Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics

278 Pages·2012·1.09 MB·English

by  Naisargi N. Dave

Queer Activism in India

Naisargi N. Dave
QUEER ACTIVISM IN INDIA
A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics
Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2012
∫ 2012 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of
America on acid-free paper $
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Scala by Keystone
Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data appear on the last
printed page of this book.
contents
vii Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
33 1. Rendering Real the Imagined
61 2. Within Limits, Freedom
97 3. Virtuous Women, Radical Ethics,
and New Regimes of Value
137 4. Public ‘‘Emergence’’
167 5. To Be Lawful, to Be Just
205 Appendix. Cast of Organizations
207 Notes
235 References
253 Index

acknowledgments
This book was inspired and helped along by so many people. I hope that in
dedicating this book to several of them I am not diluting my thanks, but
expressing the depth and breadth of my gratitude. This book is, first of all,
for prism and Sangini. Thank you for letting me into your lives and your
work. I hope that you read in these pages my absolute respect and admira-
tion for you. Specifically in Sangini I want to thank Betu, Cath, and Maya;
in prism, Akshay Khanna, Gautam Bhan, Jaya Sharma, and Lesley Esteves.
Jaya and Lesley, this book is, in part, a love letter to you; a very long, ram-
bling, and weird love letter, I know, but a love letter all the same. I can’t
thank you enough for all you’ve done for me and meant to me and for how
you’ve changed the world. Other activists and thinkers and friends in India
I wish to thank are Alok Gupta, Arvind Narrain, Ashwini Sukthankar,
Chayanika Shah, Chatura, Deepa Nair, Elavarthi Manohar, Farah Vakil,
Geeta Kumana, Geeti Thadani, Jasmin Jagada, Maya Sharma, Nivedita
Menon, Ponni Arasu, Pramada Menon, Ranjana Padhi, Shaleen Rakesh,
Shalini Mahajan, Shobha Aggarwal, Sonali Gulati, Tarunabh Khatain, Tejal
Shah, Vikram Doctor, and Vinay Chandran.
Ann Arbor is a dear place to me for everything I learned there and for all
the time I spent within its intimate square mileage. This book is also for my
former adviser, Jennifer Robertson, who is even still my model teacher,
scholar, and mentor; thank you, for everything. I remain indebted to my
other dissertation committee members, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Alaina
Lemon, and Miriam Ticktin. I am honored to have learned from you. Suma-
thi, I owe you a particular note of thanks for all of your guidance. I extend
my fondest thanks to other friends and teachers from my days at the Uni-
versity of Michigan: Bhavani Raman, Bruce Mannheim, Chandan Gowda,
Edward Murphy, Francis Cody, Genese Sodiko√, Jill Constantino, Karen
Hebert, Lee Schlesinger, Marina Welker, Michael Baran, Sharad Chari, and
Tom Fricke.
Somehow I wound up with this wonderful job in a great city and sur-
rounded by dream colleagues. At the University of Toronto, and in Toronto
more generally, I want to thank Amira Mittermaier, Andrea Muehlebach,
Andrew Gilbert, Bonnie McElhinny, Francis Cody, Girish Daswani, Holly
Wardlow, Janice Boddy, Jennifer Jackson, Jesook Song, Joshua Barker, Kajri
Jain, Lisa Forman, Michael Lambek, Sandra Bamford, Ritu Birla, and Tania
Li. I also thank my students, undergraduate and graduate, who make me
feel very lucky to spend my days the way I do.
There are many people beyond my India, Michigan, and Toronto worlds
who have helped me immeasurably and taught me a great deal. My sin-
cerest thanks to Carla Roncoli, Gayatri Reddy, Kamala Visweswaran, Law-
rence Cohen, Nita Karpf, Martin Manalansan, and Tom Boellstor√. I wish I
could thank by name all the people who have been anonymous along the
way, but you know who you are; please also know how grateful I am. I am
also very grateful to the Association for Queer Anthropology (aqa) for all
the warmth and intellectual excitement I find within its spaces.
Where to include three of my favorite friends—India or North America,
the academy or outside of it—I do not know, and so for them, a paragraph all
their own. Sunila Kale, Surabhi Kukke, and Uzma Rizvi, thank you for all
the fun and love and laughing.
And to Madeleine Findley, every word of this book’s first iteration was
written because of you.
The research and writing of this book have been supported by a Disser-
tation Research Grant from Fulbright-Hays, a Rackham Humanities Fel-
lowship at the University of Michigan, a Foreign Language and Area Stud-
ies Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and a Start-Up Grant from the
Connaught Foundation at the University of Toronto. I was also helped tre-
mendously by the American Institute of Indian Studies in New Delhi and
Chicago. I thank all of these institutions for their support. Portions of this
viii Acknowledgments
book have been published previously in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society (Dave 2010), Cultural Dynamics (Dave 2011b), American Eth-
nologist (Dave 2011c), and Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law (Dave
2011d). This book has benefited greatly from critical feedback at the De-
partment of Anthropology at Cornell University; the Department of An-
thropology at McMaster University; the Jackson School of International
Studies at the University of Washington; the Public Texts Seminar Series at
Trent University; the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of
Michigan; the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s Uni-
versity; the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities at Yale
University; and the ‘‘Ethnographies of Activism’’ workshop at the London
School of Economics. Thank you to my hosts and to those audiences for
helping me to refine my arguments and see new things in my material. I
had two reviewers for this manuscript. One made himself known to me
(thank you, Martin Manalansan) and another was anonymous. Both pro-
vided exceptionally helpful feedback and I am deeply indebted to them.
Thank you to my research assistant, Kevin Nixon, for helping me in the last
stages of this book’s preparation. Thank you to the artist, Dhruvi Acharya,
for allowing me to use her striking watercolor, Women, on the cover of this
book. Finally, I wish to thank my editors at Duke University Press, Valerie
Millholland, Gisela Fosado, Rebecca Fowler, Jeanne Ferris, and Susan Al-
bury. I am very fortunate to have had their support and the benefit of their
expertise.
In the spirit of my nascent turn to posthumanism, I wish to thank
Phoebe and Basil, and to do so without the slightest trace of embarrass-
ment whatsoever. This book is in part for Vihaan Dave, my little nephew,
son of my not-so-little little brother, Prerak Dave, and my talented and
generous sister-in-law, Kshipra Dave. I am tempted to say that I hope
Vihaan is inspired by this book to become a lesbian and move to Canada,
but then my mother would be very peeved with me. And so to my mom,
Parthivi, who still finds the very notion of anthropology amusing but, I
suspect, is also secretly proud of my unorthodox choices in life. And to my
dad, Nitin, who could not conceal his delight if he tried. They have both
given me very much, and I am grateful.
Acknowledgments ix