Books Gender And Sexuality

Rooms to Sleep In

The complexities of contemporary queer politics

31 August 2021
Imtiyaj and Ravsaheb near the fields at the Krishna River, southern Maharashtra in 2018. In Indian culture, there tends to be a good deal of homosocial bonding that often serves as an alibi for desire. In this context, homophobia does not necessarily, as Rahul Rao says, “presume the existence of something called homosexuality, to which it is antithetical.”
MARC OHREM LECLEF/FROM THE SERIES “ZAMEEN ASMAAN KA FARQ”—AS FAR APART AS THE EARTH IS FROM THE SKY
Imtiyaj and Ravsaheb near the fields at the Krishna River, southern Maharashtra in 2018. In Indian culture, there tends to be a good deal of homosocial bonding that often serves as an alibi for desire. In this context, homophobia does not necessarily, as Rahul Rao says, “presume the existence of something called homosexuality, to which it is antithetical.”
MARC OHREM LECLEF/FROM THE SERIES “ZAMEEN ASMAAN KA FARQ”—AS FAR APART AS THE EARTH IS FROM THE SKY

SHORTLY AFTER THE Supreme Court read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in September 2018, I said in a talk that I was better off when Section 377 was in existence. What I meant by this was that I preferred to continue to be a resisting subject in some sense rather than be co-opted by the state, which now saw me as a citizen with locus standi. I recalled this sentiment while reading a recent book by the academic Rahul Rao, titled Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. One of the questions the book poses at the very beginning is articulated by the scholar Jasbir Puar: “What happens after certain liberal rights are bestowed, certain thresholds of parameters of success are claimed to have been reached. What happens when ‘we’ get what ‘we’ want?”

Rao’s book is not as interested in examining this question at length since he writes, “Rather than offering critique in the smug afterlife of victory, I am interested in critique in contexts in which people cannot not want things that they do not have.” Nonetheless, his book poses a useful starting point for considering how responses to Puar’s question might play out in India today. Out of Time’s critique of certain tendencies when it comes to contemporary queer politics could provide a valuable framework for a reading of a very different recent book: Queeristan, a work slanted more towards the political Right. Read together, the books throw up questions regarding how queer individuals position themselves within the nation today.

Out of Time examines the political aftermath of various nations’ struggles with the decriminalisation of queer sex and focusses in particular on Uganda and India, both of which inherited certain anti-queer laws from British colonisation. It examines histories of queerness against those of imperialism and anti-imperialism, paganism and Christianity, whiteness, embourgeoisement and caste. In Uganda, Rao says, he is identified as a “muyindi,” or an Indian, and at times even a “muzungu,” or foreigners who are thought of as being white. He acknowledges himself as “a postcolonial Indian citizen with a great deal of gender, caste, class and religious privilege,” but contrasts this with “the coloniality of my sexuality.”

R Raj Rao is a writer and professor, who has taught at universities in the USA, UK, Canada and Germany. He is the author of the novel The Boyfriend. His book Criminal Love? Queer Theory Culture and Politics in India won the Likho Award For Excellence in Media in 2018.

Keywords: Queer community queer rights LGBT LGBT community Indias transgender community transgender
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