Queer Politics in Times of New Authoritarianisms

ABSTRACT

Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms in the last two decades have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. This introduction examines how different states, laws and communities have engaged with queer rights discourse with a range of outcomes. It argues that despite a spate of recent progressive legislations, there is no direct correlation between LGBTQI+ rights and liberal governance in South Asia. Framing contributions that take up different iterations of queer rights and authoritarianism in South Asia and its diaspora, the article outlines how LGBTQI+ actors’ negotiation of authoritarian regimes has produced fragile coalitions and new transnational formations.

KEYWORDS:

• South Asia
• queer rights
• authoritarianism
• diaspora
• gay rights
• transnational
• Article 377

Queerness remains a central fault line in contemporary South Asia. Colonial-era ‘anti-sodomy’ laws, codified in Article 377 of the penal codes in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, or Article 365 in Sri Lanka, exemplify the shared imperial lineages of the region as also their long postcolonial afterlives.

The Government of India’s submission to the 2023 Supreme Court consideration of equality for same-sex marriages branded the ask as a ‘mere urban elitist view’ (April 17). In some ways, it comes as no surprise that a government increasingly invested in the literal and figurative conservation and reconstitution of a Hindu national imaginary should confine the imaginary scope of a global human rights movement to an ‘urban elite’.

Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. New authoritarianism refers to the current socio-political crisis, which has seen great levels of enforcement and surveillance brought about by government regimes, big technology and the pandemic. New media technologies have increasingly connected diasporic space with mainland South Asia, globalising queer networks. Yet, these trajectories are necessarily discontinuous.

Given the tight intertwining of state with law, a major focus of queer activism in the last two decades has been around decriminalising homosexuality. Nepal was the first to decriminalise homosexuality in 2007. India’s decriminalisation in 2018 created a larger template for queer rights in the region. Significant activity in recognising trans-rights and identities has followed in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh and Bhutan in the last decade, and this has come through a blend of NGO-led constitutional litigations and strong grassroots activism. These developments are not without serious criticism, however. NAZ Foundation’s use of the ‘right to privacy’ argument in India to decriminalise homosexuality has been shown to be elitist both in its presumptions and preoccupations (Rajaram; Sheikh). Yet, despite limitations, the legalising of homosexuality has avowed and affirmed entirely new contingents living in rural and provincial South Asia, outside of the usual urban-metropolitan circuits (India Today; Mint). Their legal inclusion and partial affirmation (except in Afghanistan currently under Taliban rule) have created new possibilities for otherwise marginal subjects to enter and invest in the lives of nations. The earlier queer critique of state as an irredeemably heteronormative institution has given way to fragile incorporation and provisional collaboration. This story is hardly uniform and certainly not linear. Threats and deaths very much constitute the everyday experience of queer people. In Bangladesh, for instance, Islamists murdered queer activists Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Tonoy (Reuters). In many instances, same-sex couples sought and occasionally found the relative safety in western countries. Diasporic routes are, however, not always open, given ever-tightening border controls around immigration and asylum regimes. The institutionalisation of queer asylum in global humanitarian protocols underlines sharp asymmetries LGBTQI+ communities face in much of South Asia, especially where homosexuality is legally forbidden. Nonetheless, a range of queer subcultures have flourished even in the most restrictive of social spaces, visible in the proliferation of digital and physical communities, such as those formed around queer Muslim or queer Dalit identities (Dasgupta and Dasgupta; Dasgupta and Mahn; Meghani; Puar; Gopinath; Hossain; Brown and Borisa).

Citizenship to draw on Balibar’s (‘Antinomies of Citizenship’ 2) work conceives it as a ‘problem, a stake, an enigma, an invention’. The boundaries of citizenship, as Balibar argues, far from having defined attributes, is one conceptualised through struggle and constant renewal. Queer visibility and popular culture is also not without its problems. As Gayatri Gopinath (Unruly Visions) articulates, reliance on the politics of visibility and authenticity can run the risk of replicating the very terms through which liberal citizenship is constructed. Writing about the controversy surrounding the film Fire (1998), Jigna Desai (2002) rightly points out that BJP and other Hindutva groups in India have been actively sexualising art, film and images in order to condemn them and by the process, make cultural production a site of political struggle. As we have seen in recent years, this has turned into a ‘war on woke’ that has particularly targeted queer and trans people, people of colour and the working class. We are in agreement with Khubchandani (Ishtyle 23) that ‘South Asian LGBT activism is a distinctly transnational formation made through intimate connections, as well as violent ruptures that engender displacement’. This harks to what artist Sunil Gupta so poignantly calls sexual exiles. Circling back to Desai (‘Homo on the Range’) we too note that queerness and queer rights are complex and contradictory.

There is no linear relation between LGBTQI+ rights and liberal governance in South Asia. Unlike in the West, where these gains had been secured largely under liberal regimes, much of these developments in South Asia have occurred in times of strident authoritarianism and political polarisation. If greater recognition of queer rights and identities has come with a general dilution of human rights, what does this tell us about the state of both queer politics and new conservatisms? Ponni Arasu and Sarala Emmanuel’s intervention in this journal grapples with these contradictions, especially how incremental frameworks of queer liberation tend to focus on ‘single’-issue agendas disjointed from wider struggles for life and livelihood.

AIDS has brought greater funding and global focus on South Asia since the 1990s, with enduring effects on forms of governance for different queer demographics. On the one hand, it has ushered in a somewhat competitive world of NGO-led queer discourse that has plugged serious gaps in public health and outreach among fragile groups such as hijras and sex workers (Vijayakumar). On the other, it has inaugurated a tense approximation of regional queer identities with global LGBTQI+ categories. This transnational traffic, especially between the urban metropoles of South Asia and Anglophone Global North, has been the source of some of the most fertile and fraught solidarity work given the repertoire of queer rights consolidated in earlier decades. Others, however, have warned against the imperialist tendencies in such work (qtd. in Gopinath 160). Greater integration within networks of global funding, charity and human rights has produced opportunities for a range of South Asian queer publics and politics. New media have connected important strands of queer politics and performances in both South Asia and its diasporas, especially those in the West. This has been closely tied to processes of economic liberalisation that has fuelled an exponential growth of educated and aspiring middle classes in the region. In India, for instance, this has brought greater transnational mobility, capital accumulation and consumerism that have prodded its transition from a developmentalist state to a consumerist nation (Philip).

If some of the most fertile and fraught solidarity work has been produced in queer transnational encounters, do we need to worry about the potential for fertile connections between new forms of transphobic and homophobic discourse in right-wing populisms? The Republican Party in the US is producing a series of bills directly targeting gender-affirming care and basic LGBTQI+ rights (e.g. around the use of bathrooms). A ‘moral panic’, fuelled by religious undertones, is part of a calculated assault on the progress of queer civil rights ahead of the 2024 election. In Scotland, the demise of the First Minister in 2023 was partly attributed to her work to simplify the access to legal gender recognition certificates. Queer rights have become regular election fodder, with trans, working class and queer of colour communities paying the price for populist policies.

States’ shifting dynamics with queer subjects are important. Where partial legal gains in queer rights have been made, there is now a decided push to become respectable citizen-subjects contributing to the productive life of the nation. In figures like the trans-activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi and gay rights advocates Ashok Row Kavi, Abhijit Iyer Mitra and Harish Iyer in India, we already see forms of queerness adapted to Hindu majoritarian caste and cultural values. That these forms are emerging at a time of steady erosion of overall minority rights (e.g. for Muslims in India; Tamil Hindus and Muslims in Sri Lanka) raises important questions on the future of queer politics in a region witnessing sweeping right-wing populisms.

South Asian diasporas present equally complicated linkages between sexual rights and authoritarian politics, mediated by hierarchies of race, sexuality and migration. Some have usefully warned against overreading diasporic productions through the lens of mainland South Asia, especially in contexts such as the Caribbean where South Asians arrived first as indentured labour in European sugar plantations over a century ago (Mohabeer and Wahab 146). Yet, as Krystal Ghisyawan has shown, recent mobilisations by the Hindu organisation Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha in Trinidad and Tobago evidence clear networks with mainstream Hindu organisations in contemporary India (Ghisyawan 162).

The Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, along with other conservative Hindu, Muslim and Christian groups, have emerged as bitter opponents of queer rights in the Caribbean region. They have pointed to the incongruence of such rights to family values and religious traditions (Ghisyawan 148). As of 2022, 11 Caribbean states criminalise same-sex relations (‘LGBT+ rights and issues in the Caribbean’). While many of these laws have colonial-era origins, they are not the only reason for their continued appeal and authority. Laws remain a key site for competing claims both for and against queer rights. As the very recent criminalisation of homosexuality in Uganda shows, the correlation between social, political and religious conservatism and antagonism to LGBTQI+ rights has clear resonance in many African and Asian states. If forms of conservative religion have rallied against queer rights and sexual freedom in South Asian diasporic communities, deep socioeconomic divisions have also intensified racial hierarchies. Within middle-class gay circuits of Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore and Thailand, South Asians occupy an inferior racial-cultural status as partners (Kang 194). That queer geographies of desire frequently map onto geopolitical heft and economic power is no coincidence.

Taking our definition of popular culture from Hebdige (‘Hiding in the Light’ 47) as ‘a set of generally available artefacts: films, records, clothes, TV programmes, modes of transport, etc’ in this special issue of South Asian Popular Culture, we go further to not just include other artefacts such as zines, web series and public art but also social processes such as shifts in perspectives and the meaning and interpretation of everyday realities. In the last two decades, whilst we have seen an explosion of LGBTQI+ visibility most notably in South Asian film, television and new media, this visibility has come with mainstream ideological agendas that do not especially represent the diversity of queer lives in South Asia along key identities of caste, class, religion and region (Dasgupta; Dasgupta and Datta). We rather propose a queering of popular culture – a way of questioning dominant power knowledge formations that construct normative ideas of neoliberalism and regimes of truth. Queering popular culture provides a way of interrogating the nexus of cultural production and representation politics within the wider contexts of capital production and consumption.

Ghisyawan’s working note examines the vandalisation of ‘Home Is Where We Make It’, a mural designed by Amrisa Niranjan, an Indo-Guyanese artist and installed in New Jersey. Incorporating an interview with the artist, the article considers how a mural designed to speak to histories of refuge and migration in Highland Park came to be accused of being exclusionary and non-American. Ghisyawan approaches ‘queerness’ through bodies and identities which continue to challenge normative constellations of national and ethnic belonging. By ‘queering’ the flattened dimensions of South Asian representation in regional and national US politics (as directly aligned with South Asia and a trigger for Islamophobia), the working note delineates the complexities of gendered belonging for Indo-Caribbeans.

Wijewardene examines the Anglophone play, The One Who Loves You So (2019), in dialogue with the criminalisation of same-sex sexual acts (historically codified as ‘sodomy’ but operationalised with a broader set of sexual criteria). The article opens up questions about the use-value of particular representations to open up sophisticated and nuanced disentanglements between historical colonial legal practice and its role and practice in the modern state.

Sandhya V’s article addresses Udalaazham (Body Deep), a 2018 Malayalam film that sequences tribal and transgendered belonging in the nation. Sandhya questions the usefulness in reading films like Udalaazham in the context of more ‘mainstream’ frameworks for depicting transgender subjects and lives. The dissonance between English-language terms and specific South Asian histories of gender diversity is more than a site of linguistic friction, it questions the limits of how ‘local’ histories and realities of gender diversity become sub-categorised and rendered legible under global regimes dominated by the Global North.

Horton’s examination of zines produced in Mumbai in the 1990s–2000s draws on the concepts of ‘queer sociality’, and Horton traces an alternative archive for queer and trans life in South Asia that moves through the shared space, touch and networks of queer ephemera. As a portmanteau form predicated on an assembly of disconnected snippets and snapshots, Horton draws on the power of this ‘masala content’ to curate affective communities drawn together on the page through gossip and performance.

Dasgupta and Arnapal explore the crime thriller web series Pataal Lok to question issues of racialisation and queer politics and the politics of representation of ‘Northeast’ India. Their article discusses the various sexualised tropes of queer femininity and how that is projected onto this region, which is also one of the most militarised in India. They also discuss how the popular cultures of this region gesture towards a transregional flow of Korean TV culture between South Korea, China and Northeast India, offering alternative circuits of resisting authoritarian politics.

The final working note by Alim is an exploration of Instagram representation of Trans and Hijra identities in Bangladesh. Alim discusses the potential of platforms such as Instagram in community making, organising and self-representation of trans and other queer communities in Bangladesh. Alim takes a creative approach to discuss the affordance of these platforms to engender conversations around advocacy, representation and critique international NGO development agendas through the visual medium.

Geographically, we were unable to cover equally the diversity of queer cultures across all South Asian regions and its diasporas. But we believe that this special issue will encourage further critical thinking by suggesting ways in which we disentangle notions of culture, neoliberalism, nationalism and queerness in the context of new authoritarianisms. We are aware that a single issue approach to identity politics is bound to fail and will not adequately take into account structures of homophobia, racism or casteism (Mahn). The articles in this special issue take up these questions and offer critical imaginings of sexual politics and its imbrication with popular culture and authoritarian politics within contemporary South Asia and its diasporas.

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to acknowledge the British Academy (Grant reference: IC4/100117) for bringing the editors together as part of the Cross Borders Queer project.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Somak Biswas

Somak Biswas is Honorary Research Fellow at the Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick. A historian of South Asia, Britain and empire, he works on themes of race, sexuality and migration. His most recent publication is Passages Through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia (Cambridge University Press, June 2023).

Rohit K. Dasgupta

Rohit Dasgupta is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Industries and Convenor for the MSc in Creative Industries and Cultural Policy. His work cuts across several disciplines with particular interests in South Asia, communication and social change, cultural industries, Indian cinema, digital culture, queer identities and politics. He is the author of several monographs including Digital Queer Cultures in India (Routledge 2017).

Churnjeet Mahn

Churnjeet Mahn is a Professor in English Literature at the University of Strathclyde. Churnjeet’s research and activism primarily focuses on experiences of racism and homophobia in accounts of travel and displacement. She has recently co-edited Queer Sharing in the Marketized University (Routledge 2022) and Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education (Bloomsbury 2023) with Matt Brim and Yvette Taylor.