This book seeks to encourage critical thinking at suggesting ways in which notions of culture, neoliberalism, nationalism and queerness in the context of new authoritarianisms are disentangled. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.
Queerness remains a central fault line in contemporary South Asia. Colonial-era anti-sodomy laws, codified in Article 377 of the penal codes in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, or Article 365 in Sri Lanka, exemplify the shared imperial lineages of the region as also their long postcolonial afterlives. Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. New media technologies have increasingly connected diasporic space with mainland South Asia, globalising queer networks. Yet, these trajectories are necessarily discontinuous.
In the last two decades whilst there has been an explosion of LGBTQ+ visibility most notably in South Asian film, television and new media, this visibility has come with mainstream ideological agendas which do not especially represent the diversity of queer lives in South Asia along key identities of caste, class, religion and region. This book seeks to encourage critical thinking by suggesting ways in which notions of culture, neoliberalism, nationalism and queerness in the context of new authoritarianisms are disentangled. The chapters in this volume take up these questions and offer critical imaginings of sexual politics and its imbrication with popular culture and authoritarian politics within contemporary South Asia.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.
Introduction: Queer politics in times of new authoritarianisms
1.
Attempting to commit offences: Protectionism, surveillance and moral
policing of queer women in Sri Lanka
2. Its illegal but its not, like,
really illegal: Sri Lankas sodomy laws, the politics of equivocation, and
queer mens sexual citizenship in The One Who Loves You So
3. Contesting the
mainstream transwoman figurations: The question of caste and precarity in
Udalaazham
4. Between the sheets: The queer sociality of Bombay zines
5.
Between Cheeni and Nupi Maanbi: Transgender politics in Manipur at the
intersection of nation and Indigeneity
6. Mirrors and murals: Reflections on
embodied and state violence
7. Instagram representation of trans and hijra
identities in Bangladesh
Somak Biswas is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. His most recent book is Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890-1940 (2023).
Rohit K. Dasgupta is Senior lecturer in cultural industries at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of Digital Queer Cultures in India (2017).
Churnjeet Mahn is Researcher in Literature with expertise in travel writing, race, and sexuality. Her most recent book is Queer Sharing in the Marketized University (2023).
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