[Reader-list] First Posting- Queer Cityscapes

[sheba tejani]

Hi everyone,

My name is Sheba, I work for a social science journal and I live in
Bombay. This is my first posting about my project. I moved to Bombay
only a couple of years ago and since then I've had some interesting
experiences and insights about living in this city as a queer person,
and with another queer person. My project was/ is being born out of
this dailiness of living in what many people call, somewhat
ironically, the 'queer capital of India'.

The project will involving creating an audio-visual of conversations
between two women that centre around the experience of living and
"translating" Bombay, as well being seen and being translated. Of
course, the work will be pure fiction and I plan to script four
different conversations and shoot appropriate still or moving images
for each. For instance, the conversations could be about a particular
media event, such as an advertisement, a television show, a movie or
poster/s; about public transport, street fights, or social divisions;
about finding/ creating/ imagining homes and families, coping with
prejudice, or interacting with the gay community. Each of the
conversations might have disjointed and individual trajectories but
they would be united together in a larger narrative framework.

I am interested in the 'queer encounter' with the city and would like
to tap into the continuous processes of dialogue that enable a
multi-layered connection to the urban space, or even produce it in the
first place. So it is not only the city 'seeing' the queer, but the
queer seeing the city, by cognising, assimilating, rejecting but all
the while engaging with the space.

As a part of my background work I plan to interview other queer women
living in the city about their experiences and hope that somewhere
these will inform my work. This will also form part of my archival
material for Sarai.

I'm excited about the work and look forward to any comments,
suggestions, feedback, questions etc through the entire process.

Cheers
Sheba