Embodied Belongings: Exploring the
Politics of ‘Queer’ in South Asia
Schedule
Thursday, October 5
500 Hall of Languages
7 pm Vivek Shraya Performance
Multidisciplinary South Asian artist Vivek Shraya will show and discuss a range of her work -- literature, song and film -- to highlight the complex relationship between belonging and the body itself. Her work consistently tackles what it means to belong (and not belong) in relation to family, religion, community spaces, queerness and transness.
Friday, October 6
500 Hall of Languages
8:45-9:00 Coffee/light breakfast
9:00-9:15 Welcome and Introductions by Carol Babiracki, Director of the Syracuse University South Asia Center
9:15-10:30 Keynote Address
Gayatri Reddy (University of Illinois, Chicago), "With Respect to Sex, Revisited"
Lucinda Ramberg (Cornell), Discussant
10:30-10:45 Coffee Break
10:45-12:30 Graduate Panel:
On the Cutting Edge
Susan S. Wadley (Syracuse), Chair
Shakthi Nataraj (UC Berkeley), “A good laugh, and a life cut
short: “Koti” as a space of memory, poignancy and ethical crossroads”
Uzma Zafar (University of Virginia), "Spirals
of Self: Gender, Vision and Autoethnography in South Asia"
Sreyoshi Dey (Syracuse), “Exploring
the role of social media groups among the LGBTQ community in India"
Jayaprakash
Mishra (IIT Hyderabad)
, "Understanding
Desire, Marriage and Family: A Qualitative Study of Gay Men in Odisha, India"
Kwame Otu (University of Virginia), Discussant
12:30-1:30 Lunch
1:30-3:15 Social Contours of Queer
Belonging
Ann G. Gold (Syracuse), Chair
Jyoti Puri (Simmons College), “Juxtaposing ‘Antipolice’ Rhetorics:
Policing, Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Southern Contexts”
Faris Khan (SUNY Potsdam), “Khwaja sira Activists, the State, and Sex/Gender
Regulation in Pakistan”
Svati Shah (UMass Amherst), “Gender Identity, Sexuality and Sedition in
India: Queer and Transgender Politics in 'Anti-National' Times”
Himika Bhattacharya (Syracuse), Discussant
3:15-3:30 Coffee Break
3:30-5:00 Queering Art and Literature
Geraldine Forbes (SUNY Oswego), Chair
Kareem
Khubchandani (Tufts), “Un-koothu dance: choreographing region, class, and caste at Koothnytz”
Nisha
Kommattam (University of Chicago), "
Literature, still:
Textualities of belonging in South India and beyond"
Natasha Bissonauth (Haverford College), “Sunil Gupta's Sun City: An
Exercise in Camping Orientalism”
Durba Ghosh (Cornell University), Discussant
5:00-5:30 Discussion
5:30-6:15 Reception
6:30 Reading by Shyam Selvadurai
Shakthi Nataraj (UC Berkeley), “A good laugh, and a life cut
short: “Koti” as a space of memory, poignancy and ethical crossroads”
Koti is a pan-Indian term
referring to a male-born person that identifies as female or gender-fluid
without electing to undergo surgical transition. It has often been translated
by HIV/AIDS prevention discourses as
“Men who have Sex with Men” (MSM), and anthropologists have rightly
criticized this gesture as a category mistake and a reduction of people’s
sexual identity. Yet I want to suggest that sexual identity might not be what
is at stake when using the term koti. Analying a koti-authored short story as
it was debated by a reading group of koti-identified HIV/AIDS activists, I show
that as the texts unfolded in real-time, koti came alive between us in the room
as a sign with radically indeterminate meanings and affects. In the discussions
that followed, it was not necessarily sexual identity that was at stake, but
disparate concerns ranging from nostalgia for the early days of HIV/AIDS organizing,
to the changing economy of Chennai in the context of neoliberalism. I argue
that instead of treating sexual identity as our object of analysis, and
informants’ narratives as testimony, figures such as koti condense thick,
long-reaching histories that congeal and dissipate in volatile and
unpredictable ways. Return to Top
Sreyoshi Dey (Syracuse), “Exploring
the role of social media groups among the LGBTQ community in India"
India
has emerged as one of the top consumers of the World Wide Web, despite the lack
of access both geographically and economically. At the same time, the country has
also been witnessing a wave of change as conversations surrounding
non-normative gender and sexuality is on the rise. This mixed methods research
endeavors to explore the possibility that communication over social networking
sites holds for the queer community of India, particularly in terms of identity
construction.
Jayaprakash
Mishra (IIT Hyderabad)
, "Understanding
Desire, Marriage and Family: A Qualitative Study of Gay Men in Odisha, India"
Drawing
on interviews of thirty-two gay men in Odisha, India, this paper seeks to
examine their experiences of negotiation with the institution of marriage and
family. It will foreground the experiences of married and unmarried gay men
struggling to navigate between their sexual orientation and social institutions
that compel them to adhere to heterosexual conformity. This paper will also
locate homo-romantic experiences in their lives which have been overtly
sexualized in the public discourses produced by hetero-normative society.
Jyoti Puri (Simmons College), “Juxtaposing ‘Antipolice’ Rhetorics:
Policing, Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Southern Contexts”
Foregrounding constabularies’ accusations that Hijras in
Delhi are “antipolice,” this presentation explores similar police claims about
African American communities in Ferguson. Using juxtaposition in place of
comparative approaches, the presentation examines what police narratives reveal
about the regulation of subaltern communities in the global South. It shows how
each case usefully supplements the other, deepening analyses of the sexualized,
racialized, gendered, and affective ways in which law and its limits are
continually produced through policing. Return to Top
Faris Khan (SUNY Potsdam), “Khwaja sira Activists, the State, and Sex/Gender
Regulation in Pakistan”
Between 2009-12, the
Pakistani Supreme Court granted rights to a category of gender non-conforming
and sexually non-normative citizens now commonly known as the khwaja sira. The activities surrounding
the Court’s deliberations highlight the term’s complicated journey of being
institutionalized for legal and regulatory purposes. By focusing on the
appropriation of “khwaja sira” in activist and state domains, this paper
considers the role of various social actors in the production and perpetuation
of ambiguity. Return to Top
Svati Shah (UMass Amherst), “Gender Identity, Sexuality and Sedition in
India: Queer and Transgender Politics in 'Anti-National' Times”
As the
charge of ‘anti-nationalism’ is deployed against any form of dissent in a
number of national contexts, the right to exist as a gay, lesbian, queer and/or
transgender citizen has gained normative currency. This talk reviews the
tensions between the rise of the charge of ‘anti-nationalism’ in India, especially
with respect to any form of dissent against the state’s efforts to occupy or
acquire land, alongside the heightened visibility of LGBTQ people and politics
throughout the country. Rendering the recent history of these two discourses
together, both of which have been the subject of intense public debate, the
talk attempts less to argue that they are mutual constitutive than to suggest
that rendering them within the same analytic frame reveals, again, the ways in
which the stakes of sexuality and gender politics have constituted questions of
nation and of dissent. Return to Top
Kareem
Khubchandani (Tufts), “Un-koothu
dance: choreographing region, class, and caste at Koothnytz”
The sporadic queer party “Koothnytz” in Bangalore invites
patrons to “lose your couth,” to refuse respectability by dancing to dappankoothu, a style associated with
dalit communities. Tracing the itineraries of dappankoothu from dalit public performance, to Tamil film, to
nightclubs, I argue that Koothnytz provides an important expression of regional
queer sexuality that is otherwise policed in Bangalore’s bar spaces.
Alternatively, I show how pleasure is based on the absence of dalit communities
that originate the form.
Nisha
Kommattam (University of Chicago), "
Literature, still:
Textualities of belonging in South India and beyond"
This paper examines the
continued, if contested, importance of literary texts in expressing modes of
queerness and (fragmented) belonging today. Drawing on the recent work of
writers in English, Malayalam, and Tamil, I interrogate the form and function
of literary representations of Other-ness. Although from diverse literary
economies, texts such as Arundhati Roy’s new novel The Ministry of Utmost
Happiness (2017) and the provocative poetry of Leena Manimekalai and Anitha
Thambi, are interconnected in their depiction of transgressive embodiments that
are rooted in the local and particular. I suggest that the questions of
becoming and belonging articulated by and within these texts illuminate the
political power that literature can still hold today.
Natasha Bissonauth (Haverford College), “Sunil Gupta's Sun City: An
Exercise in Camping Orientalism”
Through camp posturing and
Technicolor, London-based photographer, Sunil Gupta’s most recent photo series,
Sun City (2010), narrates a gay Indian immigrant character’s hedonistic
sauntering through a Parisian bathhouse. Upon defining “camping orientalism” I
analyze Sun City’s 2010 reception in
Paris and connect the series to a tradition of orientalist homoerotic imagery.
Ultimately, I argue that while the Sun
Citys celebration of sexual freedom is vibrant, the series’ reception has
been more hesitant to consider the racial codedness of that “freedom.” Return to Top