Indian and lesbian and what came next: Affect, commensuration, and queer emergences

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate how a new social world of lesbian activists emerged in India around the text of a sign reading “Indian and Lesbian,” which was held aloft at a demonstration and then pictured in newspapers the following morning. I argue that the efficacy of this sign lay not in its commensuration of “Indian” and “lesbian” but, rather, in its introduction of an incommensurability that now had to be resolved. I understand incommensurability as affect, or the participation of the unknown in the world of norms such that something new emerges that struggles between multiplication and closure.

Being Single in India: Gendered Identities, Class Mobilities, and Personhoods in Flux

“…Deepa Mehta's film features two women lovers, sisters‐in‐law within a joint‐family household. Naisargi Dave () discusses how the public dialogue surrounding the film led many women to embrace an “Indian and lesbian” identity.…”

Relighting the Fire: Visualizing the Lesbian in Contemporary India

“…When conservative nationalists attacked screenings of Fire in 1997 for its depiction of apparently non-Indian sexuality, many of the protests against the violence were organised by LGBT-identified organizations. One of the placards that was captured by the media read: "Indian and Lesbian" (Dave 2011). …”

Revolution, Occupation, and Love: The 2011 Year in Cultural Anthropology

“…Fitz‐Henry, in turn, traces the processes by which transnational peace activists opposed to a U.S. military base in Ecuador engage in a politics of “scale‐making” that resulted in city residents viewing the activists as being “more imperialist than the U.S. Air Force” (2011: 323). To these could be added a number of additional studies that took protest and direct action events as their principal focus, such as Willow's (2011) examination of the importance of place among indigenous anticlearcutting activists in Canada, Bonilla's (2011) study of “memory walks” among labor activists in Guadaloupe (to which I will later return), Dave's (2011) consideration of lesbian activism in India (also discussed below), Murphy's (2011) discussion of political dissent among youth in France, and H. Weiss's (2011b) exploration of the ways that the logic of gift giving moves through—and forecloses—forms of social activism in Jerusalem.…”

“…These are questions that will no doubt be important for those trying to make sense of the events surrounding the “Arab Spring” and more so for those trying to build a durable political future that is not merely a reflection of what was already there. In turning to last year's publications in cultural anthropology, a series of suggestive starting points for thinking through these questions can be found in Singh's (2011) work on “agonistic intimacy” in India and Dave's (2011) study of lesbian activism in India. Indeed, Singh (2011) asks this precise question: “In what ways might anthropology offer more pluralized and empirically enriched terms for understanding how neighboring groups live together, in conflict and cohabitation?” (431).…”

“…By tracing the significance of the arrival of a “new” god across neighboring groups in Rajasthan, Singh offers us the concept of “agonistic intimacy” to imagine a mode of relatedness that is not predisposed entirely toward “communitarian affirmation” (as with Hardt's “narcissistic love”) or oppositional negation (as with the “enemy” in Schmitt's conception of sovereignty). Drawing on a similar conceptual vocabulary, Dave (2011) is likewise interested in exploring forms of subjectivity and relatedness as they travel through shifting fields of affect and intensity. Tracing the emergent social world that came into existence around a protest placard that read “Indian and Lesbian” at a Delhi rally in 1998, Dave argues that the force of the sign inhered not in the commensuration of “Indian” and “lesbian” but in its introduction of an incommensurability that called for resolution.…”