Caste Capitalism and Queer Theory: Beyond Identity Politics in India

Abstract

This article uses “caste capitalism” as a framework for thinking through the entanglements of sexuality politics, caste, and capital in contemporary India. The author uses a queer hermeneutic of heritability and endogamy, drawing inspiration from Indian feminist, queer, anti-caste, and Marxist critiques, and from racial capitalism as theorized by Cedric Robinson. The author argues that caste capitalism, read through a queer hermeneutic, makes the historicity of caste rules clearer, showing how they are both enforced through violent social norms, and, at the same time, selectively or intermittently ignored, e.g., in spaces of non-normative sexuality and gender expression. The use of this hermeneutic emphasizes the normative functions of caste-based endogamy while undoing the idea of sexuality as a scientized aspect of the privatized and “private” self, which is understood here as an effect of conceiving the body as hived off from questions of land rights, economic autonomy, and historically contingent iterations of caste categories and relations. This use of caste capitalism contributes to countermanding Hindu nationalist deployments of homonationalist rhetoric that rely on the ahistoricity of caste as a central aspect of arguing for a timeless and territorially coherent religion and culture that must now be defended through violent and autocratic means.