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Hello. Thank you for joining us. We are proud to welcome you to our special series, Across the Rainbow, brought to you by Brill, where we talk about gender equality, its past, its present, and its future. I'm your host, Lee John Greco.
Today we're speaking with Dr. Jayaprakash Yamishra. He has a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology at Hyderabad, and he's the author of Queering Emotion in South Asia, Biographical Narratives of Gay Men in Odisha, India. Dr.
Misha, thanks so much for talking with us today. Thank you so much for having me here. So before you get into the study, set the stage for us. What was going on in India's socio-political climate a decade ago?
I'm really glad that you opened up the conversation with this question to give you a little bit of context about the study. This study is situated in a socio-political climate marked primarily by two events. First on 11th December 2013, the Supreme Court of India, which is the apex court overturned the Delhi High Court statement against Section 377 of IPC, thereby re-criminalizing same-sex activity. Second, the political party that has been advocating that homosexuality is against Indian culture and is imported from the West took to power at the center.
And because of these two events, the expectation of Section 377 of Indian penal code being read down through a parliamentary process kind of seized. So these studies started in a socio-political climate charged with hopelessness. However, such hopelessness also led to a positive outcome. The resistance against the heteronormative forces became more systematic, organized, and structured.
Non-governmental organizations, lawyers collective, the queer community, and also the allies congregated and NAS foundation filed a charity petition against the Supreme Court's judgment. Such responses from the Indian Civil Society provided further impetus to media coverage, discussions on various forums, and also numerous queer pride parades and events that brought visibility to the community. My briefs didn't in queer academy connective circles in Southern Indian state of Telangana and Karnataka. By 2050 also offered me an insight into the despire anger and some hope among the people from the queer community.
So the discussion around queer scholarship focused on the anti-sodermi law, state operation, the social stigma, and those such mobilization played a very important role in the fight against criminalization of homosexuality in the legal discourse. But such events, meetings, and discussions are also primarily organized and attended by a educated, elite English meetings that you've read queer people who are mostly out in the public or where was I grosated. So such exclusions have been discussed by many people including Anidudhata as metronormative, meaning queer discourse centered on urban lives and experiences. Although these groups managed to attract interest of a specific section of people, the absence of quote unquote common gay man was also noticeable, implying that most of these spaces systematically ruled out the existence of gay men who may not eventually want to become activists, may not think of closet as necessarily regressive or may not look for chosen family.
And these are people whose stories may not necessarily conform to the standard transnational or global template of coming out to parents, needle family, looking for a queer community or sitting apart now. And such realizations also encouraged me to exclude the experience of gay men from semi urban and rural pockets of poor DSA. Yeah. So a lot to dig in there.
You mentioned that discussions around emotion, particularly guilt remain heteronormative. Before we get into why those discussions, just tell us what does it mean? What does queer in emotion mean, exactly? Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for this question. Whether the title queer in emotion in South Asia seemed really ambitious when I decided to use it for the paper, I pulled this title of the paper from one of the chapters of my doctoral thesis where I discussed three different kinds of emotion in the likes of gay men in Eastern Indian state of Odisha where I actually did my field study. So broadly, I discussed how gay men after losing someone with whom they were intimately involved did not have the access to grieving because their brief was also structurally delegitimized and also because their relationships are also not socially and legally recognized. I'm also thinking of hope and happiness among gay men because the discuss was predominantly about discrimination, stigma, police brutality, and different kinds of antagonistic relationship with state and kinship.
Other than these two emotions, I also discussed how guilt is an important emotion among gay men for supposedly not being able to reciprocate the social, emotional, and sometimes financial support extended to them by sort of not meeting their heteronormated expectation of marriage, reproduction, and failure of piety. The focus of this paper is on guilt as an emotion rather than guilt in a legal, technical, and ontological or theological sense of the term. Guilt is believed to have an internal orientation and is considered intra-psychic which exists and occurs within the mind. Besides, beside techno-izing that, this study also suggests that the causes, consequences, and functions of this intra-psychic response have substantial interpersonal and social aspects.
So following Sara Hemat's Queer feelings and feeling queer in the book, Queer Phenomenology and also Calchial Chlorotics of Emotion, I use Queer Emotion in the title of this paper, broadly thinking about how these play out in the lives of queer people in the complex ways, particularly in relation to their natal family. So the study examined 32 gay men from the Eastern Indian state of Votisha. Can you talk a little bit more about the objectives of the study which you already touched on a bit? So before I discuss the objectives of the study, just to give you a little bit of context of the field site, I conducted this field study in 2015.
I not only collected 32 ethnographic accounts of gay men who were married to women and off-marigable age, I also conducted joint interviews of men who were in partnership with each other, participant observations, and also I followed the life trajectories for the past five years. I also discussed my multiple entries, exits, and re-visits, how my, sorry, I also discussed my, I also discussed how my multiple entries, exits, and re-visits have influenced and impacted the ethnographic data that I have collected. And so drawing on these ethnographic data, I examined how guilt-feeling among gay men is not just an internal orientation, but can also be induced by other people's complexity as actions. It uncovers how guilt is roused among gay men in a social system based on reciprocity, the society urges gay men to repay to their parents, siblings, and caretakers by fulfilling their heteronormatic expectations.
It also foregrounds how gay men respond when they are systematically made aware of their indebtedness to a series of individuals. You include this poem in your article by Bracastrati, and I was wondering if you could read this to us because I think it illustrates the certain type of guilt that you write about very concisely. Yeah, sure, sure. So interestingly, Rakesh, this book, Lotus of Another Color, was one of the very first book that I came across when I was starting to research on LGBT issues in India and in the Diaspora.
One of the reasons I found the book very interesting other than the very fascinating image of pink lotus on the book cover is the sheer diversity and range of writings that it includes. And the point goes like this, should I listen to my heart and wrestle with this guilt? Should I lock myself inside the walls the parents would build? I want to feel their eyes with joys yet, let my spirit while, how can I find the love I seek and still remain the child?
And not only is that such a beautiful poem, but again, I feel it really encapsulates this dilemma. It made me wonder, is this dilemma that gay men are facing in South Asia? Is that specific to that culture? Or did you look at how families in Western culture, for example, might approach the same sort of crossroad for gay men?
Yeah, I love this question. So the dilemma that I discuss in the paper immediately stems from gay men's constant negotiation between heteronormative expectations and what I call homo romantic desire. On the one hand, there is a societal pressure to meet the heteronormative expectation of marriage, reproduction and feulial piety. But on the other hand, there is also potential to engage in disparate kinds of same-sex anti-messages.
In order to understand the heteronormative expectation, we also need to pay very close attention to the centrality and universality of heterosexual marriage in India. So once someone at means marriageable age, they are expected to marry heterosexual marriages in India and sure, upward social mobility and also a full family lineage. Marriages are also transactional and also sides of major economic activity as they involve money in the form of dowry. There is a rich corpus of scholarship on marriage in Indian and South Asia.
Additionally, marriage is also considered as being back to parents for their love, support and care, which is more about reciprocity. And failure to do so may cause massive guilt in the gay men. Many of my ethnographic protagonists spoke about their indebtedness to their parents. One such narrative where my despondent discusses is decision to accept the marriage proposal suggested by his parents and I quote, I thought about it for some time and decided that after all their parents, I'll never be happy if I go against their will.
So some others also mentioned that they are the only child or only son in the family. So one of my respondents told me and I quote, look, I'm the only son of my parents and I know that I will have to marry a girl sooner or later. So by citing his status as an only son of his parents, he's probably reiterating the inevitability of heterosexual marriage for progenie. And I also think that these experiences and social expectations are also closely embedded in the intergenerational contracts.
Sometimes the guilt also stems from not being able to reciprocate as most of the gay men in small terms of police are believed that since parents have invested their whole lives in the well-being of children, they must reciprocate with their kindness. This has been discussed by my interlutors in majorly two different ways. One, men of marriageable age discussed how they want to convey to their parents their decision of not getting married without actually coming out to them. But another category of gay men actively look for women to marry, sometime they decide to come back to small towns after living in cities for years so that they can marry and use the productive and reproductive labor of women to run the household.
But having said that, another significant finding of this study also shows that gay men in small towns are not suffering silence, rather they always go on to forge disparate kinds of relationships with other men. Such relationships may range from flings, short-term sexual encounters, a moral friendship to long-term intimate romantic partnership where they could have it. Foring the theoretical framework of queer capacity by Nicholas Deviller, I also demonstrate how gay men sit with themselves in position of ambivalence and engage in multiple modes of same-sex intimacies. One way to do it is through what I called friendship sex and partnership continuum, where men not only establish friendship and engage in sexual activities with other men, but also establish partnership through quotidian intimacies and ethnicities in the absence of legal sanctioning and social everywhere.
This is also made possible because of homosexuality where same-sex friendship and intimacy are also allowed to some extent as long as it is projected as non-sexual. And in fact, men are allowed to form different kinds of relationships with other men, as long as they take care of their marriage and familial obligations. But a few words of questions here, as I reflect on this paper that I wrote a few years back, I also realize that a dichotomous framework of closeting coming out, heterosexual and homosexual binary is inadequate in capturing the complex realities of gay men that is embedded in the social institution of marriage and domesticity, marriage, family and domesticity. This is further problematized by intersectionality of caste, class and gender, which play out interestingly in these relationships.
So when you talk about caste, class and gender, how does that affect this problem of reciprocity, for example, which seems to be the driving force behind so much of the guilt in the burden of these gay men? Yeah, thank you. That's a very interesting question. Actually, I think particularly, particularly related to class, I have looked at the class, I have looked at the experiences through class and already an optic.
So majority of my respondents were from middle class, educated middle class background, and that definitely also impacts their lived experiences and situated realities. I'm sure working class population or upper middle class population from urban localities will have a very different experience than some of the respondents that I sort of engaged with. Having said that, I also feel that I haven't engaged enough with the optic of caste in my writing, and that is one of the limitations of this paper in particular, and I think I should be, I'll be more mindful towards the caste dynamic and caste intersectionality in the future studies. So that's interesting to think about that dynamic, and I'm sure we'd love to read about a future study that focuses more on caste.
Do you feel sort of given the data that you have so far given the stories that you've collected? Would that feeling of reciprocity be more or less demanding depending on class? Does it sort of increase as you go up in class, I guess? I think more than class, it also has to do with the universality and centrality of the notion of marriage in Indian society.
So irrespective of whichever class you come from, irrespective of your economic and financial status, everybody is expected to marry at some point. And this is also a irrespective of your sexuality. A mixed orientation marriage is sort of inevitable. And as my experience of any study shows, most of the men, even if they are like sort of financially independent, they have good jobs.
And even if they physically move away from the family and then go to a city and start living there, it doesn't necessarily sort of make them sort of take autonomous decisions about their lives. Their lives, their lives always sort of controlled and interfered by the NATO family. And there is always not to, in order to understand this complex relationship between family and gay men, the critical framework of agnostic intimacy used by Rigupathi Singh and also subsequently by Brian Haughton is very, very useful. And which shows that family or the domestic space is a mutual space for care and violence.
So, there's always this, there's always a constant negotiation that goes on between kinship and queer, where family can offer care, but at the same time, family is also capable of perpetrating violence. So, irrespective of financial status and sort of economic independence, I think the heteronormative expectations also is just remains the same. Maybe it might offer gay men greater freedom or greater autonomy in choosing to, like whether severing the ties with the family or the choice to sever the ties with the family or to take up a job which is far from home. But at the same time, financial independence and economic, you know, autonomy does not really ensure greater control over their own lives.
Really fascinating study. Thank you again so much for talking with us today. Thank you so much for having me here. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you. Dr. Jay Prakash Mishra, he's the author of Queerin Emotion in South Asia, Biographical Narratives of Gay Men in Odisha, India. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast.
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