Final Year Project

Project Title

Mapping Indian Sex Life: Colonial repression and the postcolonial politics of representation

Description

For my capstone project, I explored what it meant to be 'gender queer' or gender non-conforming in pre-colonial South Asia, and how Western/European LGBTQ nomenclature has colored/altered/prejudiced our perception of non-heteronormative sexuality. I did this by providing examples of the diversity of gender and sexual expression in pre-colonial and pre-modern India, emphasizing that it was possible to express one's sexuality or, according to today's parlance, be "gender-fluid" without flouting social mores or upsetting society's sensibilities. Present day homophobia and intolerance for non-conforming gender expression has its roots in colonial-era legislation (section 77 of the penal code) concerned with repressing and reforming "unnatural" sexual behavior. My paper aims to emphasize how the western LGBTQ framework falls short of encompassing the richness and diversity of the queer milieu(s) in the subcontinent, with disastrous implications for our understanding of sexuality. There is, therefore, a need to address the colonial underpinnings of the LGBTQ paradigm if we are to decolonize our own understanding of what it means to be queer.