Humanities Underground

Gay For More Than A Day Of Rage

    Brinda Bose Since ‘straight’ is linguistic harakiri for 377-talk, perhaps we first need to get this crooked: if we say ‘we are all queer’, we cannot make a ‘they’ out of the LGBT community, and more importantly out of all that which 377 targets, ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’.  We must first understand what ‘nature’ means in the context of carnal intercourse, of course, but most crucially we must believe that being queer is a philosophy and a politics and a sensibility of desiring outside the pale of proscription. And it is also today a politics and a philosophy of protest and dissent: an assertion of our sexual selves that are denied existence by others, but in tandem, always, a celebration of those very selves – continued, secret or outed, extravagant or quiet – despite such denials and exclusions. Queer Desire: Raging, Carnivalesque ‘We are all queer’ as a movement is in league with (and not opposed to or lesser than) other battles against discrimination, like that of dalits or Kashmiri Muslims or transgenders or working class labourers. Anyone who dismisses the fight against 377 as lower on the rungs of political significance is astonishingly classist and casteist in such an argument, surely? And to say that, since only 200 ‘offenders’ have been booked in 150 years of the existence of section 377 of the IPC, this makes it any less critical to understandings of identitarian politics is to be the worst kind of offender in hierarchizing identities, it seems to me. So here then is a ‘gay’ – and we can all be gay as much as queer – that must necessarily be both a blithe spirit and an angered, avenging one. It must fight for spaces as much as mark its presence outside of legitimately-granted territories, because its very definition is to be outside of the prescribed, and to be in combat for a place that it does not really wish to seek under its contrarian sun. And so this queering must be raging and carnivalesque at once, a gay that protests, resists, rebels, chooses, loves, desires, kisses, caresses, copulates, orgasms – in whatever way it ‘wants’ the other, simply and yet complicatedly being propelled to bodily pleasure and passion by sexual urges, oblivious to what the law allows or does not. And let us be clear on this, the fight against Section 377 is not about a sloppy sentimental ‘love’ that de-fuses hate all over the world: it is about searing passionate romance, and the right to sexual practices impelled by raucous lusty desires that are seen as dangerous to the moral fabric of the nation-state – those that are legally disallowed, but not privately disavowed. It is about love all right, but it is a risky, risqué love that dares and bares and gives and takes with everything it’s got. Why is it crucial to make distinctions between loves when all are difficult enough, Calvino might ask. Then consider this: surely the BJP too thinks that love is not a crime when indulged in glorious saas-bahu technicolor, even while it renounces homosexuality in the morning’s headlines? It is imperative, therefore, to distinguish between a love that decimates romance and passion and makes of it a duty and a sacrifice and an aspiration to a higher, saintlier plane of being and living, and one that is passionate in giving and much as taking, an erotics of pleasure-soaked romantic love. Desire – the kind we are fighting for – is an overreacher, always wanting something beyond what we are allowed to possess; Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’ and Jacques Ranciere’s ‘cruel radiance’ (though neither used it in exactly this context), where the oxymoronic nature of any exercise of will and wish is emphasized, may work well to focus both the sharpness and the ambiguity of desiring processes, sexuality being no exception to this melding of potentially-contradictory impulses. Desire is a choice one makes, individual liberty may guarantee the exercising of that choice – but desire also exists beyond all guarantees, it goes where liberty – or liberality – fears to tread. This is one critical aspect of the battle against 377 we cannot afford to lose sight of, that the battle itself is contradictory, it is looking to legitimize a space that is by its very ethics (and I use the term advisedly) against the ‘order of nature’ and all that is legitimized by such ‘nature’ in the way the Court has read it. That is the real reason for it being a fraught battle even within so many of us who wish to identify as queer – whether LGBT or H(etero) – and we must begin by acknowledging and dealing with this fraughtness – or this queerness, if we will. Everyone who has ever indulged in any sex outside the penile-vaginal straitjacket (and that includes masturbation) can, within the legalese of the Indian Penal Code, be incarcerated for a criminal offense under 377. This IPC section in the news now may have been framed in British colonial times but was accepted and legitimized by Nehru and Ambedkar when power transferred back to native hands, and we cannot afford to forget that. And the Supreme Court may well say today that it is merely upholding the spirit of the founding fathers of our nation who in their wisdom did not think it necessary to throw out what the British had imposed on the subcontinent. And so the Supreme Court of India’s failure to uphold Delhi High Court’s 2009 landmark reading-down of the offending sections of Section 377 about ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ damns not just the LGBT community which we belong to or support, but just about each and every one of us in our politics, philosophies, agentic actions, dreams and fantasies, as it also damns our first nation-builders whom we invoke in all our incantations of freedom and glory. ‘Reading Down’ Liberty and Progressive Divisiveness One of the astute ways