Some Notes toward Queering the Humanities in the University
Brinda Bose Has the increasing visibility of the movement against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (that criminalises homosexual behaviour) in recent years brought any significant change to gendered spaces in Indian universities? Is ‘gender’ as an established theoretical tool for reading the humanities – and literature in particular – being ‘queered’ in the classroom and outside it on campuses now? Gender studies have been traditionally seen as analogous to women’s studies, read through feminist tracts and critiques that identified women’s positions as marginalized and disempowered, and women’s politics as collusive or resistant. Queer studies has given this somewhat-tired paradigm a new lease of life in the classroom, perhaps its own shot-in-the-arm coming from fresh turns in contemporary sexuality politics in the country. We now seem to be witnessing a parallel movement in university spaces like corridors, plazas and gardens in which the politics of reading literary texts through radical queer frameworks, for example, is being extended to assertions of non-normative sexual choices and a spreading support for queerness – and queer thinking – on campuses. This is not to say that homophobia, and a conservative heteronormativity – in response to texts as well as lifestyles – is not still visible and disruptive, but is it possible to mark, analyze and interrogate an identifiable turn towards queering the gendered space in/through the humanities in the Indian university? A few weeks ago, a young woman came up to me on the metro, checked that I was who she thought I was, and identified herself as an MPhil student of sociology for whom ‘Phobic Erotic was a Bible’ when she first began to do research on lesbian lives, and that she now could ‘not wait for the Gender Conference to begin’ (referring to the recently-concluded conference on gender, sexualities and multiple modernities that we organised at Delhi University). So what, I wondered as I stepped off the train, has been happening in the Humanities and Social Science disciplines on university campuses since I put together The Phobic and the Erotic in 2007, an anthology of writings by feminist and queer activists and scholars? The intention of the anthology was to take stock of both activism and academics around sexualities in contemporary India, and to identify ways in which feminist and queer intellectual interventions had both interrogated and extended those politics and the thinking around it. Contributors to the volume included some of the foremost feminist and queer activists and thinkers in the field, and what emerged from the volume – and the subsequent reception to it – was the sense that while it was indeed time to critique both the activist and intellectual movements and analyze their limitations, the core necessity for feminist theorizing was far from dead. While feminisms have been challenged and transformed, and ‘woman’ as a category entirely destabilized and continually reconstituted, feminist theory as a tool of critical inquiry has remained essential to intellectual interrogations of how we materially inhabit multiple spaces. Queer interventions in feminist thinking had then given it new directions by fruitfully complicating the scenario and throwing up new and old spanners in the works. I currently teach an MA course in Literature and Gender, and last semester offered an MPhil course on Sexualities and Visual Cultures in Contemporary India. The MPhil is a more advanced discussion class in which students are aware of originary debates in the field and can push the arguments in certain directions through the texts they consider and the critical readings they access. It has been the MA class which has been far more revelatory in a sense: the students are intellectually and otherwise younger and fresh from undergraduate degrees in which feminist criticism seems to start always by looking at how a woman has little or no ‘agency’ in her social structure and is dependent on, and oppressed by, a male figure. While this is not an entirely useless entry point into reading gender in the classroom, it has its obvious limitations. Starting at the undergraduate level, we try to complicate this scenario and offer ways of approaching texts that look at how men and women are gendered, constructed and performed, and how their desires, frustrations and negotiations of categories of male/female are fluid and overlapping. Students travel the range of heteronormative/homosocial/homoerotic/homosexual desire, and are able to make distinctions between different registers of desiring – not merely in terms of sexual difference, but in the ways which point toward collapsing binaries of difference into other more complex patterns of gendered and sexual interactions. What I wanted to think about, then, is whether the climate-change that has been brought about by political, cultural and social developments in India since the movement around Section 377 intensified and captured the public imagination, has made possible a completely different set of negotiations and discussions both in and outside the classroom. For the first time in almost a decade and a half that I have spent at Delhi University – first in an undergraduate college and now at the postgraduate department – it seems to me that the intellectual is slowly also approaching and approximating the personal and the political, and this is not merely to do with whether one is gay and can ‘come out’ now, though that is a vital question too. What I am trying to work out is whether a connection can be made between developments in the immediate world around us as they impact on us – and on our students in particular – and emergent trends one can see on the university campus over the past few years. There are a couple of instances I would like to point to as markers of a changing campus in contexts of gender, though this is not at all to say that any of the problems of sexual harassment, crassness and insensitivity, rights violations and stereotyping have been resolved. In fact, with a campus increasingly open to new ideas and expressions, new problems – both of radical posturing and