Queer Politics In India Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects

Queer Politics in India simultaneously tells two interconnected stories. The first explores the struggle against violence and marginalization by queer people in the Indian subcontinent, and places this movement towards equality and inclusion in relation to queer movements across the world. The second story, about a lesbian suicide in a small village in India, interrupts the first one, and together, these two stories push and pull the book to elucidate the failure and promise of queer politics, in India and the rest of the world. This book emerges at a critical time for queer politics and activism in India, exploring the contemporary queer subject through the different lenses of critical psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, and cultural studies in its critique of the constructions of discourses of ‘normal’ sexuality. It also examines how power determines further segregations of ‘abnormal’ sexuality into legitimate and illegitimate queer subjectivities and authentic and inauthentic queer experiences. By allowing a multifaceted and engaged critique to emerge that demonstrates how the idea of a universal queer subject fails lower class, lower caste queer subjects, and queer people of colour, the author expertly highlights how all queer people are not the same, even within queer movements, as the book asks the questions, "which queer subject does queer politics fight for?", and, "what is the imagination of a queer subject in queer politics?" This hugely important and timely work is relevant across many disciplines, and will be useful for students of psychology and other academic areas, as well as researchers and activist organizations.

"Changing the Subject maps a rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual rights under conditions of global neoliberalism in India. Srila Roy shows how feminism is itself a form of power, a site of subject-making in its own right. Against concerns about the cooptation of feminism by neoliberalism, Roy provides a detailed ethnographic account of feminism's entanglement in technologies of power and the self. Roy traces the very different trajectories of two Calcutta-based feminist NGOs: Sappho for Equality (SFE), a grassroots queer feminist organization that shifted from a consciousness-raising group to a fully funded NGO by the time of Roy's fieldwork; and Janam, which emerged in the 1990s as a more clearly neoliberal organization focusing on empowerment and development technologies including microfinance. Despite their differences, Roy shows how both SFE and Janam are tied together with India's neoliberal economic restructuring. Further, she explores the ways contemporary "milliennial feminisms" and (queer) feminist activism-NGO-based or otherwise-are haunted by older modes of governing subaltern subjects in the Global South"--

This book with 27 articles is the first organised literary effort on the part of the gay community to assert itself in a world which still sees same-sex love as queer . The contributors to the anthology come from within the gay community, and hail from distant corners of the country.

Struggles for LGBT rights and the security of sexual and gender minorities are ongoing, urgent concerns across the world. For students, scholars, and activists who work on these and related issues, this handbook provides a unique, interdisciplinary resource. In chapters by both emerging and senior scholars, the Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics introduces key concepts in LGBT political studies and queer theory. Additionally, the handbook offers historical, geographic, and topical case studies contexualized within theoretical frameworks from the sociology of sexualities, critical race studies, postcolonialism, indigenous theories, social movement theory, and international relations theory. It provides readers with up-to-date empirical material and critical assessments of the analytical significance, commonalities, and differences of global LGBT politics. The forward-looking analysis of state practice, transnational networks, and historical context presents crucial perspectives and opens new avenues for debate, dialogue, and theory.

This volume explores existing and emerging sexual cultures of contemporary India and the predicaments faced by abjected and sexual marginalities. It traces the sexual politics within popular culture, literary genres, advertisement, consumerism, globalizing cities, social movements, law, scientific research, the Hijra community life, (alternative) families and kinship and sites that define the cultural other whose sexual practices or identities fall beyond normative moral conventions. The chapters examine a range of connected sociological and political issues including questions of agency, judgments around intimate sexual relationships, the role of the state, popular understandings of adolescent romance, notion of legitimacy and stigma, moral policing and resistance, body politics and marginality, representations in popular and folk culture, sexual violence and freedom, problems with historiography, structural inequalities, queer erotica, gay consumerism, Hijra suicides and marriage and divorce. The volume also proposes certain transformative possibilities towards envisioning and (re)scripting sexual equalities. This interdisciplinary book will be important for those interested in sexuality studies, queer studies, gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, law, history, literature and Global South studies as well as policymakers, civil society activists and nongovernmental organizations working in the area.

"Enticements: Queer Legal Studies is an interdisciplinary volume that provides an array of queer theoretic descriptions of and prescriptions for the legal regulation of sex, gender and sexuality"--

In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.

Sexuality in India offers an expression of nationalist anxieties and is a significant marker of modernity through which subjectivities are formed among the middle class. This book investigates the everyday experience of queer Indian men on digital spaces. It explores how queer identities are formed in virtual spaces and how the existence of such spaces challenge and critique ‘Indian’-ness. It also looks at the role of class and intimacy within the discourse. This work argues that new media, social networking sites (SNSs), both web and mobile, and related technologies do not exist in isolation; rather they are critically embedded within other social spaces. Similarly, online queer spaces exist parallel to and in conjunction with the larger queer movement in the country. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, especially men's and masculinity studies, queer and LGBT studies, media and cultural studies, particularly new media and digital culture, sexuality and identity, politics, sociology and social anthropology, and South Asian studies.