Sayan Bhattacharya

Legalizing Sex joins an ever-expanding body of literature on the gender and sexuality rights movements of South Asia and their contested negotiations with the nation-state. Deploying participant observation and in-depth interviews with policy makers, activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and community-based organizations (CBOs) across several Indian cities, conducted sporadically between 2007 and 2015, and discourse analysis of legal documents and activist literatures, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti demonstrates that HIV transformed the relationship between the Indian state and queer, transgender, and sex-worker communities, whom she refers to as "sexual minorities" in shorthand. This article was published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

In 2001 a group of gay men and kotis (one of several terms used in India for feminine persons assigned male at birth, who may or may not identify as transfeminine) wrote a play titled Koti ki atma (Soul of the Koti), about a koti who dies of AIDS and returns as a ghost to prevent other kotis from having unprotected sex. This article investigates the sociopolitical context in which the play was written, analyzes its plot, and, most importantly, follows the ghost to track the labors she performs. The author offers a glimpse into the histories of care and queer community-making that exceed the terror of death and state apathy in the wake of HIV in India.

ABSTRACT

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 26 September 2020, stated that India had introduced legal reforms to accord rights to transgender citizens. Even though there is not much material basis to these rights, transgender communities have been protesting against the state and at times negotiating with it to get laws that are more in alignment with their rights. In the wake of serialised deaths and precarity intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, transgender communities also stage other negotiations in the everyday with activists, transnationally funded NGOs and academics researching their communities, encounters that are not as spectacular as the protests against the state, but that which ensures their daily sustenance. This paper investigates how they inhabit these systemically violent institutions. Deploying ethnographic field notes from eastern India, this paper argues that they inhabit them subjunctively, which is not about refusing engagement with what is oppressive but about the ceaseless conjuring of improvisatory and contingent gestures that are marked by hope as well as uncertainty. The simultaneity of protests, rage, hopelessness, hope, negotiations, supplications and scepticism allow them to not only endure the violence of institutions but also to rupture them and imagine them otherwise.

Gayatri Gopinath's first book, Impossible Desires, published under the Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press, has become a foundational text in the fields of queer and feminist studies since its publication in 2005. In Impossible Desires, Gopinath problematized the masculinist and heteronormative foundations of studies of the diaspora and its relationship to the nation-state by eloquently demonstrating how these formations cohere around constructions of normative genders and sexualities. Carefully reading queer diasporic bodies and desires, Gopinath conjured not an idyllic homeland of origin frozen in time but multiple and shifting accounts of memory, homeland, exiles, and displacements that were at once an account of colonialism and racism as they were accounts of life making that often exceeded the strictures of heteronormativity.

In an essay titled “The Virtual Anthropologist,” written in 1997, Kath Weston highlights the hybrid position of the native ethnographer in academia. Although the hard labor of researching on the field is illuminated in the writing of the ethnographer, the writing itself does not account for the labor of composing those sentences. On the other hand, if the researcher is native, that is, her field is where her home is, then research itself does not count as labor.¹ If the queer studying queers is in a geographical location that she calls home, then she is automatically interpellated as the insider. She already has all the data. Hence, how is her fieldwork serious research? So, where does one locate the labors of the native ethnographer? In the writing or in the research? Weston writes provocatively, “. . . her work will remain suspect, subject to inspection on the grounds of authenticity rather than intellectual argument or acumen.”