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To
Render Real the Imagined: Making Sexual Locality out of
Unruly
Geographies
Naisargi
Dave
Department
of Anthropology
University
of Toronto
(Canada/India)
From 1991 to 1997, due to
the efforts of a lesbian networking group called Sakhi,
women from across India, married and single, wealthy and
poor, in small towns and big cities, were forging a pan-
and transnational imagined lesbian community through the
circulation of letters. Displaying little concern about
foreign origins, most proclaimed themselves lesbian and
expressed great solace in the discovery of others like
them. This broad and meaningful network one that enabled
previously isolated women to stake claim to a larger
belonging was produced and sustained through a series of
transnational mediations diasporic magazines, mass media,
foreign travelers, and cosmopolitan scholars with
ambitious agendas.
I examine in this paper how,
as this imagined community of writers gave way to the
formation of discrete, place-based, and often politically
aspiring lesbian collectives, these transnational
mediations were deliberately obscured through an emergent
activist discourse that sought to posit the local
authenticity, and legitimacy, of a more ?Indian? (and thus
less ?lesbian,? less mediated) same-sex desire.
Efforts to transform
inherently unruly productions into local truths are
directly related, I will argue, to the imperatives of
visibility, visuality, and authenticity that underlie the
hopes of emergent political communities.
About Naisargi Dave
Naisargi
Dave is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Toronto. Her research interests include the
anthropology of ethics, gender and sexuality, activism and
social justice,
imagination, and, more recently,
animal rights discourses. She is currently at work
on a book manuscript tentatively titled Queer
Activism
in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics.
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