University
of California, Berkeley
(Estados
Unidos/India)
For many years now,
activists in India have documented and protested
violations against gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered
communities. In recent years, however, the language of
this protest has changed from focusing on violations to
a discourse of rights and political assertion. Within
this shift has been the emergence of a queer politics,
one that consciously differentiates itself from simply
speaking of LGBT issues or just about LGBT-identified
people. In this paper, I trace this shift, asking the
following questions: What is a queer politics in the
Indian context? How is it different from speaking of
LGBT rights in a language similar to that used in other
gay rights movements across the world, and from the
historical and contemporary uses of "queer" in
the West?
In doing so, I argue that
the use of "queer" both as a political/ideological
choice, as well as a strategic one. Politically the idea
of "queer" seeks to do three things: (a) it
shifts the political question away from speaking of
identity or minority-based issues to larger
understandings of gender and sexuality in society; (b)
it speaks of sexuality as a politics intrinsically and
inevitably connected with the politics of class, gender,
caste, religion and so on, thereby both acknowledging
other movements and also demanding inclusion within them;
and (c) it shifts away from protesting isolated
incidents of violence to challenging social norms and
value systems that deem such violence legitimate in the
first place and allow it to continue.
This emergent political
language has strong implications for social movements
and changing political spaces and discourses in
contemporary India. After tracing the shift I describe
above, I will try and explore some of these implications
for both queer and non-queer social movements.
About Gautam Bhan
Gautam
Bhan is a Doctoral Student at the University of
California, Berkeley. He has been part of queer rights
movements in India for many years, and is co-editor of Because
I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India (Yoda Press:
2005), as well as Series Editor of Sexualities, an
interdisciplinary publishing list housed at Yoda Press,
based in New Delhi.
