EMBODIED BELONGINGS SYMPOSIUM BRINGS CUTTING EDGE QUEER
RESEARCH TO CAMPUS
Dr. Emera Bridger Wilson
Associate Director
On October 5 and 6, the South Asia Center
welcomed scholars of gender and sexuality in
South Asia to discuss how the field
has shifted over time. To further complicate and explore the ways in which ideas
of gender and sexuality are embodied, we bookended the
symposium with artistic performances that examined the theme of queer
belonging.
On Thursday,
Vivek Shraya opened
the symposium with a discussion of her experiences with becoming and belonging
in Alberta, Canada and how her relationships with her family shaped her experience of being transgendered. She read from
a variety of her written
work, including excerpts
from Even this Page is White
and The Boy and the Bindi.
On Friday,
in her keynote address,
Gayatri Reddy, Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Illinois, Chicago, traced
the social, economic and political
currents that influenced her ground
breaking work, In Respect to Sex, and what has changed
in the 20 years since the book was published. She noted that the 1990s were a tumultuous
decade, with the liberalization of the economy,
the release of the Mandal commission, the rise of the Hindu right and, perhaps most importantly to gender and sexuality studies,
increased attention
by the State and non-governmental organizations on HIV/AIDS in India. These changes energized social movements
that created new sexual
subjectivities. In the 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS-related public health interventions led to the creation
of the behavioral category, Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) and the more indigenous term, kothi. However,
both terms subsumed
the category of hijra in
a way that was fraught with tension.
In the 2000s another linguistic shift occurred in which the term
“transgender” became increasingly common. “Much
like the MSM and kothi labels in the previous
decade, what seems to
have occurred in the 2000s was a consolidation and institutionalization of the category “transgender”...creating both an
overly bounded understanding of this category as well as a deepening
schism between transgendered, often or only
focusing on trans women, and MSM communities,” Reddy
pointed out.
Following Reddy’s remarks, three panels
focused on different aspects of the queer experience. The first, “On the
Cutting Edge,” featured four graduate students or recent graduates whose
research explored new territory in the field of Queer Studies, both in terms of
topic and method. The second panel, “Social Contours of Queer Belonging,”
examined the intersections of politics and law and queer belonging at the State
level. Finally, “Queering Art and Literature,” explored issues of belonging and
representation in the South Asian arts.
From each of these panels emerged wide-ranging but exciting
discussions on the future of queer studies in South Asia. Svati Shah, Associate
Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst, captured this well in her remarks,
stating, “One of the things that I feel, well, very moved by actually is that many of us have been involved with what we have been calling South Asian Gender and Sexuality
Studies for a long time.
But after today,
I have really seen that there could also something called South Asian
Queer and Trans Studies.” She called
on the audience to continue these conversations so that this new field could be
institutionalized in some way.
The event closed with a reading by Shyam
Selvadurai, a Toronto-based, Sri Lankan author, from his book, Funny Boy. Through his fiction as well
as his own personal story, Selvadurai explores what is means to develop a sense
of self-acceptance and feelings of belonging.