Trusting and thinking anew

This essay responds to the contributions to the forum centered on my book Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India. It addresses questions posed by the contributors, from the role of the state to the digital when it comes to a rapidly changing terrain of queer and feminist organizing in contemporary India. While the book rallied against defensiveness, in this commentary I revisit defensiveness as a queer feminist political affect. Through the provocations offered in this book forum conversation, I find renewed faith in asserting friction, inconvenience, ambivalence, and defensiveness as ways of expanding queer feminisms as ongoing sites of struggle, transformation, trust, solidarity, and hope.