#Naisargi N. Dave

[likelyslumbering]

Tagged by @memelovinglesbian

I feel like I haven’t done one of these in years? Wow, the nostalgia, as it were.

favorite color: a very very specific blue green. No I cannot describe it better but I know it when I see it 👀.

top 3 ships: oh god we’re jumping right into the embarrassing questions aren’t we.

So, uhhh, Hannigram (Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham) from Hannibal is the first. I know!!! It sucks, Hannibal is a jerk, I am aware!! I am merely a humble idiot. Next, Villaneve (Eve and Villanelle) from Killing Eve. Don’t say it, I know I have a pattern going here and I am NOT interested in your thoughts thank u!! Daensa (Sansa and Daenerys) from Game of Thrones is my crack ship. I know they hate each other, I just think they’re both neat and would vibe together if the writers didn’t suck, okay.

lipstick or chapstick: CHAPSTICK!!! Gotta keep ur teeth guards Hydrated.

last song: uhhh Down in Flames by Semisonic, I believe

last movie: just watched Midnight Special (2016) w the fam! Big recommend from me. But if y’all are interested in a movie that’s not populated almost solely by white men, Annihilation (2018) was the film I watched before then, and it’s brilliant.

currently reading: for class I’m reading Queer Activism in India by Naisargi N. Dave, but recreationally I’m about to start the Handmaid’s Tale.

Tagging: uhhh @mr-cryptid , @morethanjustanexistentialcrisis (don’t think you’ve ever done one of these..... welcome to hell)

[leohsuns]

saturday to-do

tuesday queer studies readings ✔️

José Estaban Muñoz, "Introduction: Performing Disidentifications," and Chapter 7, "Performing Disidentity," in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics

Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Diasporic Deviants / Divas: How Filipino Gay Transmigrants ‘Play with the World,” in Queer Diasporas

create google site for queer studies final project

draft gender and sexuality in south asia research paper proposal

draft graduate seminar final paper bibliography 

place interlibrary loan requests as needed

tuesday gender and sexuality in south asia readings ✔️

Naisargi N. Dave, “To Render Real the Imagined: An Ethnographic History of Lesbian Community in India,” Signs

Geeta Patel, “On Fire: Sexuality and its Incitements,” in Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society

Sharada, “Farewell,” trans. Ruth Vanita, in Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History

[pyotra]

Naisargi N. Dave, “To Render Real the Imagined: An Ethnographic History of Lesbian Community in India”

Jagori’s stance against the National Federation of Indian Women and for the rights of lesbians and gays in India to be heard does not, however, indicate a simple divide between affiliated and autonomous women’s groups vis‐à‐vis the politics of queer sexuality. Autonomous women’s groups like Jagori had their own internal conflicts around lesbian politics and were no less constrained by the demands of their political field. In 1987 two female police officers from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, Urmila Srivastava and Leela Namdeo, married each other, were dismissed from their jobs, and were subjected to frenzied media attention. Jagori and other autonomous women’s groups in Delhi debated the case intensely and ultimately decided to publicly support the couple as ill‐treated women but not explicitly as lesbians. The refusal to name lesbianism was commonplace in 1987 but, as I will demonstrate below, was still a point of contention between self‐identified lesbians and their women’s movement allies. A founding member of Jagori, Abha, explained to me years later why she and a majority of Jagori activists chose silence over naming: “It has been my choice not to be public about myself. … Others may interpret it as ‘not taking political decisions,’ but it’s far more complicated than that. … It’s … helped me to critique the position of marriage … because nobody could simply write it off as ‘Oh, of course you’re critiquing it, you’re a lesbian!’ I didn’t want Jagori to get attacked and discredited. … Impacting 2,500 villages was far more important than entertaining the question, ‘Is Abha a lesbian?’”

Among the solutions offered for the dilemma between the centrality of lesbianism to the organization and the felt need to cloak that lesbianism was the advent of the phrase “single women” (ekal aurat) by a group of activists associated with Jagori. The category of single women was meant partly to provide a community framework for women‐loving women but through a language that refused the Western politics of lesbian identity out of deference to non‐English‐speaking women in urban slums (bastis) and villages. Several women in Delhi, mostly lesbian, met informally in one another’s homes from 1987 to 1993 under the auspices of single women’s nights.

In addition to this informal collective of “single women” in Delhi, another circle of same‐sex‐desiring women known as the Delhi Group was founded in 1989 (Fernandez 2002, 182). All were feminist activists, and all had a commitment to understanding the macropolitical dimensions of compulsory heterosexuality (Bacchetta 2002, 959). Where the members diverged from one another was on the question of the macropolitics and semantics of lesbian sexuality. Urban Indian feminists at this time were, as I have suggested, under pressure to show that their concerns were not Western and bourgeois but had local relevance to a powerful construct known as the Indian grass roots. As such, organizations like the Delhi Group collectively eschewed the lesbian signifier and spoke instead as simply “single women” or “women who love women.” It is valid to ask how an English phrase such as “women who love women” could be any more palatable to grassroots Indian women than the term “lesbian.” Indeed, this awkward commitment to euphemism tells us much more about the outward projection of Indian feminism’s anxieties at the dawn of neoliberalism than it does about the linguistic and emotional capacities of the “real” Indian woman.

[pyotra]

Naisargi N. Dave, “To Render Real the Imagined: An Ethnographic History of Lesbian Community in India”

Lesbian activism in India, like lesbian activisms the world over, grew both out of and against the norms of the women’s movement that presaged it.6 It was through the heady struggles of feminist work that many same‐sex‐desiring women came to know of one another (see Shah 2005, 143–44; Sharma 2006, 8), and it was the language of women’s rights and autonomy that provided the structure within which to make political sense of this form of desire. And yet, these gifts of possibility—physical and discursive—came with a cost. As activists loyal to their larger movement, same‐sex‐desiring feminists in India have borne an uneasy task: to forge an affective community of women based on the commonality of their desires while being careful not to imperil Indian feminism with the Western, bourgeois taint of “lesbianism.” Such cultural caution has been seen as necessary given that feminism and organized women’s movements have themselves been dismissed by Indian nationalists as Western imports that undermine national unity (Kumar 1993, 87–88). Thus, women’s groups have historically distanced themselves from lesbian politics (Menon 2005, 39) in order to defend a hard‐fought image of being in step with national concerns.

Politically affiliated women’s groups in India—wings of, usually, communist parties—have been largely antagonistic toward lesbian and gay politics because of the anti‐West and pro–grass roots rhetoric of their larger organizations. For example, Vimla Farooqi, then vice president of the National Federation of Indian Women, the women’s front of the Communist Party of India, wrote in 1994 to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, urging him to cancel permission for a South Asian gay conference that was to take place in Bombay (John and Nair 1998, 34–35). Farooqi argued that the conference was symptomatic of “sexual permissiveness,” a cultural decay wrought by neoliberal policies, “an invasion of India by decadent western cultures and a direct fall‐out of signing the [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]” in early 1994 (Pioneer 1994). A politically autonomous women’s group called Jagori, founded in Delhi in 1983, responded aggressively to Farooqi’s comments in a letter addressed to allied women’s groups. Jagori pointedly acknowledged that “a large section of the women’s movement will give silent assent to the intolerance expressed by Ms. Faroqui [sic],” particularly based on the “dismissal of homosexuality as ‘western.’” Jagori reminds such allies that “for a long time, feminism … was seen as a product of western culture and inappropriate within the context of India.” Farooqi’s vitriol also gave Jagori an opening to express long‐simmering frustration with the perceived economic determinism of left‐affiliated women’s groups: “The ideologues of the left political formations need to acknowledge that class is not the only discriminatory factor in people’s lives.”