Activism as Ethical Practice: Queer Politics in Contemporary India

Abstract

Why are activists, activists? In this article I address that question, as well as what it means for an ethnographer to ask it. Based on fieldwork with lesbian and gay activists in New Delhi, I argue that activism emerges as ethical practice, and that ‘ethical practice’ consists of three affective exercises: problematizing established social norms, inventing alternatives to those norms, and creatively practicing those newly invented relational possibilities. But the political institutions that activists must engage in order to effect the transformations that they seek are far from conducive to the cultivation of the ethical practice that is at the heart of activism, and this article is partly an ethnography of this tension. I study this tension by tracing a series of key movements in Indian lesbian activism from 1987 to 2008, bookended by the public revelation of two married policewomen in rural India and a Gay Pride parade in central Delhi. Through this narrative, I show how each new shift in activism demands the foreclosure of possibilities and practices that emerged before it. On a reflexive note, I draw a parallel between activism as a fraught, contested undoing and remaking of its very premises and ethnography of activism as entailing the same.