Each year, the pivotal movements in Assam have fantasized about land, racialized-immigrant bodies or ethnic vote banks. Politics surrounding the ‘social’ works as a tool to produce new ‘sentiments’, swiftly building upon connections drawn from collective memory. The middle-class Assamese public rarely seeks to imagine sociality beyond the boundaries of regional politics in North-East India.
This is not to deny that memories people associate with culture firm up identities, help in interpreting the past, and shape their present and future actions. They transposes to the splitting figures of culture like dance forms (bihu, ojapali), documents (like NRC), traces of lineage (like tribal identity), accidental survival of the Assamese language, etc.
However, another part of the culture, neglected for the longest time, is queer counter publics which have survived only on the margins of the dominant culture. In Assamese, the word for “public” in the context of sociology would be সামাজিক জনগণ (pronounced as “xomaajik jonogon”). In contrast, a “queer counter public” is a term that refers to a space created by LGBTQ+ individuals that exists in opposition to mainstream society. This space is often characterized by its resistance to dominant cultural norms, values, and institutions that uphold heteronormativity and homophobia. In a queer counter public, LGBTQ+ individuals can express themselves freely and create their own cultural practices, identities, and social structures that challenge dominant cultural norms. This space is often seen as a form of resistance and subversion, as it challenges the dominant discourse around gender and sexuality. If the public carries forward testimonies of collective social memory then it must also visibly guard against radical forms of sexual spaces that break/fracture the hostile narrative of ‘pure’ and ‘endogamous’ heteronormative intimacy produced by a nation’s biopower.
I will hence, open this essay by reflecting on the need/urgency for building queer counter publics with two scenes:
Scene 1:
Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Chief Minister of Assam expressed that the appropriate age for motherhood is 22 to 30 years, following his disturbing crackdown on child marriage in Assam, in February 2023 [2]. It is unimportant what Sarma or any elite politician of Assam (Pijush Hazarika, Jayanta Malla Baruah, etc.) thinks for the public because the public is in a constant whirl of projection and suppression by the state and capital. Despite its apparent power, and precisely because of its excesses, caste-Hindu Assamese society shores up core national culture and allays the “Hindu” fear of minoritization transforming into a feeling of collective panic. It imagines that the Axomiya familial model which harbours endogamy and heterosexuality must be sanitized from any type of non-normative forms of intimacy. It symbolically colonizes “the private.” Next, “the private” is neutered to separate it from work, politics and the public, deeply submerging the private into heterosexuality. We see this in the forms of marriage, policies favouring heterosexual couples, and spaces organized to serve heterosexual couples.
Sarma was building upon the image of a social problem which one contends is generated, in the first place, by a caste society that overlaps with nationalist passions. The public is willing to engage in sexual politics as long as its citizens can return to the depoliticized private sphere. That means Sarma’s weaponizing of a social problem can only persist if the public feels it is less risky to return to a private sphere. This, one contends, diverts the public from organizing against heteronormativity, and unequal conditions in their economical, political and sexual lives. We are aware of how cisgender women, throughout history, have been dependent on their male partners for survival, building families and performing the labour of care, even tolerating to some extent the violence of gender. To say that ‘the ripe age of marriage is….’ (Sarma) is to trap the body in maintaining reproductive machination and lineage purity. Even desperate attempts to criminalize interfaith affection (“love jihad”) and antagonize the secrets of inter-caste futures are a project of a nation-building process that rests on exclusions.
The social status of marriage has been increasingly offered as a vision for a better life, replacing the allegedly “flavourless” life of a radical refusal of heterosexual marriage. The public is seduced by the fantasy and accessibility provided by heterosexual marriages that guarantees the production of “good citizens” and shelters us temporarily from the cannibalizing terror of alienation, capitalism and politics. Ideologies of nationalism and neo-liberal capitalism paint a rosy picture of heterosexuality where the couple increasingly witnesses “affect and politics” in privacy. On the flip side, there exists in the public imagination an idea that denigrates sex and contracts it to the private and consciously retracts the “blood” connection away from the community. This enforces boundaries between economical and moral beings.
Meanwhile, queer lovemaking, queer entrances and queer lifeworlds have been systemically betrayed. Betray means to show and reveal secrets, not congeal complexity. It’s just that it’s embarrassing to show who we might be and veil the collective shame with self-loathing. I’m not interested in de-clutter an overly saturated concept of “heteronormativity”. In fact, I want to dig deeper into the kind of non-normative attachments queerness opens up for all of us which is made tougher to imagine considering the punitive empire of the state. No doubt sexual practices of the hijra gharanas, peasant class, and urban-rural living queers in Assam need more sociological analysis; however, it is also true that figures of transness and queerness are made to rely on an extensive narrative of heterosexual intimacy. What I mean to say is that heterosexuality is just an organizing factor by which we identify or vividly relate to bodies (even during sex) born out of a complex history of gender. This makes sex the ‘nucleus’ of a culture that produces a field and heterosexuality shields to protect this nucleus. The dominant social and cultural norms around sexuality are shaped by heterosexual relations and experiences. Such a contract of social belonging in which heterosexuality persists is because it is supported by predictable “speechless-speech” acts like finding and paying rent, separating male/female bathrooms, sensing disgust in marriage ceremonies, policing dress codes in schools, colleges, homes, throwing insults which are not exactly insults but threats to self-expression (“maiki”, “hijra”, “jenani”, etc.), subtle carelessness, teaching, raising a child, hospital facilities, friendships, buying land, bureaucracy, running for elections, “juroon” (bridal shower in Assamese), etc.
Scene 2:
On January 26th, the streets of Guwahati were filled with sonic energy (religious incantations) and beautiful young students who came out of their homes rented apartments to celebrate Saraswati Puja. From the heart of the city to its outskirts, young women flocked around puja pandals in sharply pleated mekhela sador’s, while the young men turned to the streets with macho motorbikes and maybe even some pocket money. I suppose it’s quite performative now as to how the project of gender has perforated the spiritual plane. The relentless declaration of piety towards the figure of Goddess in return for blessings evokes mixed feelings. Was it Saraswati (Goddess of Knowledge, according to Brahminic traditions) or anti-caste philosophers who worked towards a future of knowledge accessibility? It’s not a complicated question to answer considering the parodying memories of the same brahminical religious institutions now speak in the grammar of the progressive language.
In State, Patriarchy and Women in Medieval Assam (2005-2006), Swarna Lata Baruah contends that conservatives litterateurs like Ratneswar Mahanta, Purnakanta Sarma, Bolinarayan Bora, etc. vehemently opposed women’s education so that they could be tethered to Hindu traditions and continue to serve the Assamese man in the house [3]. Indeed, women have come a long way to push themselves out of the domestic, however, now all the upbeat fanciness of Saraswati Puja is scavenged by the eyes of vulture-like media. The televised clips of young women are displayed in such a way as to evoke visual pleasure and that serves the attention economy. News channels like NewsLive, Pratidin News, DY365, etc. produce storylines and “gossip” like features of young women, a trite that is enamoured with something meant to destroy the impulse of ‘agency’. The thrill that comes from showing camera movements of the body top to bottom, questions that hierarchize and set ‘beauty standards’ for Assamese women, and assumptions of heterosexuality are expressed in asking questions such as “Are you here with your boyfriend”? or “what your plans for a date after the Puja”? Such mass selling from the Assamese media works as a mask that rectifies explicit public sexuality. Laura Mulvey articulates Freud’s concept of ‘scopophilia’ in her own essay “Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form.” Freud associates scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze [4]. Throughout history, political fiction, conservatism, and myths insinuated narratives of social control systems that had a direct impact on women’s sexuality. Now, the media channel dramatizes the love affair/despair between the real body and the projected body by carefully mediating the borders of erotics and traditions.
Queer Counter Publics:
Grammars of public sexuality secretly archive ‘modes of presentation’ that have to do with preserving heteronormative forms of intimacy. Assamese society’s intimate culture leaves queer counter publics dependent on them. From Pride protest to militant queer organizing, the messy solidarity & bloodletting of queer intimacy is left out and made vulnerable to scrutiny from the state, law, marital practices and affective coupling.
But does queer counter publics mean building only safe spaces, or alternative modes of living (that have been historically criminalized) and elaborating channels of creative intimacies in the public? We may have to complicate it more. Queer(ing) the public is neither a transitive act of sex nor an expression of an overworked and under-compensated expression of sexuality. It is to ‘diffuse’ the sexual culture that is made intelligible to society and expose, sublimate and cleave the border of social relations which are recognized by only exploitative and dominating heterosexual coupling and kinship, forms of which are embedded in a tacit sense of rightness and normalcy. Heteronormativity is more than just a phobia against gay/lesbian desires. It bears a necessary relation to different arrangements of social life too, such as Assamese nationalism, caste practices, state, law, commerce, medicine, education and institutionally seeping into the revelation of private affairs, language, romance and other such protected spaces of culture. Such a nest can snap fast and spill. However, an ecosystem of police, surveillance and governmentality locks the porous borders consequently threatening queer counter publics. Dangers such as the creation of documents (Trans Bill, 2019), invalidation from families, apocryphal caste-tribe network invoking heteronormativity, transactional marriage patterns, properties, and archives of ethnic violence is a part of everyday life that sustains the flesh inside a chamber of national citizenship. The inventiveness of queer world is thus, systemically blocked. ‘Personal life’ dulls the spirit of ‘non-standard intimacies’ (such as consorts, friends with benefits, mistresses, polyamorous relationships, associates, etc.). Contexts of discourse that narrate true contradictions and paranoia within the sphere of the privatized ‘personal life’ are segregated from those that represent citizens, workers and professionals. Foucault in The History of Sexuality made it clear how sex is the essence of our being, something we can’t escape from and confronts the world as a part of our personhood [5].
Modern-day transformation of ‘sex’ from the medical industrial complex to the privatized state’s extension of sex to intimacy, care and reproductive ability interrupts queer counter publics that has already made a world possible without any relation to domestic space, nuclear family, nation and desire (for example, asexuality). Queer counter publics is to refuse acts of ‘recognition’ based on institutionalized hetero relations in the nation and spill the ‘erotic’ beyond the culture of jati, mati and bheti (community, land and home). It is to make non-standard intimacies less criminal and more comprehensible, dissolve conceptions of ‘private’ and pursue disruptions, making the haptic intensely erotic.
References:
[1] Bharadwaj, Sanskrita. (2023). Solutions To Assam’s Child-Marriage Problem In Schools, Not In Mass Arrests Ordered By CM. Article 14. https://article-14.com/post/solutions-to-assam-s-child-marriage-problem-in-schools-not-in-mass-arrests-ordered-by-cm-63eeea6e577cb
[2] Baruah, Swarna Lata. (2005). Sectional President’s Address: STATE, PATRIARCHY AND WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL ASSAM. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 66: 264-295.
[3] Mulvey, Laura. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen.
[4] Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: 1. Vintage: Reissue edition
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Anamitra Bora is a prospective PhD student who has completed his postgraduate degree in Sociology from Cotton University. He is a queer sociologist whose research interests centre around the intersection of nationalism, policing behaviour, affect studies and LGBTQ+ issues.