145, 148,
160, 178, 215, 217, 223, 246, 260,
264–271, 274
gender equality ix, x, 17, 217, 258, 284,
287, 293–294
gender expression 270–271
gender identity 10, 18, 26–27, 29,
34, 37n4, 122, 193, 199, 205n2,
216, 222–223, 225, 228–234, 238,
240, 243, 245, 249, 254, 256, 269,
271–272
gender justice 220, 286, 293
gender non-confirming 1, 17
gender relations 221–222, 288
gender roles 273, 284
gender variance 15, 262, 274
genealogy 100, 204, 230, 265
genital 46, 102, 108–109, 117, 264,
268, 270, 272
geopolitical 5, 13, 100, 260, 277
Gevisser, M. 103–106, 126, 129n9,
132, 229, 244
Ghosh, A. 7, 16
 Index
globalization ix, 3, 7, 8, 10, 15–16,
18–19, 39, 81–82, 93, 97, 141–142,
144–145, 151, 156, 230, 283,
292–293, 295
global south xiv–xvi, 1–4, 7, 9, 10, 12,
14–15, 19, 20, 35, 168, 209, 217,
219–221, 263
Goa x, xiv, 62–63, 67–69, 71, 73, 77,
79–82
Gopinath, G. xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 8, 9, 16,
143, 155, 157, 161, 165
governance 2, 3, 10, 13, 16–17, 19, 24,
37n8, 44, 284
Grosfoguel, R. 10, 17
Grosz, E. 44–45, 54, 59
Grzinic, M 4, 17
Guattari, F. 35, 38
Gupta, C. 25, 38–39
Halberstam, J. 127, 279
Hall, S. 103, 132, 168, 178, 199, 206,
277, 279
hate crime xi, 231
hegemony 3, 23, 128, 141, 221
Hemmings, C. 6, 17, 171, 178
heteronormativity 5, 9, 17, 47, 51, 110,
128, 144, 156, 160, 176, 182, 294
heterosexist 24, 37n4, 190, 192, 196
heterosexual 8, 18, 23, 51, 56, 104,
109, 121, 126–127, 128n4, 140,
143–144, 148, 197, 219, 226, 231,
264, 267, 272
heterosexuality 23, 51, 101, 106, 119,
123, 137, 149, 166, 181
hijra ix, xv, 11–13, 19, 20, 30, 34,
38n11, 39, 60, 84–98, 210, 214–215,
218, 224, 248–249, 259, 262–268,
272–273, 279–281, 284, 290–292,
294–296
Hindu 25, 30, 37n7, 38n14, 39, 65,
68–69, 79, 80n6, 82–87, 94, 96–98,
139, 158, 165, 167, 170, 176, 182,
185, 190–191, 194, 246, 250, 266
Hindu Nationalism 65, 83, 96–98
Hindutva xv, 39, 84–87, 92, 98, 266
historic xv, 2, 8, 11, 13, 43–44, 57n2,
64–67, 69, 71, 74–76, 80, 96,
100–101, 105–106, 116–117, 119,
127, 128n3, 129n9, 129n14, 150,
165, 199, 220, 231, 238, 258, 263,
265, 273, 283, 286, 289, 290
history 7, 14–18, 20, 36, 39, 43, 45,
58, 60, 63–68, 70–72, 74–75, 79, 81,
301
85, 99, 100, 102–104, 111, 113, 119,
130n20, 131–134, 141, 144, 148,
157, 159, 161–163, 167, 185, 198,
203, 211, 218–219, 221, 223–224,
239, 241, 245, 249, 257, 263,
265, 279, 280–281, 285, 287–288,
294–296
HIV 46, 58, 60–61, 64, 73–74, 76–79,
82, 223, 234, 296
HIV/AIDS xi, 2, 11–12, 45–47, 53, 60,
62, 65, 67, 70, 72, 74–77, 80, 83,
87–90, 92, 125, 131n23, 133, 223
homoeroticism 9, 40, 148
homonationalism 145, 158, 200, 206
homonormativity 145, 245
homophobia xi, 24, 39, 104, 108,
120–121, 124, 127, 133, 178, 181,
199, 200–202, 226, 231, 244–245
homosexual 12, 73, 78, 88–90, 99,
102–128, 129n11, 129n12, 131n23,
131, 133, 145, 212, 226, 231, 244,
252, 264
homosexual acts 99, 104, 112,
114, 118
homosexual identity 102, 128
homosexuality 49, 58, 62, 68, 73–74,
77, 88–91, 101–104, 106–118,
120–127, 129n9, 129n10, 131n24,
131–134, 144–145, 148–152,
157–158, 180, 188–190, 195–196,
231, 238, 289
Hountondji, P.J. 3, 17, 219, 223
Houston 137–142, 146, 150, 152,
154–155
human 24, 37n8, 43, 49, 56, 113, 132,
141, 178, 222, 228, 244, 246, 248,
260, 261–262, 264, 269, 275–278,
280, 282, 285, 289, 291
human experiences x, 269
humanity 61, 131, 155, 241, 261,
276, 278
human rights xv, 11, 17–19, 46, 98,
134, 140, 215, 217, 219, 225–227,
230, 233–234, 236, 238–239,
242–245, 255–256, 260–262, 275,
277–278, 280–281, 296
human rights watch. 11, 17
human value 260
Humsafar Trust 46, 88
Hunter, N.D. 131n23, 131
icon 61, 169, 171
iconography 84
 Index
identity 2–4, 6, 8–14, 15, 17–19, 25–
29, 34, 37n4, 37n10, 38n12, 38–39,
46, 48, 53–55, 58–60, 62, 65, 68–69,
71, 74, 79, 80, 80n6, 82, 89, 97–98,
100, 102–103, 105–106, 109–112,
117–124, 126–128, 130n21, 131–
134, 138–143, 145–147, 152–155,
158, 167–168, 178, 180–186,
189, 191, 193–197, 199, 201–202,
216–217, 220, 222–234, 236–243,
246–251, 254–256, 258–259, 264,
266, 269, 270–274, 277, 279–281,
287–289, 292–293, 296
identity categories 4, 14, 181
identity politics 10, 106, 119, 124, 134,
196, 226–233, 238–239, 242–243,
274, 280, 283, 287, 291
Ilaiah, K. 25, 39
immorality 102, 104
Immorality Act (Amendment)
99, 127
imperialism 8, 200, 205–206, 223, 226,
279, 283
indeterminacy 40–45, 48–58, 60
India xi–xvi, 2, 8, 11–12, 15–20,
23–25, 36, 38–39, 45–48, 54, 58–93,
97–98, 100, 138–139, 147–148,
157–159, 163–165, 180, 184, 186,
191–193, 203, 205, 210, 214,
216–219, 224, 248–249, 259, 263,
266, 272, 279–281, 290–291
Indianness 65–71, 81
indigenous 4, 11, 12, 17, 19, 24, 35–36,
41, 46, 48, 128n5, 214, 220–221,
223–224, 281–283
Indo-Caribbean xi, 162–165, 170,
177–178
inequalities xii, 2, 284
injustice 11, 184, 220, 227, 230, 236,
241–242
intelligibility 8, 9, 37n4, 43, 48–49, 56
intelligible 52, 175
internationalism 201, 204, 209
intersectionality 11, 180–182, 189,
196–197
intersex 137, 225–226, 243, 247–250,
256, 259, 263–264, 270–272
intersexual 273
intimacy 35, 52, 58, 65, 67, 75–76,
90, 155
invisibilization 74
invisible 13, 126, 172, 186, 189, 197,
200, 203, 228, 231, 244
302
Islam 13, 65, 84–86, 96, 140–141,
144, 149–152, 155–158, 175,
180, 188–189, 197, 200, 214, 220,
263–272, 276, 278–281, 283, 294
Islamic law 157, 261, 265, 270
Jaffrelot, C. 96–98
Jatra 26–29, 31, 35, 37n5, 37n9,
38n13, 38n14, 38n15
Jeganathan, P 16
John, M.E. xvi, 6, 17
justice 3, 4, 58, 105–107, 111, 133,
158, 209, 216–217, 220–222, 227,
239–240, 263–264, 277–279, 286,
291–293
Kabeer, N. 6, 17, 284–286, 294
Karnataka 24–25
Khan, S. 5, 12, 17, 46–48, 59, 148, 158,
264, 267–269, 280
Khusras 271
Khwaja sira 273, 280
Kibria, N. 140–142, 144, 149, 158
Kidwai, S. 5, 20, 23–24, 36, 39, 96
kinnar 84–86, 91–92, 95–97
kinship xi, xii, 2, 5, 11, 98, 149, 159,
210, 213, 230, 270, 272, 277
Kitzinger, C. 226, 231, 244
Kligman, G. 283, 293
knowledge 3, 4, 6, 7, 16–17, 20–21,
23, 36, 43–44, 47, 49, 55, 57n3,
59, 89, 109, 114, 116, 118, 120,
130n18, 130n20, 132, 149, 152,
160–164, 168, 173, 175–176, 213,
215, 219–220, 223–224, 228, 230,
243–244, 262, 280, 285
kothi 12–13, 35, 45–53, 58, 249, 280
kothi/panthi 45–53
Kulick, D. 230, 240, 244
labour x, 1, 14n1, 27, 34, 38n12,
74, 163, 175, 199, 201, 211, 216,
221, 294
language xv, 1, 13, 37n4, 40–50, 54,
60, 65, 69, 71, 101–102, 108, 110,
120–125, 132–133, 145–148, 156,
165, 180, 184–185, 191–192, 195,
199, 202, 211, 215, 217–218, 226,
229, 232–234, 242, 261, 263–270,
274, 277–278, 285, 289
Latour, B. 47–48, 291, 294–295
 Index
law 2, 5, 11, 13, 15, 17–19, 38, 49,
56, 59, 60, 77, 86–87, 89, 100–111,
113–117, 121, 123–134, 144, 150,
157, 199, 215–216, 218, 222, 232,
235, 241, 244–245, 249, 252,
254–256, 258, 260–262, 265–266,
269–273, 275–281, 290–291
Law, B. 73, 82
legacy 2, 61–62, 77, 80–82, 88,
260, 287
legal 11–12, 17–19, 23, 49, 62, 74, 78,
80, 83, 100–109, 115, 122, 126–134,
144, 148, 196, 205, 211–216, 219,
225–226, 229, 232, 235–240, 245,
249, 252, 255–273, 276–278, 281,
284, 287, 292
lesbian xi, 3, 9, 16–19, 41, 46, 50,
52, 57n2, 58, 75, 87, 90, 103–105,
113, 119, 121, 124, 126–134, 137,
144, 147, 157–159, 166–171, 174,
179–185, 189, 193–197, 199, 205n1,
206, 217, 225–228, 231, 243–244,
247–248, 250–252, 255–256, 259,
261, 280–1
lesbophobia 166, 178, 226, 231
Lewis, V. 221, 223, 229, 244, 279
LGBTI ix, 17, 218, 224, 225–243, 246,
254–259
LGBTQIA+ 137, 140, 144
liberalism 14, 65, 199, 203–205
liminal 64
liminality 5
linguistic 13, 49, 52, 58, 133, 140,
144, 146–147, 225, 261, 265, 269,
270, 274
lived experience 54, 144, 156, 161,
173, 181, 184, 192, 196, 227
lobbying 216, 231
localisms 1
Lorde, A. 160, 178
love 20, 23, 35–36, 39, 47, 49, 51–55,
58–60, 89, 119–120, 140–141,
145–152, 157, 159, 174, 178, 183,
190, 192, 201, 203–206, 252, 254,
275, 290, 292, 294
Ludden, D. 14, 18
Magubane, Z. 3, 18
Mahamandaleshwar 86
Maira, S. 142, 144, 158, 279
Maldonado-Torres, N. 10, 18
Mama, A. 3, 10, 18, 220, 223
303
Manalansan, M. 10, 16, 143, 158,
229, 244
mantra 23, 29, 31
mapping x, xiv, 1, 6, 59, 88, 97, 157,
162, 168–169, 172–173, 178,
196, 245, 265
Marais, C. 223
marginalisation 194–195, 202
Marinucci, M. 103, 133
Marmon, S. 265, 280
marriage 29, 30, 34, 47, 62, 89, 90, 95,
98, 101, 121, 132–133, 145, 148,
156, 163, 187, 191–192, 194, 197,
218, 235, 248–249, 252, 255–258,
266, 295
masculinity 5, 7–9, 18, 27–28, 34, 47,
97, 119, 122, 133, 157, 168, 203,
264–268, 278–279
material xii, 29, 36, 47, 56, 63, 70,
130, 156, 162, 168, 176, 189,
198, 214–215, 217, 221, 269, 283,
288–289, 291, 293, 295
material agency 291
material realities 215
Mbembe, A. 10, 18
McCallum, E.L. 103, 131
McClintock, A. 5, 18, 130n15, 133,
267, 280
McCormack, D. 177–178
MDACS 93
media ix, 46–47, 53, 64, 66–67, 77,
81–82, 86, 88, 94–96, 104, 155, 171,
193–194, 217, 220, 225–226, 230,
261, 269, 292, 293, 296
memory xii, 80, 103, 131–132, 162,
164–167, 173, 177–178, 236
men x, xi, 8, 12, 14, 17, 26–28,
34–5, 37n10, 41, 45–47, 51–52,
58–59, 62–63, 66, 70–77, 80, 82,
88, 101, 103–108, 112, 114, 125,
131, 137–158, 163, 171, 183,
205n2, 209–220, 226, 231–234, 238,
243–244, 247–251, 263–264, 268,
273, 283, 293–294
Menon, N. 5, 18, 56–9, 293
mental health 186, 193
men who have sex with men (MSM)
17, 45, 58–59, 74, 108, 148
Merchant, H. 148, 158
Michel Foucault 43, 131
microfinance 283–286, 293, 296
middle class 17, 62, 68, 77, 79, 272,
283–284, 287–289, 294–295
 Index
migration 5, 7, 8, 82, 143–144,
156–157, 165, 199, 203, 211, 215,
220, 230, 263–264, 279, 288,
295–296
Millet, K. 45, 59
mobilization 92, 285
Mohammed, P. 164, 178
Monro, S. xvi, 9, 180, 216, 223
moral citizenship 110
morality 5, 8, 14, 20, 23–24, 58, 60, 90,
115, 117, 124, 130n20, 130n22, 157,
190, 195–196, 240
Moran, L.J. 108–109, 117, 129n7, 133,
223
Morgan, R. 213–214, 223
Mosse, G. L. 8, 18
movement x, xvi, 1, 8, 11, 14, 16, 61,
75, 88, 90–91, 96, 100, 105, 124,
126, 129n10, 130n21, 131n23,
145, 168, 202–203, 217–218, 220,
224–225, 228, 262, 266, 285, 287,
293–294
MSM 41, 45–53, 57n2, 59, 60
Muñoz, J.E. 53, 60, 147, 158, 261,
274–275, 280
Muslim 12, 20, 33, 38, 65, 85,
137–146, 149–152, 155–158, 165,
176, 182, 188–190, 194–197,
200, 205n1, 214, 260, 264–266,
287–288
Najmabadi, A. 212, 214, 223
Namaste, V. 211, 217, 219, 223, 279
Namaste, V. K., 231, 244
Nanda, S. 98, 248–249, 259, 264,
274, 280
narrative 1, 11, 37n3, 50, 52, 63,
72, 79, 87, 111, 118–123, 128,
134, 144, 148–150, 156, 161, 169,
177, 181–190, 199–203, 214, 228,
234–235, 237–238, 287
nation xiv, xv, 5, 7–10, 13, 15–17,
55, 63, 65–66, 70–71, 76, 82,
85, 100–101, 106, 116, 122–5,
134, 161, 195, 254, 263, 273,
275–276
national x, xiii–xv, 1, 8, 9, 13, 17, 38,
48, 63, 65, 67, 76–77, 79, 80, 86,
116, 125, 134, 140, 142–144, 158,
196–221, 233–235, 246, 255–258,
260–263, 271, 277, 280, 287–288,
292, 295
national identity 9, 65, 158, 196, 288
304
nationalism xi, 2, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14–19, 63,
65, 69, 80–83, 87, 96–98, 104, 132,
145, 165, 179, 243, 261, 276, 283
nationality 140, 292
national security 13, 260–261
nation-building 12, 283
nationhood 98, 142, 145, 283, 287
nation-state xiv, xv, 142, 145, 149, 260,
270, 287
neo-colonial 3, 47, 263, 277
neoliberal 1, 6, 44–45, 198–199,
226, 230, 234, 242–243, 275–276,
285–288
neoliberal circulation 1
Nepal 11, 13, 15, 17, 54, 88, 147, 180,
246–259
NGO 6, 59, 74, 77, 84, 90, 93, 210,
228, 239, 285–286, 292
non-binary 59, 204, 214
non-normative genders xv, 2, 11,
219, 279
non-normative sexualities xvi, 180
non-procreative 101, 111
normative 2, 8, 55–6, 122, 161, 170,
192, 221, 264, 287, 292, 296
Northern India xiv, 84
Ong, A. 9, 18, 100, 133, 142–143, 158,
283, 295
ontology 59, 292
organising 54, 105, 124
Ortner, S. 19
other 34, 65, 112, 164, 173, 191, 247,
254–255, 275, 285, 293
Pakistan xiv, xv, 11, 13, 18, 41, 88,
138–139, 144, 146–147, 154–156,
260–263, 266–281
palimpsestic time 173
Palriwala, R. 287, 295
Parker, R. 15, 119, 133, 141, 158,
229, 245
pathology 107
patriarchy 14, 51, 96–97, 164, 181,
196, 267, 287
patriotism 65–56, 145
Peletz, M G. 9, 19
performance 26–28, 33, 35, 37n5, 147,
158, 160, 167, 176, 210, 244, 264,
270, 272
performative 31, 36, 37n10, 110,
161, 217
 Index
personal 11, 24, 37n10, 70, 74–77,
102, 107, 110–111, 120, 131n23,
133, 141, 152, 164, 173, 177–179,
182, 189, 195, 201, 205n3, 210,
213–214, 219, 223, 234, 236, 246,
253, 288
Phelan, S. 129, 133
Philipose, L. 263, 279
phobia 226, 231
plantation 163
pleasure 6, 9, 12, 39, 50, 62, 112,
130n20, 132, 199, 264–265
Plummer, K. 9, 19, 120, 133
political economy 5, 9, 15, 19, 39, 145,
265, 279, 283, 291
political expression 1
politics 1–20, 39, 45–46, 57, 59, 63,
80, 84–89, 91–94, 97–98, 100,
104, 106, 109, 119, 121, 123–127,
129n11, 131n23, 131–134, 142,
145, 156–160, 168, 172, 177–179,
196, 199–205, 216–223, 225–239,
242–244, 260, 262–264, 266,
269–275, 277–281, 283–284,
286–288, 291, 293–296
popular culture 39, 82, 139, 185, 200,
225, 271, 273, 277–278
post-apartheid 105–106, 126, 128n5
postcolonial x–xii, 2–8, 12, 15–21,
24, 36, 60, 80, 98, 160–162, 166,
177–180, 197, 206, 209, 215,
219–221, 260–262, 267, 275–278,
280, 283, 288, 291
postcolonial multiplicities 4, 21
poverty xi, xii, 18, 34, 50, 90, 163,
206, 210–212, 215–216, 220–221,
230–233, 273, 284, 286, 294
power x, 2, 3, 5, 13, 17–20, 23–27,
30, 32, 34–37, 46–48, 50–51,
56–59, 80, 82, 84, 96, 100–101,
107, 109–112, 117–118, 127–
128, 130n15, 130n18, 130n20,
132–133, 142–143, 157, 160–163,
166, 168–169, 177, 199, 204, 212,
218–219, 221, 223, 230, 240,
250, 262–263, 265, 276–278, 282,
285–294
practice 4, 15, 25, 28, 54, 85, 99, 102,
104, 109, 114–116, 120, 123, 125,
132, 149, 155, 165, 175, 217, 232,
246, 252, 257, 263, 267, 283, 286,
289, 291, 293, 295
precarity 12, 34, 41
precolonial 36, 262, 265, 283
305
prejudice 105, 180, 190, 196, 226, 231,
239, 243–244
privacy 57, 107, 126, 210
private 32, 44, 50, 90, 92, 99, 103–104,
107, 109–112, 117, 120, 125–127,
131, 138, 160, 166, 171–172, 177,
181, 196, 280, 288
privatization 7, 203, 283
provincialization 4
Puar, J. K. 144–145, 158, 200, 206,
276, 281
public xii, 5, 8, 16, 27–28, 30, 34,
37n10, 41, 44, 46, 50, 53, 55,
59–64, 70, 74–77, 81, 86, 88–90, 92,
102–109, 112, 114, 117, 120, 123,
126, 130n22, 137, 140, 147–149,
154–155, 157, 159–160, 171–173,
177, 216–218, 222, 226, 231–240,
242–243, 249, 254, 257–258,
260–262, 264, 267, 271–272, 276,
279–280, 294–295
Puri, J. 2, 8, 17, 19
queer x, xi–xv, 3, 6, 8–18, 20,
39–41, 43–45, 47–53, 57–63, 73,
75, 82, 86–91, 97–99, 102–110,
112, 115, 117–118, 120, 122,
124, 126–129, 131–134, 137, 140,
143–144, 147, 155, 157–158,
160–168, 171, 176, 178–179,
194–195, 197–206, 234, 242–245,
247, 262–264, 269–270, 273–274,
278–279, 289–290, 294
queer identities 9, 102, 106, 120,
126–127
queer spaces 15, 194
queer theory x, xi, 17, 103, 132–134,
179, 278, 294
Qur’an 140–141, 144, 149–152, 154,
157, 270
Rabinow, P. 2, 19, 110, 117, 131
race xii, 10, 18, 20, 59, 60, 100–101,
105–106, 124–125, 129n13, 130n15,
133–134, 137, 140, 143–144,
158–159, 161–162, 180, 196, 200,
204–205, 210, 215, 221–222, 257,
263, 269, 275, 280
racism xiii, 59, 124, 165, 195–196,
198, 200–201, 205–206, 220
radical 1, 6, 12, 19, 20, 44, 52, 57, 60,
102, 109, 120, 124, 129n12, 197,
199, 201, 205n1, 206, 234, 245, 286
 Index
radicalized 283
Rai, S. M. 5, 8, 19
Rajan, R. S. 5, 19
Rana, J. 142, 144, 158, 255, 259
rape 74, 116, 151, 166, 217
Ratti, R. 147, 155, 157–158
Ray, R. 6, 19
re-colonization 220
Reddy, C. 144–5, 159
Reddy, G. 8, 12, 19, 38n11, 39, 43,
48, 53, 60, 98, 214, 224, 249, 259,
264, 281
Reddy, V. xi, xvi, 7, 99, 102, 125–126,
129n10, 133
Reeves, P 8, 19
regulation of sexuality 5, 134
relationality xiv, 265
religion 2, 5, 6, 10, 23, 34, 38, 54, 118,
140, 143, 146, 149–154, 157, 165,
173, 175–176, 182, 185, 188–191,
194–197, 206, 213–214, 218, 220,
222, 224, 257, 263, 277, 280, 287,
289, 293
religiosity 24, 29, 65, 152, 154, 177,
181, 190, 287
representation 4, 7, 9, 43, 62, 67, 69,
72–73, 75, 80, 84, 86–87, 89, 97,
109, 112, 173, 182, 194, 199–201,
206, 231, 235, 242, 283, 287–292,
295–296
repulsive 51, 107
resistance 1, 3, 4, 10, 13, 16, 18,
44, 48, 57n2, 88, 106, 110,
128n2, 129n10, 129n12, 132,
147, 160–162, 167, 199, 202,
204, 223, 230, 234, 263, 274,
278, 287
Revathi, A. 11, 19
Rigg, J. 3, 19
rights xi, xv, 2, 11–13, 17–20,
24, 46–47, 59–62, 67, 70, 74,
76–79, 96, 98, 109, 124, 127,
129n13, 132, 134, 140–141,
193, 210, 215, 217–219,
221, 223–227, 230, 232–239,
241–245, 247, 252, 254–262,
266–268, 270–281, 283–287,
290–292, 294, 296
ritual 23–38, 85, 91, 94–96, 165, 210,
214, 266, 273
Romanow, R. F. 161, 179
Roy, A. 156, 283
Roy, S. 6, 19, 287, 296
Rubin, G. 6, 19
306
safe spaces x, 162, 169, 171
Safi, O. 158
same-sex marriage 62, 132, 249, 252,
255–256, 258
same-sex sexuality xi, 133, 157
Scott, J. W. 6, 20
secrecy 35, 121, 186–187
Section 377 87, 90, 280
Sedgwick, E. K. 119, 130n17, 130n21,
131n23, 134, 161
self 15, 27, 37, 43, 53–55, 109, 111,
118–120, 122, 127, 132, 162, 164,
167, 170, 175–176, 202, 293
Serrano-Amaya, J. F. xii, 210, 212,
224–225, 228, 245
sex 3, 4, 12, 14, 17, 19, 25, 30, 34–36,
38n12, 39–41, 45, 47, 49–51, 58–60,
74, 78, 90, 98, 101, 105, 107–8,
111–112, 116–119, 124–126, 128n4,
129n13, 130n20, 131n23, 131–134,
150, 152, 158, 163, 174, 179,
196–197, 203, 211–213, 215–216,
219, 222–224, 229–230, 243–244,
246–254, 256, 258–259, 261–264,
266–267, 271–273, 275, 277, 281,
290–291, 293–296
sexism 181, 196
sexual behaviour 119, 160
sexual desire 2, 51, 148–149, 156, 176,
229, 268, 270
sexual dissidence 202
sexual diversity xii, xiv, 99, 100, 145,
168, 222, 225, 227–228, 233, 245, 290
sexual expressions 289
sexual governance 2, 3
sexual identities xi, 2, 7, 8, 10, 55, 106,
119, 155, 162, 195, 199, 219, 229,
243, 271
sexual identity 3, 4, 9, 39, 53–54, 60,
112, 121, 134, 143, 153, 185, 189,
191, 217, 258, 266
sexuality ix, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, xvii,
1–20, 23–25, 34, 38–39, 42–47,
53–55, 58–60, 62, 73–74, 80, 87–91,
96–103, 106–109, 111, 117–118,
123–127, 129n7, 129n11, 130n20,
131n23, 131–134, 137, 139–145,
147, 150–152, 155–159, 161,
164–165, 168, 170–171, 173–174,
176, 178–179, 182–190, 193–197,
199, 201, 203–204, 206, 227–229,
231–232, 238, 242, 244, 250, 257,
259–266, 269, 275, 277–280, 286,
288–289, 292–296
 Index
sexual justice 3, 4
sexual minority 11–12, 255
sexual orientation 10, 18, 54, 88, 109,
112, 119, 121–122, 134, 191, 206,
225, 228, 230, 232–235, 238, 240,
243–245, 247–248, 250, 254, 256
sexual politics xii, 1, 2, 8, 12, 18, 20,
87–88, 100, 133, 145, 157, 177, 204,
226–230, 242–243, 279
sexual practices 36, 47, 130n20,
148, 175
sexual subjectivity 41–42, 45, 47,
53, 96
sexual violence 5, 74, 271
shame 24–25, 48, 93, 154, 265, 288
Sheller, M. 161, 179
Shivashakti 25–35, 37n9, 38n12
Shukla, S. 143, 159, 200
Sikh 182, 185, 189, 191–194, 203
Sivori, H. 5, 20
Snorton, R. 276, 279, 281
social x–xii, xvi, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 14,
16–17, 19, 34, 44, 47, 52, 54–55,
58–60, 69, 74–75, 85–86, 88, 93–94,
96, 98, 100–106, 108, 110, 115,
119–120, 126, 131–133, 138, 140,
148, 152, 154, 156, 160, 162–165,
167–171, 181–182, 189–196, 199,
201, 204, 205n2, 209, 212, 214–233,
235, 239–249, 251, 254–256, 259,
261–264, 266–267, 269, 271–272,
274, 278–279, 283–289, 291–296
social capital 285–286, 296
social change 201, 204, 223
social consciousness 5
social hierarchies 7
social justice xi, 209, 216–217,
220–222, 227, 256, 274, 279, 291
social life 2, 148, 289
social norms 34, 182, 271, 286
socio-economic 35–36, 67–68, 168,
181, 198
sodomy ,11, 19, 101, 103, 128n4, 145,
290
solidarity xiii, xiv, 209–210, 218,
221–222, 226, 252, 259, 279,
290, 292
South Africa xi, xii, 18, 99–105,
110, 115–116, 123–124, 126–129,
132–134, 139, 144, 213–214, 217,
220, 223, 228
South America 212, 225
South Asia xi, xii, xiv–xvi, 1–20, 24,
38–39, 41–42, 45–48, 57n2, 58–60,
307
63, 77, 82, 147–148, 158, 180, 199,
206, 261, 263–267, 272, 279–281,
287–288, 294
South Asian gender xiv, 7, 99
South Asian Muslim 137, 139–140,
142, 155, 265
South Asian sexualities 45, 180
Southern India 23, 25, 100
sovereignty 2, 10, 243, 283–4
space x, xiv, xv, xvii, 1, 2, 4–10, 15,
34–35, 37n8, 38n11, 41, 48, 50,
56, 59, 60, 64, 71, 107, 110, 141,
147, 149, 158, 160–169, 171–173,
177–179, 181–182, 189, 193,
201, 203–204, 212, 235–236, 239,
241–242, 246, 254, 264, 267, 273,
279, 289–290, 295
Spade, D. 276, 281
spatial x, xv, 4, 15, 107,
168–169, 289
speech 46, 50, 54–55, 124, 130n21,
226
spirit 30, 33, 123, 162, 173, 175
spirituality 150, 174–175, 182, 185,
190, 265
Spivak, G.C. 1, 3, 10, 20, 56, 60, 275,
277, 281
Sri Lanka 11, 15–17, 40–42, 47–49, 53,
57, 59, 60, 88, 147, 180
state x, xii, xiv, xv, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8–14,
16–20, 31, 36n2, 42, 45–46, 50,
56, 59, 90, 97, 99–115, 117–
118, 120–129, 131–132, 142,
144–145, 149, 172, 198–199,
201, 211–212, 214, 216, 220,
226–227, 233–236, 238–239,
241–245, 247, 250–251, 254,
256–258, 260–262, 265–268,
270, 275–277, 281, 283, 287,
290–292, 294
stereotype 73
Stevenson, N. 9
stigma 32, 63, 73, 79, 82, 94, 163, 235,
244, 251, 264, 267
stigmatisation 79
Stivens, M. 9, 20
Stychin, C.F. 109, 129n7, 134
subculture 104–105, 126, 129n9,
144, 283
subject x, 18–19, 42–43, 45, 49,
52–53, 55–58, 62–64, 67, 79, 86–88,
108–109, 112, 115, 117, 125, 127,
143, 158, 161–162, 164, 227, 242,
291–292
 Index
subjectivity 2, 3, 8, 10, 15, 18, 41–42,
45, 47, 53, 60, 67, 69, 71, 80, 86–87,
96, 143, 149, 160–161, 164, 167,
172, 177–178, 189, 199, 223, 231,
236, 278
Sullivan, A. 17, 106, 129n12, 134
symbol 28, 95, 171, 287
symbolism 176, 287
Talpade-Mohanty, C. 6, 20
Tamale, S. 10, 20
Tatlic, S. 4, 17
Temporality 161–162
Thanpan, M. 287, 296
third gender 12, 18, 23, 96, 216,
246–249, 251, 254–256, 258–259,
279, 281, 291
third sex 224, 254, 258–259
time 2, 12, 20, 36, 59, 111, 147, 149,
160–165, 168–179, 203–204, 262
Totman, R. 213, 224
trans xv, 3, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 17,
45, 198–205, 209, 211–224,
229, 234–235, 238–239, 243,
245, 260–267, 269–279, 281,
292, 294
transfeminism 201, 204, 205n2, 206
transformation 17, 106, 175, 203–205,
284, 288, 290
transgender 11–13, 15, 19, 20, 24–25,
34–35, 38n12, 41, 46, 58, 60, 75,
87, 91, 94, 96–97, 103, 137, 144,
158, 180, 199, 201–202, 205n3, 206,
212–213, 215, 217–219, 221–225,
229, 231–232, 238–239, 244–245,
247–248, 250, 253, 255–261, 263,
266, 270–276, 278–282, 294
transgender man 270, 273
transgender woman 224, 232, 270
transgression 36, 74, 102, 109–110,
127, 134, 161, 167
transition 29, 203, 212, 214–216, 218,
224, 279
transnational ix, xi, xii–xv, 1–3, 6–10,
14, 16, 18–20, 45–48, 69, 87, 97,
127, 137, 139–146, 149, 153,
155–157, 192, 195, 219, 228, 261,
263, 270, 273, 275–276, 279, 283,
290, 296
transnational space 9
308
transphobia 219, 221, 231, 244–245
transphobic 24, 201
Trikone 88–89
United Kingdom 180–182, 195,
198, 238
unnatural acts 101
urbanization 283, 293
Vahed, G. 100, 131
Vanita, R. xvi, 5, 20, 23–24, 36, 39, 46,
58, 60, 96, 148, 159
victimization 231
Vidya, N. 11, 20
violence xii, xiii, 3, 5, 6, 11–13, 16,
18, 41, 47, 50, 57, 59, 60, 74, 90,
107–109, 144, 156, 159, 177, 196,
205, 210–217, 220–225, 227–228,
230–245, 249, 262–263, 267, 269,
271, 275–276, 281, 283
visibility 86, 92, 94, 97, 120, 127,
130n21, 155, 191, 194, 203, 238,
240, 243, 257–258, 292, 295
vulnerabilities 59, 243, 267
Ward, J. 234, 245
Warner, M. 98, 204
Weeks, J. 111, 129n8, 134
Wekker, G. 175, 179
Wellbeloved, J. R. 223
Weston, K. 155, 159
Wieringa, S. 5, 20, 264, 273, 282
Wilson, A. 57n2, 60, 180, 193, 197
Winant, H. 279
Wittgenstein 43, 48, 52, 60
womanhood 5, 164, 213
women x–xiii, 5–9, 11, 14–16, 18–19,
26–27, 30, 34–35, 37n7, 38, 45, 47,
51, 58, 90, 97–98, 101, 103, 128n2,
132, 144, 152, 160–166, 168–173,
175–184, 186, 189–197, 203–224,
229, 231–232, 234–235, 238–239,
243, 245, 247–251, 253, 255, 258,
260, 263–265, 270, 272–273, 278,
280, 282–287, 293–296
worship 29, 32, 38n13, 161, 253
Yaar 137, 146–147, 149