[Reader-list] on sexualisation of spaces and other such

[A Khanna]

dear all,

this is my second posting on my project 'Zara hut ke', which seeks to
enable a 'queer space' in Delhi. This posting is delayed due to
unavoidable (and exciting) developments in my larger research on queer
activism and the emergence of 'sexuality' as a political object in
urban civil society activist formations. Apologies to those who have
been waiting and have expressed an interest in reading my posting.

This posting is divided into three parts. In the first i shall examine
what it means to look at 'space' as a sexual category. Here i shall
raise issues that relate 'visibility' to discourse and about the
sexualisation of space as a political object. In the second section i
shall examine the internet as a 'queer space'. A question that arises
is whether the internet allows for the negotiation of disembodied
abstract social relationships, or whether it is better understood as
always embedded within a specific context. In the final section i shall
briefly describe some of the issues that have come up in while looking
for a place where the queer space can be enabled.

These are tentative thoughts which I hope will raise interesting questions.

Section 1: sex and public spaces
At a recent activist meeting relating to the public interest litigation
challenging Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (the colonial
anti-sodomy law that is the focus of much queer activism) the question
arose as to whether it would make sense for a group of queer folk – or
more precisely visibly queer folk, to descend upon the court – to
simply be present when the highest court of the land could potentially
be deciding on our terms of citizenship. Overwhelmingly, people felt
that this would be a bad idea – the strategy was to frame the case in
terms of 'technicalities' as we did not want the Supreme Court to take
up the substantive question of whether Section 377 is constitutionally
invalid. All we wanted was for the Supreme Court to decide that the
High Court of Delhi had been wrong in dismissing the petition on the
grounds that Section 377 affected no one in particular and thus, that
the matter raised a mere 'academic' question. The presence of visibly
queer folk would jeopardise such a 'technical' framing, and the stakes
were too high to attempt something as radical as queering the space of
the court. While there are a range of questions that arose in this
moment – about the (often illusory) distinctions between 'substantive'
and 'technical'/'procedural' aspects of law, about the negotiation of
the 'client role' in the lawyer-client-court relationship etc., what i
want to examine here is the question – what kind of space is the court?
More precisely, how is it sexualised? A little detour here.

I remember, at this point, an incident that took place while i was
working as an student-intern in the lower courts in Delhi – an incident
that put me off the idea of working as an advocate, forever. This was a
time of the dual life for me. During the day i would dress up in a
coat, tie and the like...but the evenings were my own, and often i
would indulge myself and dress up, use make up, paint my nails, go out.
Things went smoothly as long as i maintained this image of the 'real
man', and i had accumulated the warmth and camaraderie of many young
lawyers, until one morning, in a hurry, i forgot to remove my
nailpolish. There i was, stuck in the midst of my colleagues, petrified
at the possibility of letting any of them see my hands. I had never
spent so much time with my hands in my pockets, or under files, or
waited for the evening so desperately. As luck would have it, i was
discovered – by my boss's young son, who in his excitement at finding
that 'akshay bhaiya' was not quite 'bhaiya', spread the word. Soon
enough, I found myself standing in the middle of a semi-circle of my
lawyer friends, displaying my hands for all to see. The awkward silence
only ended when i left the place. For the rest of the internship i had
not a single visit from my lawyer friends, not a single conversation.
The space was closed to me. Or more accurately, that space was closed
to me as long as i did not transgress the visible imperatives of
gender. (in retrospect, i'm glad this happened - i made me find other
things to do with my law degree, and i think i'm doing pretty well for
myself).

Perhaps there is something to be said here about the peculiarly
heteronormative nature of a post-colonial judicial system. Where a
large amount of energy is spent on enforcing the 'honour' of the Court,
for instance, through Contempt proceedings, this 'honour' emerges as
that of the patriarch – the 'real' (heterosexual) man who metes out
justice. Codes of behaviour are, in other words, 'terms of presence' in
a given space. Conversely, a given space is constituted by these
implicit 'terms of presence'. And i think the two situations i have
referred to above suggest that these 'terms of presence' are to be
performed and seen – i.e. It is through our continuous visible
performances/negotiations of the terms of presence that the sexual
nature of a space is maintained or shaken up.

But what is the relationship between visibility and discourse (in the
more traditional sense, i.e. negotiations articulated in language?)
What is the relationship between visible transgression of the implicit
'terms of presence' in a space, and discourse? The Courts provide a
particularly interesting context to examine this question as they play
the role of making entries into the formal juridical register of
citizenship. In the case of the Section 377 litigation, the message
seem to be that if we are to be considered as subjects worthy of
juridical recognition, if we are to be considered as citizens with
rights, we can only be treated as abstract, disembodied entities. Our
visible presence, apparently would be seen as an affront to the
'dignity' of the process through which we shall be recognised as
citizens with equal rights.

The Courts are a particular 'public space' where the requriements of
gender/sexuality performance are related, inter alia, to ideas of
'dignity' of the legal profession. Let's consider another particular
'public space' – the public park.

The recent case of Operation Majnu in Meerut where the exact question
of the sexual nature of public space was the issue at the centre of a
national controversy. This was a case where where women police officers
were shown on most news channels slapping women who were found with men
in public parks. This 'sting operation' carried out by the moral police
backfired and we were met with the intriguing situation where Sushma
Swaraj's words resonated with those of Brinda Karat. 'Do our children
not have the right', asked an inflamed Sushma in the Rajya Sabha,
'mingle freely in public parks'? Political parties across the board
(with the exception of the Shiv Sena, of course) spoke out against the
outrage, with the National Human Rights Commission and the National
Commission for Women getting into the act as well. Interestingly, what
was being defended here was a right to privacy, or perhaps intimacy, in
a public space – which raises the question – what kind of space is the
public park?
The public park is a fascinating space. From joggers to morning
walkers, to lovers seeking a little solitude, to the everyday person
taking a brief sojourn from the drudgery of the working day, the park
is the 'public space' where privacy is granted to those who do not
otherwise have the luxury of a safe private space. Intimacy here is not
just accepted, but expected. Walking through a park, we avert our eyes
from sweet couplings as though honouring an unspoken contract of mutual
respect for each other's privacy. The public park, therefore emerges as
a precious space for socialising, for relaxing, and significantly, for
romance. In other words, it was the sexualised nature of the park being
defended. If this is considered a moment where 'public space' was
articulated a political object, the question is – how was this
political object sexualised?
Now consider that this public space is also occupied, and constituted
by Queer folk – significantly, gay men, kothi and hijras, similarly
socialising, relaxing and romancing. A corner of the park is often a
designated 'cruising area'. Two weeks after Operation Majnu, the police
again carried out an act of moral policing, this time a few hundred
kilometers away, in Lucknow. This time, the police claimed that they
had caught 4 gay men 'red handed' at a public park. While this was a
fabricated case (one man was picked up from his house, and the other
three were entrapped and arrested in a restaurant), the public park
again emerged as a sexualised political object in the media. Perhaps
not surprisingly, there was no outrage in the media, no politicians
asking questions in parliament, no NHRC enquiry. If anything, the local
press joined in the police attack on 'gay culture'. Juxtaposing
Operation Majnu and the Lucknow incident makes me think, first, that
the articulation of space as a political object is necessarily to
engage heteronormativity, and second, that the impulse to maintain the
public park as a sexualised space in response to Operation Majnu was an
aggressive act of exclusion.

Section 2: The internet as a queer space
The Lucknow incident brought to the fore the significance of the
internet as a queer space. The men arrested had been 'tracked down'
through their profiles on a website where gay men seek each other, and
the police framed the case as one of an 'internet gay club'.
Now the significance of the internet to the queer community cannot be
undermined. At one level it is an essential mode of communication, and
a site for political negotiations between queer activists around the
country. E-groups provide the space for planning of activist events, as
well as larger debates and processes of strategising. In a sense, it is
on these groups that participants create their locations of speech,
their identities vis-a-vis each other. Further, it may be said that the
sense of a 'larger community', and of a 'movement' emerges from its
virtual existence. This raises a range of questions. There is sense of
a  'queer movement' in Delhi, that is distinct from the 'national',
virtual 'queer movement'. I presume a similar situation for other
cities. How do disjunctures between these come to be manifested and
negotiated? Can we consider the internet as a queer space that simply
allows for disembodied and abstract social relations? Or should we look
at the embededness of the practices that constitute the internet as a
queer space?

At another level the internet is perhaps the most erotic space allowing
for access to pornography, fantasy and erotic encounters. The arrests
in Lucknow thus were an attack not merely on the 4 men actually taken
into custody, but on the queer community in general. For weeks after
the arrests a sense of panic circulated on e-groups, many people took
off their profiles from websites, and a heteronormative sanitisation of
communication ensued.

The tension here is perhaps one between the sense of anonymity that
allows for expression of virtual selves and (virtual?) desires, and the
sense of surveillance that creates fear. 'We all know', for instance,
that the police, and groups that oppose the queer movement (such as
JACK – an NGO that has opposed the 377 petition in Court) have
subscribed to lgbt_india. We also know that there is always a risk of
blackmail and police entrapment every time we meet some one new in a
chatroom. This complicates the understanding a 'queer space' as a 'safe
space'.
My readings on the anthropology of the internet are limited and i would
really appreciate suggestions on how i can approach this part of my
research.

Section 3: the search for a physical space
As i had mentioned in my first posting, one of the things i intended to
do in finding a place where the 'queer space' cold constitute itself,
was to inform the house owners and estate agents of my intentions for
the space. The primary presumption that i intended to test here was
that people would generally be unwilling to let out their property for
the use of queer folk. In this point I must say i was taken by surprise
– with not a single overtly aggressive reaction. But more
significantly, the experience of looking for a space has opened up the
possibilities for a broader research.
The process of looking for a place is largely about negotiating the
'safety' of one's identity. Most landlords and estate agents have a
(practiced) series of questions that they must ask even before showing
one the place. Most often, the first question is about one's marital
status (are you a bachelor?) and the second is one's credentials in the
economy (aap kahaan service karte hain?). Other questions revolved
around which part of the country i come from, whether i was
non-vegetarian, whether there would be other people living with me. And
the like. There is seemingly a matrix of questions that assess
suitability and safety of a tenant in terms of caste, religion, marital
status, position in economy, professional affiliations, habits of
consumption... It would be interesting to do some sort of mapping of
these letting practices and examine their relationship with processes
through which multiple 'others' are constructed, as well as how these
processes then come to be articulated in terms of demography, the
geographic distribution of 'types', and further, on community
formation, political processes, aesthetics and the like. It would be
interesting, further, to carry out this process out from a visibly
queer subject position. This is a larger project that i wish i had the
time for, but as of now it seems a bit too ambitious given other
commitments, responsibilities and priorities in my research. I would,
however, be thrilled if anyone were interested in doing something like
this in collaboration, which would further complicate the process
beyond my subject position and modes of self-representation.

Thus far, apart from keeping in mind these questions of letting
practices, the construction of the safe tenant and attitudes to
(sexual) queerness/otherness, i have kept in mind what i imagine as the
minimum requirements for the queer space as i envisage it, including
size, location (vis-a-vis largely south delhi based queer activism),
aesthetic possibilities and, of course, rent. Nothing that fits all
requirements has come up, and where it has, the landlord has deferred
the decision to allow the queering of the space onto others – in
response to my description of what i intend for the space ('there will
be gay, lesbian, hijra vagera people coming here regularly for
meetings...') i have most often come up against 'i have no problem at
all, but i will have to ask my family'. Where the family had no
problem, the rent was too high.
I hope to be able to find a place soon and begin the process of setting
up the space.

That's all for now. Hope this has raised some interesting issues for
discussion.

Best,

akshay