Queering Critiques of Neoliberalism in India: Urbanism and Inequality in the Era of Transnational “LGBTQ” Rights

Abstract

AbstractUnderstanding contemporary sexuality and gender politics in India compels an examination of the imbrications between cities, the idea of modernity, the production of non‐normative identity‐based social categories, and critiques of neoliberalism. Recent developments in Indian sexuality and gender politics with respect to non‐normative subjects must be understood through the critical lens that scholarship on neoliberalism offers. At the same time, an uncritical use of the theoretical apparatus of neoliberalism in the Indian context risks overdetermining the discursive space of normative urban gay elites. The conflation of gay identity with elitism, and transgender identity (when it is conflated with hijra‐ness) with poverty, has characterized much of Indian public discourse on non‐normative sexualities and genders. Emphasizing the vagaries of the daily lives of non‐normative subjects, read through their geographical valences, is one way to disrupt this binary, while demonstrating the unique role of the urban imaginary in the discursive production of sexuality and gender‐based activism in India. This is important in the current moment, as “LGBTQ” rights are taken up as a foreign policy issue by governments around the world, and the newly elected Indian government promises to build 100 “world class cities” during its tenure.