‘Identified as gay’—Making up queer communities and sexual selves in Mumbai

Abstract

Queer persons’ narratives tend to be silenced, ignored or overheard in clinical everyday life and medical education. This article takes the narrative and story of Ajay, a psychiatric in-patient, as a pathway into learning about Mumbai’s queer landscape and about how local identity categories are socially constructed. Ajay seems to embody a contradictory sexual orientation and gender identity from a Western psychological perspective: He loves to ‘have gay sex’ but also ‘feels female’ and adopted a feminine habitus and female roles in certain social contexts. Because of the latter, he was diagnosed with ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ by the ward psychiatrist. Psychiatric diagnosis contributes to sickness identity, individual and collective, and at the same time it fuels identities that move and rebel against biomedical categories. The article takes up Ian Hackings’ concept of ‘making up people’, which depicts how the humanities create new classifications and knowledge, how people embody and perform these categories as social meanings and thereby manage issues of a vulnerable self and identity. By diverse examples from South Asia and beyond the author illustrates that ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are not self-evident experiences but rather socio-cultural tools that extract certain information and feelings from the everyday stream of life before the purposes of making meaning about, and representing, ourselves and others.