Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogating “Lesbian” Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa

Abstract

These accounts from India and South Africa demonstrate that contemporary politics of intimacy and survival cannot be approached through frameworks that create a simple binary between the proverbial First and Third Worlds. At the same time they foreground the limitations of feminist theories emerging from Northern academic institutions. Can our existing frameworks adequately represent the struggles of women in same-sex relationships who are located in the most socioeconomically peripheralized areas of the world? Can we analyze the politics of sexuality and intimacy in their lives without diminishing the centrality of neocolonial histories and geographies and their everyday struggles over access to material resources? How if at all can we integrate insights from critical development studies and lesbian studies to address these contradictions and questions? (excerpt)