"Resisting Mundane Violence" - Feminism and Queer Identity in Post-colonial India

Last year, the English Department at SUNY, Albany announced its third annual graduate student conference titled "Conflict and Ir(resolution): Negotiating Disciplinary Spaces." The conference, the CFP tells us, "addresses outright warfare." [1] The organizers of the conference go on to "invite our colleagues to report from the front lines"—a rather curious mode of interpellation, given the political climate at the time of the conference, when Bush was preparing his own front lines in Afghanistan and threatening to smoke terrorists out of their caves. While the CFP ostensibly sets out to "address" and understand theoretical incommensurabilities, the rhetoric used in the CFP seems to uncritically reiterate a school-of-resentment theoretical stasis, reifying and reducing theoretical positions to 'camps' and 'sides' that are pitted against one another. In her essay "Against Proper Objects," Judith Butler has drawn attention to the limitations of establishing theoretical "front lines" in relation to questions of gender and sexuality:

Politically the costs are too great to choose between feminism, on the one hand, and radical sexual theory, on the other...When and where feminism refuses to drive gender from sex or from sexuality, feminism appears to be part of the very critical practice that contests the heterosexual matrix, pursuing the specific social organization of each of these relations as well as their capacity for social transformation. [2]

For Butler, the tendency to theorize feminist and queer theoretical positions as antithetical has often obscured the potentially useful manner in which a more dialogic relationship can be established between these two moments. According to Butler, the need to interrogate a neat separation of fields is epistemologically imperative and politically necessary and such a separation "requires the desexualization of the feminist project and the appropriation of sexuality as the 'proper' object of lesbian/gay studies." The imposition of this 'proper object' takes place, through "a mundane sort of violence." [3] This separation of feminism from queer theory raises questions that are theoretically and politically crucial — does the insistence on a queer paradigm axiomatically negate gender as a category? Conversely, does the man-woman binary of certain feminist theorizing inevitably lead to the establishment of a heterosexist hegemony? In attempting to answer these questions, I will examine certain trends within the feminist movement in the post-colonial context of India that could potentially open up the feminist critique of patriarchy to an interrogation of compulsory heterosexuality as well. I will look at possible ways in which this "violence" can be turned into a more productive politics of possibility.

It is useful to situate the critique of Indian feminisms within the context of a specific mode of theorizing that in many ways could be said to degenerate into the epistemological violence Butler refers to. Teresa Ebert's "(Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism" is an attempt to examine the ontology of agency under the "ludic" turn in feminist politics that has, according to her, replaced questions of historicity and materiality with the emphasis on discourse, textuality and language. Ebert attempts to re-visit the claim that conflates notions of historical materialism with positivism, challenging the post-Marxist contention that dismisses materialist standpoint theories as essentialist, totalizing and teleological. For Ebert, the postmodern interrogation of historical materialism is based on the fallacious critique that such an approach assumes a fixed human nature for individuals with pregiven selves. Consequently, the rearticulation of materialism as a mode of idealism in post-Marxist discourse divorces materiality from the actual historical conditions that stem from economic modes of production. According to Ebert, this paradigm shift can lead only to theoretical and political nihilism, since the ludic reconstruction of materiality is limited to discursive practices such as "citationality" and "performance" that have no referents outside language.

Throughout the essay, Ebert constantly draws attention to her concern with the "real" as well as her pre-occupation with the economic and the "existing conditions" of materiality. While historical materialism might be the absence that haunts ludic feminism, it becomes imperative to look at the gaps that haunt Ebert's own text. Ebert's analysis is emblematic of a certain kind of Leftist critique that has made postmodern theory the object of its criticism rather than the operations of capitalism, patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. There are moments in Ebert's essay where the desire to navigate the theoretical "sea of indeterminacy" leads to a certain kind of fixity which, rather than materially anchoring politics, only serves to reinforce a theoretical rigidity. This prevents Ebert from recognizing the manner in which her call for a red feminism ends up othering already marginalized subject positions. For instance, according to Ebert, a "materialism that does not act materially" is incapable of explaining in non-discursive terms, the "girling" of women in India, the gendered division of labor and the appropriation of women's surplus labor. [4] But Ebert's own materialism, when attempting to make interventions in "the ludic reading of queerity," fails to explain the material operations of compulsory heterosexuality. [5] In a theoretical move that almost seems to assign ranks to class and sexuality, writer Dorothy Allison's lesbian identity becomes secondary and must be subsumed by material circumstances of poverty and economic exploitation. Indirectly, Ebert seems to suggest that queer politics is excluded from the 'properly' political. This is not much different from the homophobic assertion that lesbian and gay rights are hardly an issue since gay men have beautiful apartments in Manhattan and wear designer clothes. In this light, Ebert's concern for the 'girling' of impoverished women in India, rather than drawing attention to the magnitude of the problem, in fact, seems to border on a watered-down postcoloniality that uses the sub-altern subject position as a site for inscribing a real versus false politics dichotomy.

Ebert's critique of the 'ludic' turn in contemporary theory is similar to the position adopted by some Indian political thinkers under the guise of postcoloniality and the need for indigenous or 'native' political theories. Very often, feminist critiques have adopted a watered down version of the familiar Leftist position that espouses the idea that the concern with sexuality in the Indian context is a bourgeois and decadent matter and comes with a certain kind of 'westernized' class privilege. In perhaps the most prominent feminist journal in India, Manushi, editor Madhu Kishwar remarked: "Such issues (lesbian desire) are not as important in a third world context since Indians face more crucial, more economically basic life-and-death issues." Paradoxically, it is precisely this mode of thinking which, operating under the guise of Marxist-feminism, privatizes and depoliticizes desire. What is interesting to note about Kishwar's rhetoric is the manner in which a western otherness is inscribed on to queer identities. In an essay entitled "Naive Outpourings of a Self-Hating Indian: Deepa Metha's Fire," she labels Fire (a film depicting a lesbian relationship between two Indian housewives) as "un-Indian" - a film that "does a big disservice to the cause of women...[it will] inhibit Indian women from expressing physical fondness for fear of being permanently branded as lesbians." [6] According to her, most relations between women in India are "ambiguous" and not as explicitly sexual as in the West. [7] Apart from the obvious homophobia of Kishwar's statements, what is also effaced is the manner in which a more plural understanding of what constitutes 'Indian' and 'western' could lead to more subversive political possibilities. The attempt to think of queer identity in India, especially, necessitates operating through a paradigm of non-nationalist nationalism, given the political and theoretical origins of the term "queer." The intersection with a feminist project in this context becomes crucial, given that the Women's Movement in India has not only been able to self-reflexively draw on western epistemologies, but has also been successful in simultaneously carving out a specific indigenous tradition that relates these epistemologies to specific local particularities.

The attempt to think of a queer identity through Indian feminism in terms of a nonnationalist nationalism is not some kind of an abstract indulgence or celebration of a theoretical differand. From the Dalit Panther Movement that drew its inspiration from the Black Panthers in the US to the Naxalite movement in Andhra that drew on the ideas of Maoism, there have existed throughout Indian history several attempts to fashion counter-cultural movements out of the tenets of western thinking. A closer look at various modes of resistance in Indian history points to the manner in which the selective employment of Enlightenment philosophies succeeded in drawing on and yet critiquing the potentially universalizing tendencies of western rationalist thought. Thus, the manner in which the women's movement has negotiated the conflict between the 'global' and the 'local' serves as a useful historical precedent for the 'translation' of a queer project in India. For instance, in the 19th century, women were caught between Indian revivalists on the one hand, who re-asserted traditional "angel of the house" constructions of womanhood, and Indian Reformers on the other, who, as part of a Great Civilizing Mission, were keen on recasting women in more 'progressive' roles. Not surprisingly, the Indian Revivalists were attempting to hold on to pristine images of the chaste Hindu woman of the Shastras and Vedas. Conversely, the supposedly more broad-minded reformers like Dayanand Saraswati fought for women's education, albeit for rather dubious reasons. The rationale for women's education was to make them fit companions and healthy mothers. The educated Brahmin wife and mother was the vehicle for racial purity; she was the procreator of a special breed of men — a healthy pure stock of Aryans. In this way, the patriarchal control over bodies and women's sexuality was reinforced not only by revivalist Vedic sanction but also legitimized by social Reform. Although women became the site for the testing and reasserting of tradition, it is interesting to see how they redeployed and subverted these movements in their own way. Even while women were caught in the crossfire between the western mainstream Reform movement and the Revivalist patriarchal constraints, it was the larger spaces that the Reform Movement had made possible which gave them the support systems and education to fight against this oppression. These women were drawing on the philosophies of the Enlightenment, liberalism and western education to distance themselves not only from traditionalism and patriarchy, but also the paternalism and universalizing tendencies of these very philosophies.

By ignoring the plurality of what constitutes 'the national,' feminists like Kishwar have tended to ignore those reform movements that have been sensitive to changing identities and needs of the nation. Kishwar's conceptualization of 'woman' and the 'nation' represents a static notion of the indigenous, resulting in an insular and majoritarian version of Indian tradition. It is not insignificant that along with the rise of Hindutva [8] in the early 90's, the Women's movement in India saw the need to adopt traditional icons like Kali and Shakti in order to assert an idea of authentic Indian womanhood. Consequently, it became extremely convenient for parochial political parties like the BJP and the Shiv Sena to co-opt this discourse of traditionalism and mobilize it for their parochial agendas. Seeing themselves as empowered Shakti incarnates, the Mahila Aghadi (the women's wing of the Shiv Sena party) played a significant role in the communal riots that followed the demolishing of the Babri Masjid. This communitarian logic was largely a result of a nativist framework in which some women saw themselves primarily as community upholders of tradition rather than as agents of change. These regressive forms of thinking pushed women in the direction of a primordial past, even if they ostensibly expressed liberal feminist slogans. The rioting of the Shiv Sena's Mahila Aghadi for instance, prompted the Censor Board of India to reconsider its decision to allow screenings of the film Fire. A petition to the Censor Board contained the following protest: "If women's physical needs get fulfilled through lesbian acts, the institution of marriage will collapse...reproduction of human beings will stop." [9]

It is not my intention here to place Kishwar in the same category as Hindu fundamentalism and the dubious politics of the Shiv Sena. In fact, over the years, Manushi, the journal edited by Kishwar, has become one of the most visible feminist critiques of the Hindutva project and its parochial agendas. Nevertheless, it is crucial to foreground the manner in which Kishwar's inability to grasp the connections between patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality provides a framework for dominant discourse to appropriate the language of feminism and offer a watered-down version that is not only intensely homophobic, but also counter-productive to the formation of a more sophisticated feminist praxis. It is in this context that I wish to re-visit the work of Judith Butler in order to think of alternative frameworks through which feminism and queer identity in India can be theorized in more politically progressive ways. It must be qualified at this point that I am aware that my attempt to use Butler in relation to the sexual economies of India could be seen as a certain kind of imperialistic insistence of western epistemology over third world subjectivities. However, as mentioned earlier, although there inevitably needs to be a sensitivity to cultural difference, the nature of this project necessitates a move beyond east-west binaries. Often, the reliance on and even the attempt to usefully reconfigure western epistemologies for non-western subjectivities is castigated as some kind of betrayal to the 'cause' of a legitimate or 'pure' postcoloniality.

In the Indian context, this is often manifested in the form of a near-xenophobic discourse that attempts to circumvent the subversive potentiality of any expression of secular politics. In an interesting manifestation of a kind of post post-coloniality, the label of 'Macaulayite' (after the colonial administrator, Lord Macaulay) is often bandied about in order to describe any radical intellectual who espouses a politics that is critical of prevailing orthodoxies. The attempt to marginalize any voice that represents a mode of counterculture gets conveniently couched in a rhetoric that dismisses these voices as "western," "elitist," and "anti-Indian." This is especially true of any work that attempts to theorize queer identity, where a watered down postcoloniality (that constructs the queer = west equation) becomes the rhetorical means by which compulsory heterosexuality is effaced. Thus, in the introduction to A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, editors Mary John and Janaki Nair rightly point out that the mere drawing on Western paradigms cannot be dismissed as acquiescing to hegemonic first world grand narratives, since the crucial task of theorization depends on the reading of dynamic historical processes and not the simplistic application of canonical theory. [10]

Not surprisingly, Butler's work has been received with caution and skepticism from most feminist theorists in India, since its interrogation of discursive categories, its insistence on the instability of identities as well as its broadly anti-essentialist framework is seen as theoretically limiting and politically disabling. Feminist thinkers and scholars have been especially concerned with the implications of privileging indeterminacy and hybridity since this deconstructive logic is seen as a move towards a certain kind of transhistoricity. Butler's insistence on the instability of symbolic system, which is the central premise of the idea of the "performative," forms the condition of possibility for agency, but according to critics, says little about the complex material power relations that give rise to political action. Butler's failure to offer a more substantive account of agency is often related to her remaining within an essentially negative paradigm of subjectification which privileges the idea of indeterminate gender trouble over concrete praxis. Butler's performative idea of agency thus supposedly fails to link the symbolic to the material, and consequently underestimates the extent to which there can be a systematic co-option of subversive performative practices.

The post-structuralist critique of identity can undoubtedly often lead to a potentially problematic argument that makes the categories of "Woman" or "lesbian" into fluid and open signifiers. This kind of deconstructive critique could create another form of anxiety—the anxiety of being nothing at all. The celebration of silence, absence and nonidentity is obviously not only fairly compatible with the workings of global capital, but it can also promote a stasis that works to reinforce the normal and normative. A closer analysis of Butler's anti-foundational critique of identity politics, however, offers a theoretical framework through which one could avoid these traps of a watered down post-structuralism. Instead, Butler offers a theoretical vocabulary through which one can re-imagine the very nature of the basic categories through which the social whole is viewed and constituted. In her presentation at the "On Left Conservatism Conference," Butler responded to the critique that a deconstructive politics necessarily lapses into political aporias:

If an anti-foundational critique need not axiomatically efface the formation of political possibilities, it might be useful to foreground the specific ways in which such critiques can be politically mobilized in the Indian context. Butler's deconstructive theoretical formulations then, might enable the formulation of a feminism that instead of pathologizing sexual deviation, is more attentive to the operations of compulsory heterosexuality and its impact on women.

Several Indian feminist thinkers have pointed to the reasons why in the Indian context giving up on the signifier "woman" is a politically dangerous and problematic move. Roshan Shahani and Shoba Ghosh, for instance, argue that "without a standpoint and a forum, no sort of community, including a feminist community, can find a common ground upon which to stand." [12] Kumkum Sangari asserts that the "new fashionable post-modernist diatribes against the 'nation' and 'unity' per se [provide] neither a determinate answer to communalism nor a solution for gender equality." [13] Furthermore, several feminists have pointed to various moments in Indian history where "the sexed specificity of the female body" has become a site through which patriarchal discourse has inscribed its parochial agendas. Irene Gedalof has pointed out, for instance, that the "female body, and especially its capacity for birth plays an important symbolic and material role in the emergence of national or community identities." [14] For example, the invocation of "Bharat-mata" or the Mother-India syndrome by freedom fighters, as a proto-nationalist weapon during anti-colonial struggles, re-inscribed a traditionalist role on women, even while ostensibly espousing a counter-colonial agenda. This form of deification endorsed the traditional heterosexist role of women as productive land and men as seed ploughers, reinforcing women's supposed dependence on men to be made fertile in order to bear children. In A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, Mary John and Janaki Nair, point out how the valorization of celibacy in order to build a nation of patriotic heros gradually culminated in the exaltation of the 'chaste' Hindu widow whose abstinence from sex became a symbolic rejection of colonial dominance. They point to how "it is not virginity that is upheld as an ideal for women so much as the notion of the chaste wife, an empowered figure in (Hindu) myth who functions as a means of taming or domesticating the more fearful aspects of the woman's sexual appetite." [15]

In more recent times, women's bodies have literally become 'productive' in the Foucauldian sense. Apart from the obvious examples of sati and female infanticide, fundamentalist movements have also insisted that women should dress in a particular way to uphold the honor and sanctity of a community. Hindutva activists in North India recently carried out campaigns against "western" modes of dressing that were 'corrupting' women. In Kashmir, Muslim fundamentalist groups threatened women with acid attacks if they failed to don the burkha. The specifically gendered ways in which the Indian female body becomes a site of patriarchal inscription has made it difficult to argue for a theoretical framework like Butler's that seems to be interrogating coherent identities and arguing for a move away from what Irene Gedalof calls the "specifically female." Thus in her analysis of Indian feminism, Gedalof argues that Butler's positions become untenable since in her critique of Irigaray and her conceptualization of the lesbian phallus, the "female body disappears." What gets effaced with the disappearance of the female body is "the possibility of feminist strategies of resistance that take a specifically female subject position as the starting point for alternative models of self, self-other relations and identity." [16]

However, Gedalof's critiques of Butler fail to recognize the fact that in the Indian context, the insistence on the "specifically female"—for instance in the feminism of Kishwar - could lead to a fixity that anchors a politics of compulsory heterosexuality. The desire for a fixity of signifiers only performs a politics of further exclusion—Kishwar's feminism illustrates the manner in which only heterosexual models of "self," "self-other relations" and "identity" are allowed to emerge. In the introduction to Gender Trouble, Butler's response to the demand for lucidity in her writing is equally apposite in relation to the demand for an ontologically grounded female subject:

Thus in the Indian context, what travels under "the sign of clarity" is the call for a fixed signified that supposedly grounds political action. What gets obscured in the process of this fixing is the manner in which this signified almost inevitably establishes a normative sexuality that serves to stabilize a heterosexual matrix. Butler's attempt to problematize the notion of a coherent subject as an ontological given is thus not some hollow deconstructive (= destructive) desire to destabilize coherent identities. Instead, the attempt to problematize the existence of a pre-ontological "I" prior to discourse prevents Butler's feminism from lapsing into the very power relations that it sets out to critique. Butler's interrogation of a pre-social, "nonhistorical 'before'" can provide a useful framework for a critique of Indian feminism that presumes an "I" behind discourse that is always already (hetero)sexed. The death of the subject then, need not be the death of feminism, but as Butler has suggested, could precisely be a way for Indian feminism to reinvigorate itself and become more self-reflexive about its totalizing and normative tendencies.

The question that immediately comes to mind in the Indian context (and one that Gedalof raises in her critique of Butler) is what happens to the sexed specificity of the female body. What becomes the ontology through which the female capacity for birth is used as a 'productive' site of repression and regulation? The above questions could be answered in more useful ways through Butler's understanding of sex not as a fixed, biological entity out of which gender is culturally encoded, but "as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter." [18] The crucial task at hand is to examine how "matter is materialized," how 'sex' as a regulatory category enforces and inscribes reproductive roles on to the bodies of women. Thus, the very feminist question that demands a consideration of women's sexed specificity or the biological capacity for birth could reinstate the very biological determinism that it supposedly sets out to critique; this aporia can in fact be dislodged through an understanding of 'sex' as a performative act that appears as if it were pre-discursive or prior to culture, when in fact it lacks any coherent metaphysics of substance. In her essay "Against Proper Objects," Butler points out:

The move away from the "domain of reproduction" is not an elision of material specificity—what Gedalof laments as "the disappearance of women" [20]—instead, it is the attempt to contest the process of reification that unwittingly re-inscribes a process of essentialism and fixity, counter-productive to a more subversive feminist project. Butler's attention to the manner in which 'sex' is materialized does not entail an elision of women's sexed specificity but interrogates the manner in which this specificity becomes the site through which subjects get constituted as viable and docile. It is in this sense that Butler 'queers' the body since she forces us to be self-reflexive about the very categories through which one 'sees.' A defamiliarized understanding of sex enables "the moment in which one's staid and cultural perceptions fail, when one cannot with surety read the body that one sees" [21]

While Butler's anti-foundational critique provides a framework through which feminism in India can re-work some of its essentialist assumptions, it simultaneously allows for a performative re-working of the discursive sites through which women are produced and contained, so that 'woman' as a political signifier is not made to "disappear." Instead, in keeping with a Foucauldian model of power, Butler foregrounds how these sites of production and containment can be exposed and positively re-worked for a more subversive politics. This intervention becomes especially crucial in India, where feminist critiques have often been limited to an analysis of the objectification, exclusion and marginalization of women. It becomes increasingly crucial to look at the manner in which foreclosure operates not only negatively, i.e. through a process of silencing, but also through modes of interpellation that initiate subjects into submission, making it impossible for women to experience sexual rights outside the prescribed norms of the symbolic order. In her essay "Sexual Rights," Rosalind Petchesky points to the rhetoric of human rights that sustains this negative formulation of sexual citizenship:

Petchesky's questions hint at the inadequacies of a sexual rights discourse that inadvertently limits itself to an ethics and politics of toleration by foregrounding only the need for a freedom against abuse and coercion. Consequently, the fact that compulsory heterosexuality cannot be conceived as a form of violence or coercion suggests the need for an epistemological leap that takes into account, what Petchesky calls, a more "dialectical way in which the affirmative and negative dimensions of [sexual] rights are intertwined." [23]

The exclusive focus on the negative assertion of sexual freedom can be discerned in A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, a recent volume of essays published by some of the most well-known feminists in India. Apart from the excellent introduction where Mary John and Janaki Nair foreground the need for Indian feminism to extend its scope to a consideration of alternative sexualities, the actual essays in the anthology do not quite live up to the introduction's theoretical and political scope. V. Geetha's essay "On Bodily Love and Hurt" addresses questions of same sex desire, but, once again, it is in the context of questions pertaining to exploitation and violence. Geetha draws on Andrea Dworkin's idea of violence, as the context in which sexual intercourse takes place, in order to foreground the manner in which "masculine desire expresses itself in the context of marriage." [24] Geetha goes on to talk about a certain kind of male bonding and language of filiation in Indian society that constructs a space for male power and privilege. In this space, she locates a repressed homoeroticism which then becomes the very root of male oppression: "It is not surprising that, often, battered wives point to 'bad company' as a reason for the violence they endure. And it is not entirely accidental that women sometimes complain of being sodomized. It is possible to read in such acts, a subterranean homeroticism." [25] While Geetha's formulation draws attention to a complex power dynamic, her analysis unconsciously, yet problematically lapses into a conflation between the "homosocial" and the "homosexual." In the introduction to Between Men, Sedgwick points out that "homophobia directed against men is misogynistic, and perhaps transhistorically so." It is not only "oppressive of the so-called feminine in men...but is also] oppressive of women." [26] In the Indian context, compulsory heterosexuality is a question that should inevitably and necessarily becomes a feminist concern. The continuing sanctity that revolves around the institution of the family forces several gay men in India to enter heterosexual marriages that are believed to be 'cures' for the disease of homosexuality. Thus the idea of a gay 'community' in India is complicated, given the fact that the most common form of homosexual interaction takes place between "heterosexually" married men who do not align themselves with a sense of identity or community. The latest reports from the NAZ foundation reveal that 'MSM [men who have sex with men] behavior' is the most prevalent form of interaction even in the cosmopolitan urban areas. Most women who are involved in marital relationships with these men are largely clueless about their husbands' sexual preferences, a problem that is further complicated given the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. For lesbian women, of course, the situation is even more complex, since they are not only forced into heterosexual marriages, but unlike gay men, their access to a public sex culture is practically non-existent.

Consequently, while several essays in John and Nair's anthology focus on the ways in which colonial and postcolonial nation states regulate women's bodies, none of the essays explicitly foreground the heteronormative logic that informs this regulation. It might be useful to conclude by looking at the operations of colonial and postcolonial discourse in India to illustrate the crucial intersections between patriarchal structures and the workings of obligatory heterosexuality. As pointed out earlier, it is not without significance that homophobic discourse in India continues to inscribe the label of 'western' on to queer identities. For instance, in response to the film Fire, Hindu Fundamentalist Bal Thackeray remarked that "such things" were not a part of Indian culture, thus ascribing an epistemological otherness to homosexuality. [27] It is of course ironic that while Hindu nativist discourse in India has no problems uncritically reconciling itself to a culture of global productivities and western scientific knowledge, same-sex relations which are also supposedly a product of the West cannot be incorporated into the matrix of authentic Indianness. In order to understand this selective ideology, it might be useful to revisit certain narratives of colonial history and nationalist freedom struggles, not as a recourse to epistemic 'originary' moments, but as a way of contextualizing the manner in which constructed notions of authentic "Indianness" were formed through a queer eradicating impulse together with a patriarchal regulation of women's bodies.

The homophobic tendency to locate queer identity outside the national imaginary can be looked at as the need to circumvent the homosociality of the encounter between English colonizers and Indian nationalists who were attempting to forge a counter-hegemonic and anticolonial agenda. The 'effeminizing' of the Indian nation state was achieved through the "'penetration' of western ideas" that operated as the necessary progression towards (western) modernity and modernization. It was in response to this process of 'emasculation' that the postcolonial nation state saw the need to assert its 'manliness' through an exaggerated heterosexuality that inevitably employed women as bearers of nationalist ideology. 'Masculine' and independent India could no longer carry the mark of the penetrated receiver - this stigma had to be displaced immediately, and women became the convenient site for this displacement. Women were forced to embody the signifiers of 'femininity' through neatly defined roles that were shaped by the needs of the newly formed nation state. In Recasting Women, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid point to the manner in which the recovery of tradition and the recourse to the ancient Indian past became the new colonizing narrative by which women were formed as subjects. Far from enjoying the benefits of postcolonial independence, women came to represent the newly formed private sphere that operated "as an indigenist alternative to western materialism." According to Sangari and Vaid, this split between the public and the private enabled nationalist discourse to establish neat oppositions between male and female, inner and outer, material and spiritual. [28] Consequently, the construction of these dichotomous binaries facilitated the reinforcement of compulsory heterosexuality, which became a necessary ideology through which the newly 'born' India could erase the national memory of colonizing homosociality. In its place were the more feasible narratives of procreation, reproduction and regeneration - narratives that inevitably marginalized both women and sexual dissidents.

University of Florida

Gainesville, FL

1. The English Department and the English Graduate Student Organization of the University at Albany, SUNY, Graduate Conference, Wednesday, Dec 12, 2001, http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/archive/2001-12/0064.html.

2. Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects," in Feminism Meets Queer Theory, eds. Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 18.

3. Butler, "Against Proper Objects," 9.

4. Theresa Ebert, "(Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism," in Post-Ality, Marxism and Postmodernism, eds. Ebert, Morton and Zavarzadeh (Maisonneuve Press, 1995), 5.

5. Ebert, 19.

6. Madhu Kishwar, "Naive Outpourings of a Self-Hating Indian: Deepa Metha's Fire," Manushi Vol. 3 (1992): 11.

7. Kishwar, 12.

8. Hindutva refers to the project undertaken by Hindu Fundamentalists, who in order to construct a Hindu=India narrative, have relied on selective and regressive returns to the past that endorse monolithic constructions of Indian identity. The destruction of the Babri Masjid, (a mosque located in Ayodhya) by Hindu Fundamentalists was based on such an assertion, which claimed that Ayodhya was initially the birthplace of Ram, a Hindu mythological figure. The mosque according to this logic was the consequence of Muslim (= foreign) invasion that took place in the 17th century.

9. BBC News Online, 9 December 1998

10. Mary John and Janaki Nair, A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India (London: Zed Books, 1998), 6-7.

11. Judith Butler, "Marxism and the Merely Cultural," New Left Review 227 (1998): 32.

12. Roshan Shahani and Shobha V. Ghosh, "In Search of New Critical Paradigms," BEAM 18 (January 1999): 3.

13. Kumkum Sangari, "Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies," Economic and Political Weekly 30.51 (Dec 23, 1995): 3287.

14. Irene Gedalof, Against Purity: Rethinking Identity with Indian and Western Feminisms (London: Routledge, 1999), 37.

15. John and Nair, 17.

16. Gedalof, 111.

17. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: London, 1999), xix.

18. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (Routledge: New York and London, 1993), 9.

19. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 27.

20. Gedalof, 23.

21. Butler, Bodies that Matter, xxiii.

22. Rosalind Petchesky, "Sexual Rights — Inventing a Concept, Mapping an International Practice," in Sexual Identities, Queer Politics,ed. Mark Blasius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 124.

23. Petchesky, 131.

24. V. Geetha, "On Bodily Love and Hurt," in A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, eds. John and Nair (London: Zed Books, 1998), 316.

25. Geetha, 319.

26. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), 20.

27. Quoted in The Hindu, 14 December 1998.

28. Kumkum Sangari, and Sudesh Vaid, eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 10.