Redefining ‘safe bodies’: queering the shifting body politics during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Bodily safety during the post-covid ‘new normal’ is a fraught, but phantasmal notion, subject to manipulation by both institutional and non-institutional power structures. Looking at the Indian context, a queerer understanding of the pandemic is required at a time when bodily relations have been queered by numerous instances where new forms of non-economic social stratification are discernible. Bodies are getting targeted, otherized, and discriminated against in unpredictable ways while imagining and negotiating the modalities of the new norm. Medicalization of the everyday at this massive scale does not follow the biomedical logic but seeks to normalize heterogenous responses based on irrational fears perpetuating ableist myths about the normal body. Queer activism and praxis need to play an interventionist role in shaping policies cognizant of the new threats and challenges that are being faced by queer individuals in such a scenario. Queer identities need to be reconfigured for continued sustenance, support, and political relevance. The case of the Hijrah community in India is studied as an example where a new political language is needed for revamping their mode of protest in response to the shift in the current body politics.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• body politics
• new normal
• the everyday
• queering
• queer bodies
• Hijrah
• safety

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The highly contingent nature of ‘queerness’ is evident in Donald Hall’s observation: ‘there is no “queer theory” in the singular, only many different voices and sometimes overlapping, sometimes divergent perspectives that can loosely be called “queer theories”’ (Hall 2003, 5).

2 Owing to the extremely narrow and limiting definitions of ‘normal’ practices providing continuing credibility to the ‘charmed circle’ in contradistinction to the deviant ‘outer limits’ in Rubin’ schema, the need to otherize deviance can only be sustained through constantly fantasizing about the norm as what it is not rather than what it is. Encountering the excess in queerness, is therefore inevitable.

3 Without easily accessible government relief, sustenance and work, when migrant labourers were forced to defy the lockdown to try and return home, their bodies automatically became legal outcasts, trying to hide from the government even when it was trying to reemploy them (Kumar 2020; Anuja 2020).

4 As P. Sainath quotes Chunni Lal Jatav:

“All the judges of the Supreme Court do not have the power of a single police constable. That constable makes or breaks us. The judges can't re-write the laws and have to listen to learned lawyers of both sides. A constable here simply makes his own laws. He can do almost anything”. With state and society winking at him, he pretty much can. (Sainath 2005)

Indeed, many cases were registered where heckling by police officers became a routine affair that no court of law intervened to check.

5 In the early days of a national lockdown in India, a section of the population in Kolkata flouted the state’s order to stay home, and flocked together, as has been their age-old custom, around a tea-stall opened surreptitiously. A video footage of that scene went viral. Along with it, ‘Cha khabona amra (Won’t we drink tea?)?’ asked innocently by one of the gatherers, immediately became a by-word among the educated middle-class for a typical instance of ‘Covidiocy’, while the daily wage-earning labourer who had uttered it (by now a well-known face, thanks to the innumerable memes flooding the social media), went on suffering from lack on employment and extreme poverty during the lockdown.

6 This has come to pass for a number of reasons. For one, covid by now has infiltrated almost every household. Second, the contagion has reached such an advanced stage, it is being assumed that one would test positive irrespective of whether symptoms are present or not.

7 Wearing masks, though, has merely become a legal and ethical formality. It is rather common to see masks merely dangling from one’s face, leaving the mouth and nose uncovered.

8 If we take into account direct politico-religious motivations behind blatantly flouting safety norms, election campaigns of right-wing leaders like Trump/Modi, the holy gathering in Kumbh Mela, or the Durga Puja in Kolkata (2021), all can be cases in point where fear of the pandemic had no visible effect whatsoever in denting the zealous participation from masses and politicians alike.

9 Conspiration theories blaming China for having used the virus as its lab-manufactured biological weapon put all Asians across the world at a risk with numerous incidents being reported world-wide where they were randomly targeted by extremists.

10 So poor is the medical infrastructure in many of such ‘villages’, getting tested for the virus is impractical even for those who are willing to do so. As a result, statistical data will automatically be misleading. Covid is affecting and killing people in villages and cities alike, but deep-seated misconceptions and fallacies still persist.

11 As the ‘previously stable ordering divisions of Life and Nonlife shake’ (2016, 5) Povinelli finds Foucault’s concept of biopower lacking in terms identifying tactics that surpass the operative logic of life and death, preferring the tern ‘geontological power’ instead to account for the relatively new subtler power structures at work.

12 The Modi government in India kept pressurizing Bharat Biotech to coincide the official release of the government’s flagship Covaxin with India’s 73rd Independence Day, 15th August 2020, leading it to release the vaccine without official data from Phase III trials.

13 For allegations of such a nature to make any change, involved officials need to come out and make their testimonies public. But as is only to be expected in a climate of fear and censorship, these allegations were floated around in the air more in the form of hearsay than official complaint. From a more personal point of view, I’ve heard about a case where the father of one acquaintance of mine suffered massive strokes after taking each dose of the Covishield vaccine. Being a doctor himself, he fortunately avoided any fatal consequences, but the doctors, convinced that his symptoms were clearly vaccine side-effects, still refused to diagnose his symptoms as such, fearing an unofficial embargo on doing so. Such a state policy not just exposes the unsuspecting populace to unknown threats, but tampers crucial statistical data necessary for further developing the vaccines.

14 Donna Haraway describes a technocratic world as one where it is the general consensus that for every problem there exists a solution made possible by technological advancement. She calls such technical solutions ‘technofix’ (Haraway 2016, 3)

15 Business models using the tagline ‘we are 100% vaccinated’ obviously mandates a discriminatory body image to repackage safety for prospective customers and staffs alike.

16 A story about the stoppage of hormone therapy (Bana et al. 2020) was covered by Varta’s initiative of ‘Coronavirus Diary: queer citizen journalism in action’.

17 The Transgender Act, 2019, while recognizing the ‘third gender’ as a legitimate identity category, it drew severe criticism from the queer community in India for brashly denying a prospective queer person the possibility of self-identifying as ‘third gender’.

18 This Bengali phrase has now gathered connotations of a certain middle-class gentility that is extremely Victorian in its moral codes and sanitized cultural sensibilities.

19 Not so surprisingly, even the authors of a book that has received wide popular acclaim as almost a text book of sorts on the Hijrah community, routinely overlooks the possible political import behind verbal and physical offences indulged in by some members of the community. Firmly distancing themselves from such ‘obscenity’ with a disapproving discomfort, authors Ajay Mazumder and Niloy Basu frequently talk of Hijrahs with a patronizing attitude as ‘diseased’ (2011, 33).

20 The question of holy/impure is a fraught issue vis-à-vis the Hijrah’s touch. While the Hijrah’s curse can be an extremely ill omen for fertility (the reason why heterosexual married women are targeted more), their blessing is seen as auspicious for the newborn. On the one hand they are revered as demigods in Hinduism, while on the other, their bodies are barred entry inside temples. This ambivalence is essentially monetized by the Hijrah community, although, elements of harassment, assault and persecution are enduring problems for them.

21 Government relief for covid-19 towards the Hijrah community in India has been meagre: something to the tune of INR 1500/month per person.

22 The much-discussed digital divide adversely affects sex workers too if they are unable to learn, adapt and negotiate with the mores of the digital sex trade industry. Interestingly, we should also consider what happens to the conventions of cybersex in cases of imperfect digital literacy; does someone with imperfect knowledge of the conventions create niche markets for expressing desires that are non-normative? Can queering of desires occur due to gaps in knowing virtual sex industry norms?

23 Reviewing Prasanna Mohanty's An Unkept Promise: What Derailed the Indian Economy (2022), Joe Athialy for The Wire quotes a former union finance minister's humorous description of the National Democratic Alliance government as 'No Data Available' government in the Parliament, calling it out for its failure to collect adequate data related to covid-induced anomalies such as the oxygen shortage deaths, the dead bodies in the river, the number of migrants who walked back home, etc. (The Wire). The way forward must lay stress on proper data collection and official accountability.

24 I want to thank Dr Kaustav Bakshi and Dr Paromita Chakravarti for shaping my ideas through their talks on queer lives in India during the covid-19 pandemic. Inputs from the issue editor and the reviewers greatly aided me in re-structuring my ideas in a more coherent fashion. I am also indebted to my friend and colleague Ms. Medhashri Mahanty for her feedback and suggestions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dhriti Shankar

Dhriti Shankar is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. His primary focus on literature and cultural studies employs a hybrid methodology, bringing together Urban Studies, Body Studies, Feminism, Queer Theory, Postcolonial literatures, and Animal Studies. His article examining the fin de siècle medical and sexual subjectivities was published in the journal Jadavpur University Essays and Studies. He is currently working on rhythmanalysis in the context of urbanization.