Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics by Naisargi N. Dave (review)

Naisargi N. Dave’s Queer Activism in India uses lesbian emergence as a way of understanding queer activism as ethical practice, which is made up of three affective exercises: challenging social norms, inventing alternatives to those norms, and putting them into practice (3). Dave argues that in confronting and challenging normalizing processes, Indian queer activism invariably (and partially) reproduces those very practices, thereby seemingly compromising that which is most radical about activism. According to Dave, however, this “norming” is an inevitable part of how activism unfolds; in encountering new constraints, activists are forced to challenge them by partially embracing them, which results in new ethical engagements that lead to new practices.

Dave traces the emergence of lesbianism through ethnographic work primarily based in Delhi, but interspersed with short periods in other major cities. She analyzes the ways in which queer and feminist organizations and movements grappled with who could—or, more important, could not—stake claim to being the authentic lesbian subject. Dave argues that these organizations understood the emerging lesbian subject as either a political identity that challenged heterosexism (the proper lesbian subject) or as a psychosexual subject of desire (the improper one), but one that rarely embodied both dimensions.

Through a reading of the letters that the Delhi-based lesbian network, Sakhi, received from women who were attracted to other women—most of them asking for the addresses of lesbians that Sakhi refused to provide—Dave demonstrates that Sakhi delimited “lesbian” to mean only those who could inhabit the subjectivity as a terrain of politics but not one of pleasure. On the other hand, Sangini, an internationally funded helpline and support group, believed that women’s same-sex desire had traditionally articulated itself within a “poetics of silence” (104): those gender-segregated spaces under Hindu patriarchy where homosociality thrived. This afforded lesbians the perfect cover to express their desires without attracting the punitive gaze of Hindu patriarchy. Although Sangini was not averse to the conception of lesbianism as a political project, Dave argues that there was resentment that groups such as Sakhi and CALERI (Campaign for Lesbian Rights, an organization of lesbian and straight allies), had rendered lesbianism too prescriptive at the cost of repressing the affective dimension.

Dave demonstrates that this cleaving of the Indian lesbian into proper and improper subjects resulted from negotiations with mainstream Indian feminist movements that lesbians had been forced into. This split was also the result of tensions that arose after an emboldened Hindutva (Hindu right-wing) movement mobilized around the controversial film, Fire, by projecting queers as “other” to the nation. Indian feminists had historically relied upon representations of “real” Indian women as victims of poverty and lesbianism as a bourgeois luxury that was out of sync with the reality of these women. This rendered the “Indian lesbian” as the impossible subject of Indian feminism. As a result, Dave argues, lesbians were forced to demonstrate their “Indianness” by linking lesbianism and “Indian” in an embrace that created serious conflict between lesbian groups. Although this framing of “Indian” and “lesbian” as not inherently antagonistic categories of identity challenged the Hindutva movement’s queer-bashing, Dave notes that this was a risky venture because the emerging category, “Indian lesbian,” alienated feminist and queer constituencies who rejected the primacy of the nation-state. However, Dave cautions us that considering all iterations of “India” as coinciding with the Hindu Right’s interpretation of it would be to ignore the ethnographic details of everyday life in which activists had to embrace categories such as the nation (or the category “Indian”) to challenge the limits of sexual acceptance.

Dave explores the unfolding of activism by examining the conflicts that arose around law as the subject of queer activism. Dissension surfaced between different feminist and queer groups after Naz Foundation (India) Trust, a NGO working in the area of HIV/AIDS advocacy, submitted a public interest...