Why and how are we all queer? By Brinda Bose.
*In January 2014, a young female lawyer in Kerala received a show-cause notice followed by a month’s suspension from the Bar Association she belonged to, as punishment for a Facebook post in which she called the behaviour of some male advocates with female colleagues ‘lecherous’, and commented that this was impelled by a wish to ‘subjugate’ women. The Association felt that she had insulted the advocate community to which she belonged and overstepped her freedom of speech even on an informal forum.
*Facebook, the most popular of social network sites, is being trolled continually by anti-queer persons whose selfappointed task is to cleanse this cyber-immensity of every post and link that challenges or undermines their ideal of a wholesome, conjugal, procreative, stable, ethical society. There is one such person who has garnered a report in a newspaper in Chandigarh as an ‘anti-AIDS activist’, a rabid homophobe who preys on individual and group pages on Facebook for material he objects to and raves and rants till he is banned and blocked – after which he reappears, genielike, under a fake identity and worms his way into the same pages and groups and starts his cleansing process once more until identified and hounded out all over again.
*Kumar Vishwas and Somnath Bharti of the freshly-minted Aam Aadmi Party of Delhi have embarked on aggressive socialclean- up drives on the streets of Delhi, targeting ‘drug and sex rackets’, and some erstwhile-left-leaning intellectual aam aadmi who jumped on to this new political bandwagon with alacrity are now anxious, embarrassed and confused, but are unable to jump off it since ‘cleaning up’ seems a valuable political mantra; AAP meets RSS in a moral soup which the once-Left is left to swallow or gag on.
Vigilantism, clearly, is the raw stinging flavour of the season.
The most fearful, if expected, fallout of the shocking redemption of Section 377 by the highest court of the land on December 11, 2013, is that it has allowed the most dangerous of people in the land – the ones who are bigoted – to take the law into their own hands and run with it. The Supreme Court, in preserving the law, has surrendered it to the very ones they should have guarded it from the most. The vigilantes have snatched a nugget of a legal explosive from the robed wise ones to strut out their own spiel on the ethics of erotics. And as with all vigilantes, they are gobbling up the law and spitting it out at the world around them in a fine stinky mess. However, what is far more significant about the aftermath of the ruling is that it has revealed, yet again, a complexity about vigilantism that we keep encountering but never quite come to terms with: that it can be both rabid and reasonable, loud and silent, conservative and liberal – and rightwing and leftist.
In the history of Indian politics and its ideological dealings with sexualities, this is not shocking but merely, continually, ironical. The political right, in its many personae and disguises, never disappoints in churning out worn clichéd responses to any threat of carnal excess. The BJP, and the RSS, expectedly therefore, declared in December that it upheld 377 not merely because the Supreme Court had ruled on it but because it believed that homosexuality was a Western import that threatened the exemplary cultural traditions of India. The Congress, under immense public pressure at a time when all its fortresses were crumbling, decided to gamble on a strong anti-377 stand, filing a review plea of the judgment of December with the SC. The fledgling Aam Aadmi Party of Delhi raised left-liberal hopes in its early days by declaring that it had found the SC judgment “disappointing”, hoped that it would be reviewed and that Parliament would also “step in to repeal this archaic law.”
We are all queer, in fantasy if not in reality – but some of us are afraid of being queer because we want to be safe instead, and because we feel that it is irresponsible and unethical to step outside of norms. Queer is desire itself, it is the erotic personified – because every desire is a transgression, it ceaselessly wishes for more than what is. This state of constant instability and fraughtness goes against the very grain of vigilantism, which at bottom aspires to be statusquoist. The raving vigilante, however, is not theone who is full of stable conviction, but is rather the one who is destabilized by inner contradictions and is violent and aggressive as a result of this cross between two impossible desires, to be ethical and to be erotic.
In an unsurprising equivocation, CPM MP Sitaram Yechury said, “It is now a legal matter in the sense that the Supreme Court has overturned the HC ruling and on that basis it has made certain observations. Those observations involve the invoking of the executive’s responsibility in law making in order to resolve the conflict. Since the judiciary has sought the executive’s involvement, the executive have to properly study what the judgment is all about.” SUCI (Communist) Party, a far more non-equivocating arm of the left, issued a statement from Bengal on December 23, 2013 invoking its general secretary ‘Comrade Prabhash Ghosh’ which harangues: “…homosexuality is a sick, unnatural and perverted sexual practice… We believe that this irresponsible and decadent lifestyle is deeply harmful to society and a criminal offence.”
The stance of the morally Right is not so shocking after all. That social networks are teeming with sternly-moral foes (‘unfriends’ before they are ‘unfriended’), that judges of the Supreme Court are overstepping their briefs to pass universal diktats on pre-marital sex, that closet-homophobes are crawling out in droves for their day under a vengeful sky. In such a moral chill as this, it is hardly surprising that the continual somersaults of 377 in the law courts of India should unleash a brash new set of vigilantes who are both enraged and empowered by the goings-on around queerness. Enraged, because the ‘we are queer, we are here’ sloganeering has really borne fruit, and the visibility of non-conformist ‘sexy types’ has grown like mushrooms under straw in humid conditions. Empowered, because the Supreme Court has pushed an atom bomb into their hands with the judgment of December 11 that overturned the landmark Delhi High Court reading-down of the law in 2009, and they’re swinging it around in a frenzy of paranoid hatred as they mark their targets.
What is to be noted here, rather, is that this rabid vigilante case against queers extends, in actuality, to something far beyond a common understanding of who the subjects of 377 really are. The Supreme Court’s upholding of 377 is at least partially based on the argument that it concerns a ‘miniscule minority’ of the Indian population, a fraction that does not worry our law-enforcers enough to wish to protect it.That this in itself is contrary to what the judiciary’s primary responsibility is to the Indian constitution – to uphold each and every citizen’s fundamental rights – has already been loudly protested. But the vigilantes support the court’s decision of late 2013 for two further implications: one, that they, unlike the SC bench, clearly do not believe that it is a ‘miniscule minority’ of offenders (or if they do, size does not matter and even a miniscule number needs to be rooted out); and two, they have in fact interpreted 377 correctly enough to understand that the law does not pertain ‘only’ to homosexuals and transgenders. In both, they see the threat as larger than, and/or more significant than, a negligible few who practice a carnality that is ‘against the order of nature’.
They drink coffee, and hang out at all the left-leaning or liberal conferences, apparently leaning left or being liberal together. But among them are many who secretly, righteously, silently, enigmatically believe in a life of sanity and stability, in living responsibly and productively, in doing the right thing by oneself and society, in never crossing the mark, in never overreaching, fantasizing, or screaming in nightmares. Such is the power and persuasion of the ethical good that wisdom and maturity and loyalty and familial bliss appear just around the corner, tantalizingly within reach – where each of them can claim a bodhi tree and win peace as an award.
What makes these implications potentially more dangerous than the SC’s mandate is that these vigilantes perceive the threat to be a large and real one to the kind of ideal society they envisage for their ‘nation’. Therefore, they will not let the matter rest with the reinstatement, so to speak, of 377 in legal terms, especially knowing that the law has not been invoked and implemented with much frequency or consistency in the 150 years of its existence. If there is an inherent contradiction in the SC’s judgment – that ‘unnatural’ sexual practice is dangerous for a well-knit ‘social fabric’ of nationhood, but also that such unnatural practices are confined to a minority who do not really matter to the national profile and need no looking out for – then there are contradictions too (or concurrences, if you will) at various levels in vigilante- speak post 12/11: the miniscule minority needs to be gutted because despite being marginal and negligible they are harmful to society; and/or, they are really not that insignificant in number or impact; and/or, non-acceptable sexual behaviour is not confined to this marginalia, significant or not in number, but actually permeates through larger parts of society which needs to be purged of such a scourge.
Vigilantes are, first and foremost, fascists, masquerading as do-gooders. They believe in a certain blueprint for the world they inhabit with a kind of sick frenzy, and so they want to cleanse it of any germs of ideas, ideologies or behavioural practices that pollute the air they aspire to maintain. Vigilantism is always aspirational and conservative. More than that, however, it seems that in this case around 377, vigilantism is born out of fear and shame, an inability to come to terms with not just what is transgressive in a society they wish to see shaped otherwise – that is assumed – but that which is transgressive in themselves. It is guilt about desiring to be or do what one believes one should not be or do.
Everyone wishes to transgress, to push the boundaries of convention, to seek pleasures which are elusive and illusive. We are all queer, in fantasy if not in reality – but some of us are afraid of being queer because we want to be safe instead, and because we feel that it is irresponsible and unethical to step outside of norms. Queer is desire itself, it is the erotic personified – because every desire is a transgression, it ceaselessly wishes for more than what is. This state of constant instability and fraughtness goes against the very grain of vigilantism, which at bottom aspires to be status-quoist. The raving vigilante, however, is not theone who is full of stable conviction, but is rather the one who is destabilized by inner contradictions and is violent and aggressive as a result of this cross between two impossible desires, to be ethical and to be erotic.They are easily identified, because they constitute a lunatic fringe.
It is the other kinds of vigilantism that we are less wary of because we fail to identify them as enemies of sexual freedom. This kind is to be found not among the rightwingers, but along the racy continuum that stretches among the populace from the liberal through the neo-liberal via the left-liberal to the so-called left. They are comprised of people who feel comfortable with each other as opposed to self-confessedly uncomfortable with those of the rabid right. They drink coffee, and hang out at all the left-leaning or liberal conferences, apparently leaning left or being liberal together. But among them are many who secretly, righteously, silently, enigmatically believe in a life of sanity and stability, in living responsibly and productively, in doing the right thing by oneself and society, in never crossing the mark, in never overreaching, fantasizing, or screaming in nightmares. Such is the power and persuasion of the ethical good that wisdom and maturity and loyalty and familial bliss appear just around the corner, tantalizingly within reach – where each of them can claim a bodhi tree and win peace as an award. Where, then, is the space for desire and terror among them, for passion and transgression? Who, really, among all of them are queer, then, however much they are outraged by 377?
A strange sleight of political hand is often witnessed in these negotiations, by which the far left switches sides to the far right, resulting in the practice of a peculiar brand of socialist fascism. There are two coordinates to the impetus of this left brand of fascism: the first, ideology, and the second, praxis. Leftist ideology about the erotic comes probably straight from enlightenment philosophy, the idea that a teleological progress toward a classless society must always remain the focus of all inquiry and understanding, emphasizing questions of labour and the historicizing of class struggles over and beyond any questions of sexual pleasure, because all other forms of radical politics seems to them to be either revisionist- liberal or romantic-excessive. To these serious left thinkers, the very idea of queerness appears as either a liberal- social-democrat pastime or a severely-decadent adventurism. If we return to the SUCI( C ) pamphlet, the general secretary thunders: “The more reactionary the bourgeois become, leading to tastelessness, consumerism, individualism and valueless irresponsibility, we see that things turn toward decadent sexual excesses – taking the society into a poisonous bog of rotten filth and offal, leading to such practices like homosexuality. It is no use telling people that since the times have changed, we can now turn into bourgeois reactionaries.” The belief is that only social democrats can afford to be avantgarde, decadent; and those who are decadent are social democrats – either way they are not invested in revolutionary politics of any kind, and are now treading a misguided path.
This is an in-your-face rabid leftist take on eroticism, erotics always already perceived as an indulgence and a frivolity which undermines any serious political agenda. The condemnation is so clear and confident: one can see how it veers precariously close to right-wing pronouncements we are familiar with and which we easily slot and dismiss. The second fascistic impulse is less visible and thus more difficult to identify and beware of. It emerges at the level of practice, where an uneasy divergence is often noticed between belief and non/action. These may be of three kinds. First, a number of left ideologues who are theoretically sympathetic to the cause of homosexuality, and who can see the radical potential of the very idea of queering, still are – because of background, training, historical circumstance, social pressure –unable to translate it into an articulated ‘position’. And so they refrain from taking any position at all publicly, remaining ill-at-ease, silent. They hope that their benevolent silence conveys their support of the ‘cause’ of queerness, but of course it does nothing of the sort, since silence is more often than not taken as collusion by bigots and bullies.
The second kind in this category of ‘praxis’ are the ethical left-leaners whose weakness for a spiritual quietude pits them fundamentally against any idea of sexual transgression; which they then transcend, making of it an ethical choice. Desire, to them, is always secondary to the question of will, which is considered central to political decision- making. The ethical-transcendentalist left thinkers are sanguine and suave; being convinced of the efficacy of their judgment they are able to win friends and influence many who would otherwise have been rambunctious in their celebrations of queerness.
The third left-leaning individual constructs what may be seen as a kind of intersectionality between sexual freedom and other responsibilities, like respect for what elder family members or children may want or workplace professionalism, subjugating any excess of sexual desiring to other insistent ethics. This kind of impulse serves a liberal, legal definition of rights rather than a radical one, for the radical would have to look beyond law to tip the hat at a certain amount of madness and mayhem in the pursuit and conflict of individual rights.
I remember a few years ago when our MA students were organizing a seminar on Literature and Gender, and planned to end the day with a play-reading from The Vagina Monologues. Just the title made some of the faculty and administrators blanch (many not having heard of the play at all earlier) and retreat into a sullen perturbed silence, neither able to risk being labelled reactionary nor comfortable with endorsing what they assumed (wrongly) would be merely a risqué performance, having no sense of its politics. This silence, conveying displeasure and doubt – which almost disallowed the event – is perhaps the most problematic sort of vigilantism that restrains by being shifty, prevaricating, banal and muffled. No one can shout back because no one is shouting in the first place.
But all of these are left/liberal safe positions: they are all vigilantes of various kinds, and none of them are completely comfortable with queering as a philosophy and a politics as much as a practice. Queer remains maverick, risky, boisterous, enraptured, endangered. In some bold or stolen corners of our complex selves, we are all queer, but vigilantism to the left and right of us always aspires to not let us be as queer as we really are.
Brinda Bose teaches at the Department of English, University of Delhi, and is co-founder of MargHumanities.
