Maura Finkelstein

Department of Anthropology

Stanford University

Estados Unidos

Drawing from fieldwork conducted in the former textile mill neighborhoods of Central Mumbai, India, this paper engages queer theory in response to recent conversations surrounding the study of poverty in Urban Studies. 

The work of Giorgio Agamben has been extremely critical in rethinking exceptional and vulnerable bodies. In considering the ways in which “illegibility” is often conflated with “exceptionality,” in an Agambian sense, this paper seeks first to disentangle the two terms, and then pay close attention to the ways in which queer theory can help reframe the language used to speak of “the poor.” 

By theorizing chawls – utilitarian communal housing structure built to house factory workers in India – and their tenants alongside other queered bodies, I will show how an application of queer theory to the study of urban poverty is critical in thinking beyond the limitations of disciplinary and thematic boundaries. In doing so, I reconsider the threshold of legibility and illegibility as a respite for bodies deemed culturally unintelligible by larger societal norms. In distinguishing between “exceptional bodies” and “the state of exception,” I show how the “threshold” of legibility provides (counter to Agamben’s claim) a safe(r) space for those who have been cast outside the limits of cultural intelligibility. 

As a threshold, the chawl cannot be understood within a normal framing of urban habitation: it defies the regulations deemed necessary for “respectable” life. However, it is only through its presence that chawl dwellers are allowed to exist as “housed” individuals: once the building falls, they will be forced to find homes on the pavement or within the growing slums scattered throughout the city. It is actually (counter to Agamben’s claim) within the threshold – the space in which “life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable” - that violence can be averted. 

Similarly, queer bodies become most vulnerable when forcibly hailed into the sphere of normative society. It is the precariousness of this crossover (drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler) - the danger of illegibility and unintelligibility – that marks an exceptional space on the body. This is not, however, “the State of Exception,” in an Agambian sense, as Agamben steals the safety of the threshold and reifies the binary of interiority and exteriority. For, while a body may be cast outside the law, that body cannot be cast outside society. Indeed, it is in being cast outside the law that chawl dwellers and queer bodies are forcibly drawn into normative society, hence being subject to the violence of legal abandonment through their cultural illegibility. 

This conversation - between urban studies and queer theory – can both provide a fresh direction for theorizing the city and contribute to a new relevance in the application of queer studies.

About Maura Finkelstein

Maura Finkelstein is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research considers issues of class, labor, housing, and urban citizenship in the former textile mill neighborhoods of Mumbai, India.