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Special session:
Intranational
and International Geographies of Queer Politics: A Focus on
India
How do we understand the use of the English word
“lesbian” by a collective of women in New Delhi, or
the deliberate use of queer rather than LGBT by activists
in the same city? How do regional, national, cultural and
sexual identities intersect within diasporic South Asian
communities in America? How have hijras, an indigenous
trans/third gender community in India negotiated a global
encounter of another kind, that of colonialism?
The intranational and international geographies of
queer politics are often presented within simplistic and
binary categorizations of the “indigenous” or
“local” versus “global” or “Western”
identities. In speaking of sexualities from the global
south, too often sexuality is either irredeemably reduced
to its geographical and socio-cultural “otherness”, or
is understood incompletely from within the perspectives of
global LGBT theoretical frameworks. From within each of
these binaries then emerge political discourses, languages,
and understandings of sexuality that rigidly defend either
their indigenous authenticity or their universal relevance,
while resting uneasily on the unsaid maps of class,
language, rural/urban residence and other indices of
social, political and economic privilege.
This panel seeks to unsettle these easy
categorizations by examining both the local and the
transnational political discourse on queer sexualities,
specifically relating to India and the Indian diaspora. It
argues that transnational conversations and interactions
must not be seen as simplistic exchanges between the
indigenous local and the sexually emancipated LGBT global.
It further argues that different engagements with queer
politics across geographies has the ability to profoundly
and productively un-map and unsettle our easy assumptions
about sexuality and sexual identity across the world.
Within this un-mapping, there is the possibility of
creating a new cartography, where the transnational
discourse on queer politics is truly transnational, and
knowledge is produced at all its nodes, and each is
informed by the other.
Papers
in this session:
To
Render Real the Imagined: Making Sexual Locality out of
Unruly
Geographies
Naisargi
Dave
Department
of Anthropology
University
of Toronto
(Canada/India)
Queer
Desi Formations: Marking the Boundaries of Cultural
Belonging in
America
Gayatri
Reddy
Department
of Anthropology and Department of Gender and Women’s
Studies
University
of Illinois, Chicago
(Estados
Unidos/India)
The
Transformation of Eunuchs’ Lives & Livelihoods in 19th
century North India
Mario
D’Penha
History
Department,
Rutgers
University,
(Estados
Unidos/India)
Intersections
and Movements: The Rise of Queer Political Activism in
India
Gautam Bhan
Department
of Anthropology
University
of California, Berkeley
(Estados
Unidos/India)
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