Queer Politics in Times of New Authoritarianisms edited by Somak Biswas, Rohit K Dasgupta and Churnjeet Mahn explores South Asian queer activism through popular culture, showing how movements in the region evolve through complex negotiations with neoliberal and authoritarian regimes. Its focus on art and culture – especially underexplored forms like zines and digital media – offers a fresh, grounded perspective that expands the field of Queer South Asian Studies, writes Lobsang Norbu Bhutia.

Queer Politics in Times of New Authoritarianisms: Popular Culture in South Asia. Somak Biswas, Rohit K Dasgupta and Churnjeet Mahn (eds.). Routledge. 2024.

Beyond Western liberal frameworks

How have queer politics evolved in South Asia over the past several decades? This is the question taken up in a volume edited by Somak Biswas, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Churnjeet Mahn which first appeared in the special volume of South Asian Popular Culture in 2023. It comprises seven chapters dealing with issues pertaining to the burgeoning of queer politics amidst the landscape of new authoritarianism in South Asia. The editors, while introducing the volume, survey the existing scholarship that has looked into the development of queer politics in the region, and argue that unlike the West, queer activism in South Asia does not have a linear relation with liberal democracy. Instead, queer activism in this region has grown out of the enmeshed relationship of contestations and negotiations with neo-liberal states. These inherent contradictions that are embedded in queer movements in South Asia thus provide a fertile gr​​​​ound for enquiry. Like seminal works centred on South Asian popular culture such as Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Culture (2005), this volume also focuses on popular culture, extending its definition to include “zines, web series and public art” changes in “social processes” and “everyday realities” (4).  

Resistance through popular culture

The first chapter by Sarala Emmanuel and Ponni Arasu is a careful reflection on ​​​​Sri Lanka’s sodomy laws of 1883 and how it infringes upon the lives of queer people of the region up to the present day. With their involvement as activists, they highlight the role of international NGOs in ushering in LGBTQI+ ​​​​rights-based discourse and the state’s conditional redressal to the decriminalisation law in lieu of the growing influence of the western market economy. Shermal Wijewardene’s chapter similarly explores the ambiguity inherent to sodomy laws and their equivocation, which render unequal sexual citizenship to queer men. By analysing the anglophone play The One Who Loves You So (2019), revolving around the lives of two queer men from different social backgrounds in contemporary Sri Lanka, he effectively demonstrates the equivocal nature of the law that adjoins the pervasive role of the state in “reproducing the internal stratification of queer citizenship” (37). Both the chapters emphasise the role of new authoritarianism in the gradual transformation of sodomy laws in Sri Lanka that allow conditional interstices for the formation of queer politics, but only by facilitating the growth of majoritarian values that are conceptualised by the state in congruence with the elites. 

The third chapter by Sruthi B. Guptha and Sandhya V offers a critical analysis of the film Udalaazham or Body Deep (2018), through the lens of caste and precarity, which has been largely excluded in the depiction of transgender characters in popular Malayalam cinema. The film revolves around Gulikan, who belongs to the tribal (Paniya) community, as he navigates his sexuality amidst societal hostility due to his tribal caste and gender expressions. The authors, while juxtaposing the film within the context of larger Malayalam cinema, propose the dimensions of “gender-liminality” in understanding Gulikan’s sexuality. Their employment of this term offers a new way of understanding identities complicated by multiple contestations that cannot be defined within the fixed conceptualisation of being transgender. 

Arnapal and D. DasGupta’s framing of trans-indigeneity as a ‘radical breakthrough offering a different kind of on-the-ground alter trans/queer politics’ is a crucial contribution to a growing the queer politics in Northeast India.  

Brain A. Horton’s chapter on queer zines prevalent in Bombay during the 1990s and 2000s such as Bombay Dost, Scripts and Gayzi Zines posits them as an “overlooked archive of queer and trans culture in India” (58). His chapter evokes a sense of excitement as we progress through the salacious “gossips” or “masala” from Bollywood that appear throughout the zines, which in a way speak for the queer readership of the time in Bombay. The concept of “queer sociality” employed here is significant, as it emerges through the pages of the zines and engenders a “commitment to the creative critical work of imagining collective possibilities” (60). 

Intersecting trans, queer and indigenous experience

Maisnam Arnapal and Debanuj DasGupta take into account the representation of Northeast India in popular Hindi cinema that has framed the cultural imagination of the Northeast as the racial “other”. Amidst the appropriation of queer politics in the region by the Hindu nation-state, they posit that there is “futurity” in projects the Chinky Homo Project, a digital queer anthology of North East India and Nupi Maanbi’s activism in Manipur, a trans-indigenous movement. Their framing of trans-indigeneity as a “radical breakthrough offering a different kind of on-the-ground alter trans/queer politics” (84) is a crucial contribution to a growing the queer politics in Northeast India.  

Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan examines the vandalisation of the mural titled “Home is Where We Make it” by Amrisa Niranjan, an Indo-Guyanese artist on 29 April 2022 in New Jersey, US. Including an interview with the artist, she explores the mural’s defacement as a symbolic representation of anti-immigrant sentiments and her approach to queerness alludes to the larger notions of “otherness” and “unbelonging” that is pervasive in the cultural imagination that discursively denies “them a space for existence within the national body” (87). Not being geographically rooted in South Asia, this chapter deviates slightly from the regional cohesiveness of the volume, but is nonetheless significant.  

Analysing the curation of their digital identities on Instagram, Alim notes that such self-representations engender a radical queer futurity for members of trans and hijra communities

The final chapter by Tanvir Alim probes the self-representation of trans and​​ hijra (transgender, intersex, or eunuchs who follow a kinship based system in South Asia) identities on Instagram in Bangladesh. He foregrounds the ​​​​role played by international bodies such as foreign donors and NGOs in the growth of trans rights advocacy, and the neoliberal notions of self-optimisation in the formation of digital identities. While analysing the curation of their digital identities on Instagram, he notes that such self-representations engender a radical queer futurity for members of trans and hijra communities, specifically in “community making and civil rights activism” (101).  

Queer Politics in Times of New Authoritarianism is an essential addition to the scholarship on Queer Studies in South Asia. Despite the chapters being geographically limited to a few countries, which the editors dutifully disclose and justify at the outset, it presents a nuanced analysis of queer politics under new authoritarianism critically reimagined through the lens of popular culture.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: SolomonAsghar on Wikimedia Commons.

Read an article by Rohit K. Dasgupta, Desi queers: celebrating queer South Asian history in Britain in LSE Research for the World.

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