TY  - CHAP
AB  - Abstract The paper uses archival materials, interviews, and secondary scholarship to examine debates among Indian coalitional activists on legal argumentation against India’s national sodomy law in Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi in particular, and in their mobilization activities in general. At the heart of activists’ debates was whether “rights to privacy” was the appropriate legal justification with which to argue the unconstitutionality of the sodomy law. Activists warned against uncritically advancing the notion that the sodomy law was an unlawful intrusion into an individual’s privacy, understood in spatial terms as existing within the bounds of a physical home or area, instead highlighting how gender and class shaped queer citizens’ engagements with private space. The paper argues that activists’ critical examinations of private and public space in the Indian context problematize canonical foundations of queer theory and sociological approaches to sexual citizenship, much of which assumes that all queer life moves from an inner sanctum of private secrecy, experienced as shameful, to an outer realm of equality vis-à-vis the state, the public, and the economy through declarative acts of embodiment. Drawing on critical queer studies scholarship, the paper argues that the legal debates in Naz and Indian queer activism reveal the unstated Western liberalism in prevailing scholarship on the promise of law for queer communities in contexts where core differences exist in material and social realities, and, consequently, in the meanings that individuals attach to space, privacy, embodiment, and visibility.
VL  - 30
SN  - 978-1-78635-074-9, 978-1-78635-073-2/0198-8719
DO  - 10.1108/S0198-871920160000030004
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-871920160000030004
AU  - Balasubramanian Savina
PY  - 2016
Y1  - 2016/01/01
TI  - Contextualizing the Closet: Naz, Law, and Sexuality in Postcolonial India
T2  - Perverse Politics? Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, Multiplicity
T3  - Political Power and Social Theory
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 135
EP  - 158
Y2  - 2024/04/24
ER  -