“Sex Between Women and Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies”

Diversity of gender self-apprehensions and sexual attachments have been long under negotiation of medical, spiritual, and cultural writing, and is now understood as significant component of Indian political debate. There is not enough audacity in confronting assumptions on sexualities beyond binary. Although complex to address, sensitive questions upon behavior, belonging, and violence are of importance for those stigmatized on account of their sexuality. The literature, activism, and law, reflective of social bias, support norms and blur the picture of everyday lived reality. This paper gathers ambiguous, space, and time dependent perceptions of alternative sexualities in India, to open present day debate on queer mobilization in India entangled in colonial, global, and pre-modern influences.

VLEARNY Journal of Humanities & Social Science 1, 2024

Indian memory holds a profound lacuna when it comes to the rich traditions of homosexuality in the pre-colonial era. Sexuality, pleasure, intimacy, and love were expressed in different ways, such as through literature like the Kama Sutra, Perso-Urdu poetic texts, and the works of various writers. There was also a cultural vibrancy manifested through cross-dressing, female impersonation performances, and the importance of divergent identities placed at the center of many of our rituals and practices, among other trends. These expressions showed a freedom from rigid norms of respectability, even though they sometimes existed outside the mainstream. The presence of such elements led to colonial appropriation, which resulted in an oppressive superstructure, the echoes of which are still felt today. Colonialism, as a form of exploitation, also featured distortion across the social, legal, political, and cultural spheres. Laws like IPC Section 377 reflected colonial values and catered to upper-caste, conservative Hindu ideas of masculinity and religious purity. We will also examine the dichotomy between Eastern and Western ideals and how queerness is inherently woven into the fabric of Indian, or Hindustani, identity. Love and sexuality cannot be discussed without considering gender, and thus, the conditions of the Hijra community in the 19th century are briefly discussed here. This paper attempts to trace queerness and its manifestations in early colonial India, along with the repeated and continuous attempts of tyrannical authority and orthodox society to suppress divergent identities. It delves into the consciously colonial efforts to rewrite Indian histories and erase the lives of queer individuals.

Interventions, 2020

Upanayan Publishers, 2022

A greater tolerance for people with diverse sexual orientations and sexual identities has been observed in several parts of the world. Though to some extent, it conspicuously found that the people belonging to Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons have been able to attain assimilation in the mainstream of society and culture in some countries as a whole, the condition is drastically sad in other countries. People have their lifestyles, use of language, way of expression, feelings and behaviour. They have been denied living a peaceful life. They are deprived of all kinds of facilities and forced to live in extreme poverty. Even if they have tried to seclude themselves from mainstream society, they have often been the target of negligence and hatred. But if we try to locate its root cause, such discrimination is mandatory irrespective of caste, class and the importance of their gender. In this chapter, I aim to find out how the mainstream of Indian society and culture dominate these people throughout the years. Along with it postmortem, the dupe-headed role of the mainstream society. It will focus on the sorrowful life cycle of the people who have not been allowed to express their feelings, emotions, desires, ideas, and preferences as these may destroy the richly manipulated foundation of society. Though they have been allowed to move out of their homes and seek employment, but they have always been pushed down secondarily. Apart from these, the article will delve deeper into exploring the tricky Indian society where people lead a queer life challenging various norms. It makes a significant intervention in critically analyzing the emergence of queer studies in India. To explore such, I will be focusing on the contemporary Indian fiction of Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You (2017), Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), Abha Daweasar's Babyji (2005 )and R. Raj Rao's Hostel Room 131(2010).

International journal of innovative research and development, 2016

The sexual minorities dwelling in India are fettered by the discrimination, stigmatization and continuous subjugation of the hetronormative social structure. The role of section 377 of the IPC also acted a very important role in shaping the homophobic environment in the present Indian society. The politics of creative resistance that is developed by the Indian cinema not only brings to light the plight of queer lives and experiences, but it also constructs an alternative culture against the dominant hetronormative culture that redefines the present Indian society. Indian Queer movement, like many other new social movements, is based upon the idea of bringing a social change; a change in our understanding of sexuality not from the conventional stage but from a peripheral one. It strives to demolish the manicured walls of predominant paradigms that define the sexual universe of any common man. The main argument is that with the increasing popularity of queer themes in Indian cinema a ...

Mapping World Anglophone Studies, 2024

Literature has often served as a weapon of social and political activism. The absence of a vernacular literary tradition of the sexual minority in a multi-lingual country like India has compelled the Indian queer to predominantly use English as the language of literary creation as well as theorising. The process of canon formation has taken the shape of (1) the publication of English anthologies of literary pieces such as Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Indian Literature and (2) literary writing in English following the Anglophone models, as in the case of R Raj Rao’s Lady Lolita’s Lover (inspired by Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover). This move aims at the consolidation of a pan-Indian queer community united not only by a common cause but also a common tongue and the creation of global solidarity of people defying the rigid taxonomy of identification through sex, gender, and sexual orientation. However, the queer terminology borrowed from the West lacks contextual specificity in the Indian subcontinent and has not been translated due to the lack of equivalent vernacular terms. The Indian queer, for lack of a better term, is faced not only with the challenge of overthrowing a compulsory norm-assigning web cast upon its shoulder, which too was a colonial imposition but is compelled to use tools alien to them.

In many literatures, eating and food are primary figures for love and sex, and Indian literature is no exception. The specifics, however, differ. Questions that one might explore in this regard include: what cultural significance does the food item have? Is it a high-status or low-status food? Are different foods used to figure different types of desire or love? In this essay, I discuss food in three early twentieth-century north Indian fictions about same-sex desire -Ismat Chughtai's Lihaf, Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra's Chaklet, and Suryakant Tripathi Nirala's Kulli Bhat. Public discussion of homosexuality in early twentieth-century India was almost entirely couched in the language of Victorian sexphobia and homophobia, and overshadowed by the sign of sodomy, imported into India by the British, most notably in the form of the anti-sodomy law introduced into the Indian Penal Code. Pre-colonial Indic traditions of depicting same-sex desire in pleasurable, nonjudgmental ways were under erasure. I suggest that one of the ways pleasure resurfaces in Indian fiction about desire is through the figure of food.

culture, occasion and historical period. 'Symbolic' gender is the cultural or religious signifier of status, and is not necessarily always aligned with social gender. For instance, in India, the 'symbolic' gender signifiers of mother goddesses give women an elevated status that women's 'social' gender does not match. The above distinction between 'sex' and 'gender' is contested on two fronts. On the one hand, some, like biological anthropologists, insist that there are core physical determinants of gender. On the other hand, theorists like Judith Butler (1990) argue that sex is already always constructed as gender. She does not deny the existence of biological differences, but argues that the importance given to reproductive biological differences over other physical differences is politically and culturally constructed. Butler notes that there are often more biological and physical differences between persons of the same sex (such as differences of age, reproductive capacity, skin colour, height, size etc.) than there may be between people of different sexes. Challenges to the binary conceptualization of male and female physical differences are also offered from the point of view of the 'third sex' (eunuchs) and 'inter-sex' people (male and female hermaphrodites) (see Fausto-Sterling, 1993). Sexual identity and gender identity both refer to how one thinks of oneself, and both are 'embodied' concepts, physically rooted in the body. Sexual identities are often constructed in complex intersection with different gender identities. Sexuality is diverse, incorporating a range of behaviours and identities. Although many societies define procreative heterosexuality as the 'normative' sexuality, a plurality of sexual behaviours has always existed, and includes homosexuality, bisexuality, and pansexuality among other behaviour and identities. Butler suggests that gender is a performative act, continuously constituted (rather than a fixed construction), thus exposing the fluidity and instability of not only gender identity, but also of sexual identity. However, as Moore (1999) points out, despite Butler's historically specific analysis, many later theorists have interpreted this 'fluidity' and 'instability' of gender as opening ground for highly individual, voluntaristic agency in the 'subversion' of gender norms. In their lived realities, most people do not find gender identities particularly fluid or open to choice (whether they are accepting or rejecting norms). As Butler acknowledges, gender perfomativity is never only about conscious wishes and desires. It is formed in conjunction with conditions not of our making: language, the symbolic, the realm of the inter-subjective and the relational. The existence and perpetuation of violence towards particular gender identities and sexual identities is based at least in part in the historic and continuing oppression of people who do not conform to society's 'normative' sexual and gender roles. Mason (2001) observes that violence in the inter-locked systems of gender and sexual identity is not bound by the immediate injury due to the act of violence. The violence runs deeper, and shapes acts of both compliance and resistance by people who 'do not conform' to these norms. Acts of resistance include changing or subverting 'normative' gender and sexual identity. Compliance includes behaviours that seek to hide gender and sexual identity in order to reduce visibility as a 'deviant' sexual subject and avoid the threat of potential violence. As Mason argues, violence is partially contingent on the 'visibility' of the transgressive sexual subject. That is, since people are normatively 'presumed heterosexual', only those who indicate otherwise (through their clothing, behaviour, speech etc.) are vulnerable to direct violence. In her discussion of how 'visibility' centrally shapes the incidence and effects of homophobic violence, Mason points out that for lesbians and gay men, safety from violence is never a static condition, but a context dependent form of negotiation (ibid, 37). She further examines how the 'visibility' of lesbian and gay behaviour shapes the effects of violence, and suggests that the knowledge of homophobic hostility interacts with other factors such as class and ethnicity to engender deeply embodied practices of self-surveillance as a means of negotiating safety.

Journal of Gender and Power, 2017

In this paper, the author primarily engages with the cultural tropes existing around the notions of gender, sex, sexuality and its alternatives within the Indian context, specifically to locate and explore the “subversive” expressions. The influences and interpretations put forward in this paper are based in a broader doctoral research, wherein personal narratives of “queer” individuals provide the qualitative basis for the projected discourse. The principal objective of this paper has been to explore the conceptual space the “queer” identity locates itself in, and thereby the cultural outlets of its expression. The paper trails various literary and academic sources, alongside field notes and narratives, to present a critical discourse of existing social tropes regarding the “queer” identity. The context of the entire engagement is positioned in a reexamination of the Indian cultural scope today, as a methodological approach to study the “queer” category in a postcolonial dialog. KEYWORDS: alternative sexuality, sexual marginality, sexual subaltern, Indian queer culture, queer expression