Lesbian in/from South Asia: erotic and political geographies.

Abstract

This special issue emerged from a two-pronged question: what it means to be lesbian in/from South Asia and what it means to be so in the contemporary moment. The contemporary is marked by both enduring and emergent forms of precarities, changing strategies of survival, intensified digitalization and transformations in global queer politics. Seeking to open up the ideas of "lesbian" and "South Asia" both individually and in relation to each other, the issue underscores the inadequacy of singular modes of identity, territory or politics to apprehend either. The contributions broadly engage with two valences: negotiations with global queer politics and locally situated practices of solidarity and care. Instead of positioning South Asian lesbian experiences as either neatly adopting or rejecting global queer frameworks, they analyze everyday negotiations which appropriate, contest and rework such frameworks. They situate lesbian subjectivities in socio-historically and materially specific conditions to imagine political possibility beyond universalist paradigms while simultaneously resisting nationalist closures that reduce South Asian contexts to inherently coherent and culturally static ones. Anchored in immediate conditions of survival, belonging and futurity, the issue pays attention to how lesbian subjectivities are produced by and themselves shape intersecting structures of caste, class, religion, race and gender. Collectively, the articles call for a pluriversal understanding of lesbian lives grounded in partial connections, transversal solidarities and differences. The issue reflects on its uneven geographic representation and the institutional, linguistic and epistemological inequalities that shape whose lesbian experiences become available for scholarly circulation, thereby calling for greater methodological attention to the geographies of knowledge production in South Asian lesbian studies.