Sexual Subaltern Subjects as Signifiers of the Current Crisis in Queer Politics in India

Presenter:

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Abstract

When two young women, Swapna and Sucheta, committed suicide in Nandigram, West Bengal, in 2011, queer activist interventions told the story of two abject figures unable to survive the cruel consequences of loving each other, highlighting the violence on lesbian bodies in contemporary Indian society at the cost of excluding their class, caste, and gender as definitive of their life’s trajectories. This allowed queer activists to situate Swapna and Sucheta as another lesbian suicide. What was missed in this encounter was the crucial question of whether Swapna and Sucheta would have told the stories of their lives in the same way had they been alive. Situating them as sexual subaltern subjects, drawing especially from Guha’s and Spivak’s interventions in the understanding of the figure of the subaltern, allows us to trace a crisis in contemporary queer politics in South Asia through the consistency of Swapna and Sucheta’s silence. In the inability of queer politics to offer a framework of representation without the erasure of sexual subaltern subjects, a larger reflection of the limits of queer politics becomes possible. In this paper, I will explore the tensions that emerge when we allow sexual subaltern subjects to orient our exploration of the discourse and desire of queer politics in South Asia. In doing so, I will demonstrate how sexual subaltern figures reveal not only the aporias of queer discourses and identifications, but also highlight the specific ways in which sexual subaltern figures are mobilized in these discourses as valuable and expendable at the same time, revealing the developmentality and neoliberal desires of queer politics in current times.