[Reader-list] summary-outing Bangalore ...

[Arvind Narrain]

Please find below a brief about the project “Outing
Bangalore: Intersections of Geographies, Law, and
Sexualities”
“Outing Bangalore” is a project that seeks to
understand a hitherto marginalised, invisible part of
Bangalore’s cultural landscape.  Specifically, this
involves the subculture of sexual identities such as
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT).  We
seek to understand the emergence of these identity
categories by looking at the colonial and
post-colonial discourses of law and medicine and their
role in constructing the homosexual subject.

Global and local contexts
Urban spaces are important sites of discourses on
sexuality. Modernity/ capitalism contributes to the
break down of traditional collective structures and
creation/ suppression of LGBT spaces and cultures. In
India also, it is the city that has provided spaces
for the formation of LGBT cultures through the
organization of city space. Research on LGBT issues in
India tends to focus more heavily on public health
approaches (i.e., HIV/AIDS, STDs, STIs etc. as the
main issues) and concentrating specially on
male-to-male sexual behaviour. Public health
discourses have looked at LGBT people as ‘risk groups’
or sexually ‘promiscuous’ people.  LGBT as legitimate
cultural identities are only now emerging in India.
However the emergence of these identities in the
current context faces particular difficulties with
respect to the emergence of the Hindu right and the
phenomenon of globalisation and its impact on the
creation/definition and regulation of the spaces. 
Bangalore, a city of close to 7 million people, has
emerged as an international city and offers more
complex circulations of people and, therefore, of
ideas.  The accessibility of urban spaces catering to
this diverse range of people depends upon social and
economic power. What urban spaces can a ‘hijra’ have
easier access to than a heterosexual person? Is there
any way in which hetero-normative nature of space is
challenged by other emerging spaces?
The study seeks to examine real (i.e., physical
spaces), discursive (verbal and non-verbal) and cyber
spaces and how sexuality is constituted in the Indian
context. We will particularly look at medical spaces
(and their interactions with sexuality) and LGBT
spaces in their real, discursive, and cyber
manifestations.

Study objectives
As with India in general, the emergence, in Bangalore,
of the rights of LGBT people and cultures in India is
a recent phenomenon with a few civil liberties groups
actively recognizing and articulating them.  Since
those early beginnings, the fledgling LGBT rights
movement has grown increasingly vocal and articulate. 

Systematic knowledge on some aspects of LGBT people is
slowly emerging. In order to help address the lack of
knowledge about LGBT spaces and issues in India, this
project’s objectives are to:
·	Study selected spaces to understand how they
function as sites of intersection of geographies, law,
and sexualities, particularly LGBT people’s
sexualities.  
·	Study how these spaces are also sites of LGBT
resistance, celebration, and empowerment.  The spaces
to be studied in this project are: (a) medical space,
and (b) LGBT spaces.
·	Study the impact on the private LGBT space of the
LGBT discourse’s move from the private to the public.
·	Describe and document how LGBT individuals’ access,
occupy, traverse, and shape, and are shaped by these
spaces.
·	Prepare a set of intervention tools that can bring
the results of the project to a variety of spaces and
begin a process of dialogue to making these spaces
(more) LGBT-sensitive and  (more) LGBT-empowering.

Intersections of geographies, law, and sexualities:
the approach
As an interdisciplinary area, cultural geography looks
at issues in the context of space (space being the
central focus of geography).  In this study, the
cultural geographic framework offers understanding
about the spaces that LGBT people live in and from
that, action can follow.  Sexualities, particularly
LGBT sexualities, and their spaces are among the many
issues with which geographers have engaged.
How has the figure of the homosexual as a deviant
emerged in modern law? How does law construct what is
natural sexual behaviour? What are the identities
which get stabilized as ‘natural’ through constructing
the ‘unnatural’? What are the roles of both criminal
and civil law in constructing the homosexual as an
(un)viable (un)subject in civil law and as a series of
unnatural sexual practices when it comes to the
criminal law? However, often operating in the sites of
greatest regulation, LGBT people have forged cultures
of resistance. LGBT people are today claiming the
language of rights, which has so far been used in the
context of heterosexual citizenship. It is in this
context that human rights discourse can become
important. 
Sexuality is the least discoursed issue in India.
Moreover ‘sexuality discourse’ includes both
problematic as well as celebratory aspects of
sexualities (whether heterosexual, homosexual or
otherwise). Sexuality becomes a terrain that
constructs notions of normality and abnormality.  What
are visible are the varieties of discourses on rape
(forced sexual intercourse), prostitution (selling sex
for money), child sexual abuse (having sex with
children), or homosexuality (same-sex sexual
behaviour).  What gets strangely invisibilised in this
variety of discourses is the supposed norm –– sex
within the context of marital relationships.  Through
this process of sexual construction, norms of
respectable behaviours and deviant behaviours emerge.

Medical spaces
The medical establishment in India — viz., The Medical
Council of India, Indian Medical Association and
Indian Psychiatric Association — has adopted the WHO
system of classification of mental and behavioural
disorders known as ICD -10 (1992) This system
distinguishes between ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic
homosexuality as psychiatric disorders where sexual
preference is not in doubt, but the individual wishes
it were different and seeks treatment. In such a case
treatment is warranted. The syntonic / dystonic
distinction is problematic and many doctors assume
that any patient who comes to them is suffering from
ego-dystonic homosexuality. 
In a context of a society where there is little
information about same sex desires and relationships,
LGBT people have been subject to a wide range of
medical treatments, which include administration of
drugs to induce nervous reactions, shock therapy and
behavioural therapy all aimed at coercing heterosexual
behaviour. Other systems of medicine such as ayurveda
and homoeopathy also view LGBT people as perverted and
needing cure. According to one reputed homeopathic
doctor in Bangalore, homosexuality is curable in
homeopathy and was invariably linked to dysfunctional
families, sexual abuse, or boyhood sexual fantasies.
Besides this, there are also numerous unqualified,
unqualified, illegal medical practitioners (“quacks”)
who ‘treat’ homosexuality.
In the context of medical space, this research will
examine, among other things, (a) How the medical
discourse constructs notions of normality and
abnormality (b) How clinical category of ego-dystonic
homosexuality is actually a product of societal
attitudes (c) How medical discourse itself as a
product of a hetero-normative framework (d) How this
discourse impacts on the sense of self and identity
(e) How the universal norms of human rights interact
with this particular kind of modern suffering. (f) How
traditional/non-allopathic medical systems (ayurveda,
unani, homoeopathy) address homosexuality (g) How
modern and traditional medical systems compare in
accommodating LGBT lives.

LGBT spaces
Emergence of LGBT groups and emancipatory practices
such as activism, groups, newsletters, help lines,
demonstrations, public talks etc. which help create
and define the spaces of hope will be studied.
Sub-cultural identities are formed in a variety of
ways, one of which is political assertion and, through
occupation of public space, resisting
invisibilisation. This occupation of public space is
buttressed by an increasingly vocal civil liberties
discourse. But the emergence of these groups though
influenced strongly by their western counterparts,
still assert their identity in ways unique to the
local. This is not only because of difficulties and
oppressions particular to the local but also due to a
construction of the self that goes beyond sexuality.
Thus a study of sexuality politics in India generally,
and Bangalore particularly, involves studying its
particular local history while simultaneously keeping
an eye on its global influences. 
In this project, we will (a) Examine the role that
Bangalore’s LGBT spaces have played in the
life-journeys of individual LGBT people and, in turn,
contributed to the emergence of a larger movement
towards developing a social and political community.
(b) Examine the processes of sectoral developments
such as NGOs, media, and others very visibly influence
these LGBT spaces. (c) Examine the perceptions of
these groups from both emic and etic perspectives. (d)
Map the growth of these groups and their specific
forms of assertion, which in turn would generate a
reflexivity and theorisation.
Chandra Shekhar Balachandran
Arvind Narrain
Vinay Chandran




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