5Witnessing Faithfully and the Intimate Politics of Queer South Asian Praxis
Shireen Roshanravan
“You don’t have to tell them,” María explained to me, as I struggled at the edge of belonging to a family and community of origin who would read my political and sexual becomings as failure and betrayal. I felt a deep relief. I knew she did not mean that my family was not evolved enough to accept my queerness and that I needed to “hide” it for my own well-being. I heard María, instead, as I had come to know her as a faithful witness to the complexities constitutive of the worlds of meaning-making from which we each emerge and encounter others. No one is disposable in her visionary philosophy of liberation, and nothing can be presumed transparent in its presentation. In response to my worries about painful confrontations with family during obligatory journeys home, she encouraged me to “pay attention to how interesting they are” and bear witness to their modes of resisting daily lived oppressions. To love, in Lugones’s deep coalitional praxis, is to commit to faithfully witnessing each other in our struggles and to identify each other as inextricable from our possibilities for liberation. This chapter is born of the many intimate conversations with María, as mentor, friend, and compañera, that allowed me to navigate what has often felt like the contradictory longing for both personal and political integrity.
Efforts to transform familial home places into sites of queer affirmation are central to queer South Asian diasporic cultural work.1 Alok Vaid-Menon, former member of the now disbanded DarkMatter, a queer South Asian performance duo, describes “[o]ur turn toward our families of origin [as] part of a strategy of intimate organizing—a type of political work that … suggests a commitment to a type of collective liberation and a practice of solidarity where we refuse to allow our people to be disposable in our movement work.” Yet queer South Asian outreach efforts tend to emphasize a celebration of the “accepting” family who embraces their queer-identified children without giving equal attention to developing tools to help those with “unaccepting” family members preserve relationships with our families of origin.2 For those with “unaccepting” families of origin, the message is often to take solace in our queer South Asian communities of choice. When juxtaposed against the narratives of “accepting” parents who have embraced their queer-identified children, painful testimonies of parental rejection can intensify the (internalized) hegemonic Western public perspective of the “unaccepting” South Asian parent as shameful, backward, or even monstrous. The focus on seeking and celebrating familial “acceptance” can thus unwittingly reproduce the colonial/modern framing of the “accepting/progressive/modern” versus the “unaccepting/backward/traditional” South Asian family. And this reproduction limits our work, contradicting the stated commitment of queer South Asian praxis to not leave our people behind in our movement work.
Addressing this limit in queer South Asian diasporic cultural work requires heeding Lugones’s call for theorists, activists, and popular educators to attend more carefully to the communicative barriers to deep coalition (OC 76). The communicative work of deep coalition involves a commitment to “witness faithfully” (to hone our perception of) the unfamiliar resistant codes and constructions of those we presume to be familiar to us (IP 7). Lugones explains that “to witness faithfully, one must be able to sense resistance, to witness behavior as resistant, even when it is dangerous, when that interpretation places one psychologically against common sense, or when one is moved to act against common sense, against oppression” (7; emphasis added). Because it is about refusing to see others as wholly consumed by oppression, witnessing faithfully enables a way of loving rooted in and routed through identification with different journeys of resistance rather than identification with the shared misery of oppression. Witnessing faithfully our “unaccepting” parents thus requires an openness to reading them as enacting resistance to oppression, however ambiguously, in their rejection of our queer/LGBT-identification. Doing so disables the unwitting colonial/modern narrative that frames “unaccepting” parents as not-yet-evolved to love unconditionally in ways promoted among “accepting parents” who, in turn, are featured and celebrated by queer South Asian cultural and organizational work.3 The goal of witnessing faithfully rather than “seeking acceptance” shifts the focus of queer South Asian praxis away from a unidirectional finite project of changing our parents’ attitudes. Instead, witnessing faithfully encourages a lifelong project of forging loving connections in a way that animates the interdependence of our (queer- and nonqueer-identified) collective well-being.
Witnessing faithfully, methodologically, relies on Lugones’s central tenet of “complex communication.” She identifies a misconception common among theorists of coalition that occludes rather than resolves communicative difficulties, namely, the assumption that all who are being oppressed ← → resisting will be semiotically transparent to each other (OC 76–77). Suspending assumptions of semiotic transparency between the resistant codes of our elders and of our own, we can realize that the communicative efforts between us may carry more meaning than the content of what is actually said. For example, many queer South Asian organizations state that “seeking acceptance” is one of their primary goals. However, this goal of “seeking acceptance” interrupts complex communication because it presumes the transparency of an obvious “acceptability” of that for which one seeks acceptance (in this case queerness) as it becomes translated across worlds of sense. As Brinda Mehta theorizes, the Western emphasis on personal (individualist) choice readily translates as “fostering an amoral individualism that is at odds with the collective ethos” of South Asian diasporic worldviews (2004, 38–39). Presuming semiotic transparency of our resistant understandings of “queerness” rests on the assumption that our South Asian immigrant elders share our linguistic and historical domains of distinction to understand queer/LGBT-identification beyond its hegemonic celebration of individualist self-fashioning and personal choice.
Beyond elaborating the communicative obstacles inherent in the “acceptance” discourse, then, I attempt to illustrate potential avenues of complex communication illuminated in the shift to witnessing faithfully our “unaccepting” families of origin. I do so by witnessing faithfully my own mother’s recurrent lamentation that she “raised a hijra!” This requires refusing colonial distortions of Indigenous hijra cosmologies that remain an occluded part of my mother’s Indian English world of sense-making. Doing so allows me to hear her insulting use of hijra as inextricably tied to her sense that an emotional rejection of same-sex sexuality is essential to upholding respectable Indian diasporic womanhood and, relatedly, to preventing familial disintegration. This resistant connection between “respect” and a communally constituted self, in turn, enables a resistant understanding of Vega Subranamian’s seemingly assimilative claim, “I’m not queer, I’m ordinary.”4 Known for her role as part of the first nonwhite couple to sue for same-sex marital rights, Subranamian reveals the communicative limits of queer to articulate her self-understanding as a same-sex-loving South Asian American woman committed to remaining a central participant in her own, and her wife’s, family of origin. Finally, by threading an analysis of Subranamian’s communicative strategies with those illustrated in the Izzat Collective’s book, Heartbeats: The Izzat Project (2014), and Aparajeeta ‘Sasha’ Duttchoudhury and Rukie Hartman’s collection, Moving Truth(s): Queer and Transgender Desi Writings on Family (2015), I suggest that complex communication in the queer South Asian diaspora reveals a culturally specific politics of love and respect conditional on what Gayatri Reddy (2007, 151) identifies in her study of hijra community formations in Hyderabad, India as a politics of “being there.” This politics of love and respect counters Western/U.S. colonial-racial codes of liberal individualist (self-)respect and unconditional (self-)love and is inextricable from a queer South Asian praxis committed to not leaving our communities behind in our movement work.
In the summer of 2013, I attended the story-telling performance “Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love,” which narrated the negotiations of two women’s struggle of being both queer-identified and Muslim within their ethno-religious family and the pains and triumphs of learning to love themselves during these negotiations. Most of the audience members (if not the entire audience) were queer-identified South Asians. As the performance drew to a close, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. I was not alone. The tearful wailing that gripped the room seemed to unsettle the performers who urged us to remember that Allah loves us for being queer and that being queer and Muslim is a gift. Two years later, I experienced a similar collective outpouring of grief during my participation in a workshop that included a performance by the Izzat Collective on South Asian daughters resisting familial pressures to conform to gender/sexual codes of honor and respect (what some South Asian communities refer to as “izzat”). The daughterly resistance performed in a brief skit intimated that leaving home, however painful, may be our only recourse and that the leaving did not preclude loving our families but rather affirmed our right to self-care and self-determination. Again, the audience, South Asian women of various ethno-religious backgrounds, many of whom were queer-identified, found ourselves tearfully sharing stories of familial loss after the performance. During a short question-and-answer session stifled by tears, one woman asked what strategies any of us had for helping our parents deal with their own traumas. No one had any to offer. The upshot, it seemed, was to take relief in the cathartic release of our shared grief.
Although comforted by those who could understand my tears and offer empathetic recognition of my pain, seeing my grief mirrored by other queer-identified and gender disobedient South Asians amplified the pain of our shared condition of familial loss to an almost unbearable level. Lugones helps make sense of this response when she cautions that, “to the extent that we face each other as oppressed … we repel each other as we are seeing each other in the same mirror” (WT 85). Leaving familial home places, whether via expulsion/ostracism or the decision to flee under duress, did not resonate in either workshop space as a pathway to self-determination insofar as the freedom it offered did not alleviate the haunting of familial loss. Without uptake within our communities of place, individual queer re-signification of our ethno-religious familial home place (for example, the message that “being queer and Muslim is a gift”) existed only in our imaginations or in the elsewhere of a queer South Asian counterpublic. In Lugones’s terms, community of choice could not replace community of place in our yearnings for communally constituted selves, and identification with each other’s grief, as victims of familial pressures, did not motivate further connection beyond the space of mourning.5
The expressions of grief I experienced with other queer-identified South Asians can also be witnessed in the testimonies describing the severe emotional and physical reactions of South Asian parents to the possibility of their children’s nonheterosexual sexual identifications: threatening suicide, having heart attacks, experiencing nervous breakdowns, or even expressing preference for their child to be in an abusive marriage rather than in a same-sex relationship.6 During ten years of participating in queer South Asian support groups, conferences, networks and organizational events, I have been consistently pained by the frequency of such testimonies and struck by the ways the descriptions of these parental reactions often echo the grief and pain experienced by their queer-identified children. If we take seriously these parental threats of suicide, we can question the communicative efficacy of mainstream U.S. celebrity-anchored public service announcements that implore nonqueer-identified family to accept queer-identified youth for who they are.7
Queer South Asian organizations that adopt the rhetoric of “accept us for who we are” tend to reproduce this unidirectional logic in which our “unaccepting” families of origin become the primary ones in need of emotional growth and shift in perspective. This framing legitimates the pains of the queer-identified as appropriate responses to their struggle with familial loss while concomitantly registering parents’ severe responses to queer ruptures of family as condemnable cultural conservatism. The above anecdotes suggest that the communicative impasse between queer/LGBT-identified South Asians and our “unaccepting” families of origin emerges from a shared source of angst: fear that queer/LGBT-identification can disintegrate one’s communal constitution of self. Fear of losing family can motivate queer-identified South Asians to retreat to queer (South Asian) communities of choice, to emphasize helplessness to change one’s gender/sexual nonconformity and appeal to parental mercy, and/or to adopt a confrontational accept-me-or-fuck-you approach.8 These approaches, in turn, can reinforce parental fears of losing the participation of their children in modes of family-making that give them cultural meaning as dutiful South Asian mothers and fathers. Both queer-identified and non-queer-identified family share angst over the ways gender/sexual nonconformity can result in a loss of family and thus of a “self in community.”9 Understanding the different resistant orientations motivated by this shared angst of losing family can better prepare the communicative groundwork imperative to forging deep coalitional ties with our families of origin. We must therefore witness faithfully our families of origin in their emotionally charged rejections of our gender and sexual nonconformity. This requires suspending Eurocentric and liberal individualist assumptions permeating hegemonic translations of queer/LGBT-identification. Doing so allows us to explore culturally and historically specific conceptions of “self,” “family,” and “love” that can better illuminate resistant meaning-making among “unaccepting” families of origin.
Sonali Gulati’s documentary film, I Am, foregrounds interviews with Indian parents who have come to accept their LGBT-identified children. The film also includes glimpses of Indian mothers’ commonly phrased negative reactions to their LGBT-identified children. These reactions include statements like: “What will happen to all my marriage plans?” “It’s not normal. It’s not natural,” “I don’t want to hear anything about it,” and “What’s made you gay?” While these responses may not seem culturally specific, we cannot presume a monological translation across distinct cultural contexts just because the English wording of these statements is familiar to queer-identified Anglo children in an Anglo context. Indeed, it is significant that the majority of these responses are made in Indian English because, as Alton Becker makes clear, language shapes domains of distinction through which we make meaning and orient affectively in relation to others and the worlds we inhabit (1991).10 The ethnocentric imperialist logics of U.S. homonationalism infuse the English world of sense from which gay and lesbian communicates inherent dissonance with one’s family of origin and understands freedom in terms of a freedom from family, a literal coming out against the traditions, rituals, and codes of respect that ground its formation. If identification as gay or lesbian orients one toward the forgetting of a sexual self that is integrated with families and communities of origin, we can begin to hear the Indian mothers’ “unaccepting” responses featured in Gulati’s documentary as more than homophobic rejection or heteronormative denial. We can begin to hear them as animating a fear of communal disintegration, a refusal to tolerate queer rupture of their sense of self in community.
Let’s begin with the frustrated maternal response to gay or lesbian identification that, as featured in Gulati’s documentary, exclaims, “What will happen to my marriage plans?!” Rochona Majumdar has shown that the institution of “arranged marriage” endures, with variation, in India and its diaspora (2009, 240). She notes that the “joint family” remains the primary component of the institution of “arranged marriage” and, despite the modernizing focus on the couple, “subordinates the individual to the family” (240). While heteronormativity of white/Anglo culture also generates parental dreams and plans for their child’s presumed marriage, the collectivist ethos of Indian cultural worldviews renders parental investment in the child’s marriage more about maintaining the self in community via familial well-being and endurance. This is not an uncommon sentiment as revealed by the growth of Indian same-sex wedding ceremonies performed in ethno-specific religious traditions gaining publicity since the federal legalization of same-sex marriage. Within this specific cultural domain of Indian arranged marriage, the Indian mother (and other family) is supposed to be fully involved in the planning of her child’s marriage and has as much at stake in fulfilling this familial obligation. Hearing that one’s child is gay or lesbian in this context can translate readily to a loss of these marriage plans and, consequently, to a dismemberment of the family and her collective sense of self in relation to the family. In this regard, the exclamation, “What will happen to my marriage plans?!” can be understood as more than a selfish investment in seeing one’s own heteronormative dreams fulfilled or homophobic disregard of one’s child’s desires.11 We can also hear it as a decolonial yearning to hold on to one’s collective sense of self as it emerges through fulfilling familial obligations and strengthening/growing the family (and self in community) itself.
The contradiction in a South Asian mother’s decolonial yearning for a communally constituted self that manifests in the rejection of her queer/LGBT-identified child is born of colonial redefinitions of “civilized” family formation in heteropatriarchal terms. This redefinition reroutes decolonial yearnings for a self in community toward an investment in caste/race boundaries. These caste/race boundaries dismember community in the name of ethno-religious purity. Shefali Chandra’s work demonstrates how English-language education and the production of properly consenting heterosexual subjects converged in colonial India to universalize caste restrictions and heteronormative definitions of Indian culture/nationalism. She explains how upper-caste Brahmans and commercially successful Parsis sought to discipline English (prevent its access to the lower-caste and lower-class or “other” Indian communities) by imbuing it with sexual mores suitable only to their women. By teaching/restricting English to their “idealized women” (chaste, married, devoted, conjugal), they were able to Indianize and secularize English without disturbing caste exclusivity. The Indian male elite justified restricting Indian English as the exclusive realm of upper-caste/class Indians, in part, by characterizing other Indian communities as lacking the heteropatriarchal sexual virtues to handle the individualist agency English language acquisition afforded.
Because the “civilizing” practice of companionate conjugal marriage at the heart of Indian English languaging must be circumscribed within heteropatriarchal endogamy, only those women deemed civilized enough to handle the power of choice endowed by English language acquisition could be trusted to choose within the appropriate caste/class and sexual boundaries.12 According to this logic, queer-identified Indians would rupture the presumed evolutionary civilized discipline necessary to realize proper heteropatriarchal subjectivity because their queerness evidences a failure to choose sexual companions that are properly conjugal and reproductive of caste/race purity. Within the (neo)colonial worlds of Indian English, then, claiming and enacting same-sex romantic love throws into question one’s “civilized capacity” to choose properly one’s conjugal companion. Given this, we can witness faithfully the Indian mother’s responses of “It’s not normal. It’s not natural,” “What made you gay?” and “I don’t want to hear anything about it,” beyond homophobic hostility and incapacity to love unconditionally. Instead, we can attend to the ways her Indian English domains of distinction bestow a caste/class and racial civilizational superiority vis-à-vis the rest of the colonized that makes gay identification, in her world of sense-making, definitively unnatural (against biological destiny). As such, gay-identification is registered as an intentional individualist choice to disregard familial well-being and the fulfillment of one’s obligations to the family (self in community).
Colonial ideologies that seduce investment in fictions of relative superiority prepare upper-caste/upper-class Indian immigrants for uptake of the U.S. model-minority racial ideology. The model-minority racial project seduces Asians in the United States to invest in their state construction as culturally superior to other people of color while acquiescing to their relative subordination and vulnerability to white supremacy. Anannya Bhattacharjee especially reveals the gendered seduction of the logic of this racial project that defines the relative “cultural superiority” of Asians in terms of their tight-knit heteropatriarchal families (1999). As she explains, the model-minority racial project defines maleness, in addition to whiteness, as a marker for access to power. For upper-caste/class South Asian immigrant men for whom race/caste or class is not a marker of dehumanization in their postcolonial country of origin, the model-minority racial project offers a salve to the pains of their subordinating exclusion from whiteness in the United States. Because the model-minority racial project defines the modelness of Asians in terms of their tight-knit heteropatriarchal families, South Asian immigrant men who invest in model-minority racial ideologies can cope with their racial subordination vis-à-vis white peoples by affirming their power to exercise maleness over and against their own women. Such patriarchal collaborations can be understood not only as a complicit response to the pained sense of racial dehumanization endured in the white/Anglo dominated public domain, but also the consequent yearning to belong to a domestic/communal circle where one’s humanity is unquestionably recognized and valued. Bhattacharjee explains how in the South Asian immigrant community, family and home space becomes this circle of belonging, and the figure of the “woman,” especially the properly married wife/mother, becomes symbolic of its reproduction and preservation as a cultural refuge (1999, 234).
As erin Khuê Ninh notes, “subjects can and commonly do act as guardians of systems which do them fundamental disservice, and a mother may energetically support a patriarchy which oppresses all women in order that she herself or her own daughters may thrive within its rules, relative to other women” (2011, 129). Protecting the home space as cultural refuge is a tremendous weight to bear for the Indian immigrant woman. This cultural pressure, shaped by the model-minority racial project, offers important insight into how we might faithfully hear a mother’s disbelief or refusal to hear of her child’s sexual and gender disobedience. As the family member responsible for the reproduction of proper cultural etiquette, the mother is implicated in the potential collapse of the communal and familial refuge now, presumably, threatened by her child’s gender and sexual disobedience.
Bhattacharjee thus offers an important amplification to Ninh’s literary analysis of the model-minority racial project’s psychic cost to Asian immigrant families in the United States. Ninh centers the second-generation Asian American daughter as the primary bearer of the psychic cost of this racial project while framing the immigrant parents as consumed by its capitalist logics. The parents’ internalization of their racial positioning as model minorities, she suggests, moves them to participate in producing their daughters as the unfilial subject under constant threat of disownment and condemned to fail her immigrant parents’ always-growing expectations of repayment for their sacrifice on her behalf. These parental expectations include the daughter’s role in upholding familial honor. Upholding familial honor often requires obeying strict boundaries of “respectable” gender and sexual behavior that protect the daughter’s marriageability against the inevitable community gossip mills (Ninh 2011, 142). Like Bhattacharjee, Ninh emphasizes the model-minority racial project as a heteropatriarchal mechanism of social control, but she attends less to the ways this social control enacts psychic violence on the entire family, however differentially, including the parents who participate in the mechanisms of control over their daughters. Bhattacharjee reminds us that immigrant parents from high caste/class positions in their home country also experience a psychic cost in their racialized naming as subordinate (becoming “not white” in the United States) and their yearning to heal their racial dehumanization within the space of family and community of origin.
Neither psychic cost is more worthy of attention, nor am I suggesting that psychic violence of racism justifies familial violence enacted against Asian American daughters. Rather, I am highlighting distinct wounds of racial/colonial dismemberment that shape differential journeys of resistance in which (neo)colonial and racial projects often reroute decolonial yearnings via promises of superficial relief in exchange for complicity in their oppressive logics. For the Indian immigrant bourgeoisie, Bhattacharjee explains, the yearning for an affirmed sense of self in community can reroute through an investment in the false invitation to become “model” or “almost-civilized” racialized subjects via “respectable” traditions of heteropatriarchal family formation. For the gender and sexually disobedient (and perhaps queer-identified) daughter, on the other hand, the decolonial yearning for wholeness can reroute through an investment in neoliberal individualist logics of agential self-fashioning as the freedom (and moral obligation) to love without conditions. The concepts of “respect/izzat” and “love” thus become contested terrain in their lack of semiotic transparency between queer-identified South Asians and their parents’ worlds of sense-making forged through differential journeys of resistance.
Remembering these historical journeys of navigating oppression enables us to understand both immigrant elders and their children as “liminal subjects,” active subjects who enact “resistance to particular forms of oppression at particular times in particular spaces” (OC 77). “Since,” Lugones explains, “our journeys to the limen are different, often at odds, often in great tension given that we are among each other’s oppressors, the freeing spaces where we attempt to chisel our own faces are not readily accessible to each other” (77). So, while the gender and sexually nonconforming children of immigrant South Asian parents may journey through worlds of understanding where they inhabit queer or lesbian as a liberatory space of community, it does not mean that our immigrant elders have access to this same world of resistant sense-making. Their resistant journeys are likely quite different; moreover, all journeys risk seduction into complicity with oppressive logics. However, as Lugones teaches us, complicity does not erase resistance even as it compromises its liberatory possibility. Without heeding Lugones’s fundamental insight that we enact epistemic travel to each other’s worlds of resistant sense-making, we cannot but hear/understand each other as antagonistic to our attempts at becoming whole integrated selves in community. Let’s turn now to these differential journeys of resistance routed through cultural codes of (self-)respect/izzat and (un)conditional love.
My mother’s recurrent exasperation that she “raised a hijra!” to express her hurt and frustration at my failed heterosexuality invites an exploration of Indian ways of being that exceed Western modes of meaning-making. While these excess ways of being may be inarticulate beyond their disparaging colonial reductions, they can nevertheless provide insight into the affective modes of communication that relay meaning beyond what is actually said. The British colonial signification of hijra as an “uncivilized” indigenous queer (read: repulsively nonnormative and nonhuman) caste of unassimilable Indians occludes knowledge of hijra identity that can clarify the notions of respect informing South Asian immigrant familial responses to queer-identified family members. As “a potent and enduring cultural identity in the Indian universe” (Reddy 2006, 5), hijra worlds of sense-making become central to the act of complex communication between queer-identified South Asians and our ethno-religious communities to which we remain affectively tied.
Gayatri Reddy’s delineation of “family” in hijra community formations of Hyderabad “complicate[s] our cultural understandings of ‘choice’ in the context of kin relations” and centers on a “notion of caring, indexed principally through a temporal (and spatial) dimension of ‘being there’ ” (2005, 151). She explains this claim by comparing hijra kin relations with those described in Kath Weston’s study of gay kinship ideologies in the United States, where “chosen family” is privileged over “blood family,” with the latter a biogenetic given and the former generated through one’s individual choosing/desire. While hijra kin relations, like Western LGBT formulations of family, are also not constructed through “blood” and marriage, “the central and only prescriptive bond in hijra conceptualizations of their family—the guru-cela bond—[is] not purely idiosyncratic, being more often assigned rather than chosen, and involve[s] far more structured obligatory responsibilities than the gay familial relationships described by Kath Weston” (151). A hijra becomes recognized as a “real” hijra after putting a rit in the house, or gharana, of a particular guru. As Reddy explains, “[t]he guru-cela relationship is the most important bond among hijras and is necessarily central to hijra conceptions of family. It is a mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationship, entailing both social and economic obligations and responsibilities for both parties” (156). Putting a rit in a gharana establishes hijra belonging to a family and larger community of hijras, and this belonging requires a commitment to fulfill obligations in an interdependent, reciprocal, and hierarchical kin relation that is fundamental to achieving izzat. Reddy illustrates the centrality of familial belonging in hijra subject formation, in part, through examples of hijras who suffered under their gurus yet, if given the option, would not elect the seeming freedoms of living with a marital partner beyond the obligations of hijra kinship structure (143).
While my mother’s use of hijra as an insult invokes her implication in these worlds of British colonial distortion, the incredulous tone with which she would declare that she had “raised a hijra!” intimates an investment in the concept of “respect” that Reddy elaborates as central to Hyderabadi hijra identity. That is, she suggests that, despite her own efforts at raising a respectable daughter (read: dutiful in one’s commitment to familial expectations/obligations over individualist desire), my mother nevertheless failed to yield the proper returns, making me an exemplar of Ninh’s “unfilial subject” doomed to fall short of repaying her immigrant parents’ self-sacrifice. My failed heterosexuality thus exhibits disrespect to a hierarchical and interdependent kinship structure that, in the middle-class immigrant Indian diasporic world, requires becoming a wife/mother in a commitment to intergenerational care and familial duty. The colonial distortion that puts hijra on my mother’s tongue as an insult (with hijra signifying my disrespect for family) belies her emotional investment in an understanding of respect anchoring an organic definition of hijra identity in India. Because, as Lugones instructs, if I recognize my mother in a limen, a space outside dominant constructions of who she is, I have to assume that she means more than what she says and that her meanings exceed those inscribed by dominant structures like colonialism, homophobia, and white/Anglo cultural imperialism.
The Izzat Collective, “a group of young South Asian women [who seek] to challenge how izzat or honour has been used to rationalize violence against us,” powerfully illustrates the ways differing intergenerational conceptions of respect/izzat and love generate communicative impasses between South Asian daughters and our immigrant families of origin (2014, back cover). Heartbeats: The Izzat Project is an illustrated popular-education-style book that tells stories about South Asian American women’s struggles to negotiate love for their families of origin and self-preservation. The stories center themes of familial silence in the face of incest, forced marriage, familial rejection because of queer-identification, and the cycle of shaming “bad” daughters to limit their social movement, political beliefs, and career choices. At the same time, the authors issue a call for “unconditional love” from their parents and families: “More than anything we want unconditional love. We want support, hope, happiness, and to have a say in our future” (7). The call for unconditional love as interwoven with their call to redefine izzat in violence-free terms gives rise to a contradiction that can help illuminate part of the communicative impasse between gender/sexually disobedient daughters and our parents. On the one hand, the authors include a section, “Signs of Violence,” clarifying the difference between “abuse” and “love,” listing various actions such as “us[ing] anger to intimidate or control you” and “forc[ing] you to marry someone you do not want to” as actions that do not communicate love but rather abuse (32). This section suggests that the authors understand the act of loving as conditional on not causing psychic or physical harm to those one loves. Love, then, is understood primarily as freedom from harm. Loving another unconditionally would thus require an understanding of what harms this other person and refraining from those actions that compromise their well-being. The authors indicate that unconditional loving requires support for allowing them the freedom to choose who they want to be(come), letting South Asian daughters “have a say in our future” (7).
If the redefinition of izzat is the enactment of “unconditional love” that turns on the principle of noninterference in the life paths charted by South Asian daughters, we may begin to glimpse the opacity of izzat as it shapes the ground of cultural resistance for both South Asian Americans and our immigrant elders. As mentioned earlier, a collective ethos shapes most South Asian worldviews in which individuals are understood as interdependent in the collectivist mission of familial and communal well-being. Notions of izzat thus cannot entertain the support of individualist choice or desire that is not accountable to the well-being of the collective.
Brian Gilley’s analysis of autonomy in Native American worlds of sense is particularly useful in elaborating non-Western understandings of self-determination that are tied to the well-being of the community. Gilley explains that for Native Americans, “[a]utonomy is an orientation of respect for other individuals’ right to live as they wish insofar as it supports the community and does not disrupt the social order” (2014, 24). Gilley’s analysis of Native American conceptions of “autonomy” is a useful guide in rethinking the codes of izzat that may shape South Asian immigrant elders’ worlds of sense. Here the “freedom to be one’s self” is not a “freedom from communal order,” but rather a collectivist project of thinking how one’s action impacts or disrupts the communal understanding of well-being and social order. When language and identity become more of an impasse than a vehicle to communication, the action of “being there” can be most effective in forging bridges where none seem possible.
Keeping both the understandings of respect elaborated in hijra worlds and the worlds of Indian English meaning-making that inform South Asian diasporic communication, let’s now turn to Mala Nagarajan and Vega Subranamian. In their narrative of how they came to be re-integrated into their ethno-religious families of origin, Mala Nagarajan and Vega Subranamian, well-known for their participation in the lawsuit to sue Washington State for the right to marry, detail a long process of “being there” for their families in order to combat their initial ostracism. This included showing up to take care of, attend to, or otherwise participate in collective familial events. Other communicative acts of “being there” included not displaying physical affection publicly, and being persistent, even in the face of silence, about their commitment to fulfill familial obligations commonly expected of South Asian children in the name of respect. Identifying as “queer” was something that Vega clearly expressed as detrimental to the communication process as it signified a departure from the codes of interdependent care that registered as respect within hers and Mala’s ethno-religious familial structure. As Vega put it during a conversation with me, “I’m not queer, I’m ordinary.”13 Her rejection of the term queer can be understood both in terms of the identity’s individualist associations and her parents’ inability to register queer as anything but dehumanizing within the worlds of meaning-making among her family of origin.
The identification with ordinariness that Mala and Vega enact invokes understandings of respect detailed by Reddy as central to hijra identity in Hyderabad. Here the “ordinariness” becomes radically non-Western in its enactment of a collectivist commitment to care that counters assimilation to Western individualism that queerness often represents. As such, they expose the life ecologies of sustainability colonized into silence or insult when hijra is used to disparage nonheterosexual and gender disobedient South Asians. By excavating worlds of sense-making silenced by colonial massaging of history, we can situate my own mother’s exasperation that she raised a “hijra” in terms of how queerness signifies to her the prevention of a commitment to grow the self in community. In these terms, her calling me a “hijra” could be a calling out my perceived disrespect for a commitment of “being there.”
Aparajeeta “Sasha” Duttchoudhury and Rukie Hartman’s anthology, Moving Truth(s): Queer and Transgender Writings on Family, include stories that illustrate what I am suggesting is a complex communicative act of “being there.” This communicative act respects the opacity of resistant worlds of sense by dwelling in the inarticulate, the inchoate, the nonverbal and sensory modes of meaning-making forged between queer/transgender South Asians and their families of origin. The contributors to Moving Truth(s) illustrate this communicative act by emphasizing modes of nonverbal communication that can better signify their gender/sexual difference as consonant with a collective sense of self inclusive of one’s commitment to one’s family of origin (2015, 28, 44, 160).
In the opening chapter, Rajat S. Singh sets the tone for the anthology by detailing intimate perceptions and sensory experiences that communicate a connection to his parents that remain inarticulate. As he acknowledges the “well-accepted notion that South Asian diasporic families don’t talk,” he also suggests the significance of excavating worlds of meaning-making that are not rooted in verbal expression (2015, 19). He writes: “[W]hat would it look like to question a culture of silence, and examine less visible forms of communication, openness, and ally-ship within Indian families, which may perhaps be couched in the shadows? At what point do faint glimmers of ally-ship emerge, and how do we know how and when to spot the inchoate?” (19). Lugones’s strategy of complex communication can be glimpsed in Singh’s suggestion that an avenue toward “allyship” between queer/LGBT-identified South Asians and our families requires attending carefully to the meanings generated in nonverbal and nonvisual forms of communication. Instead of dismissing the “accepted notion that South Asian diasporic families don’t talk” as evidence of a conservative (read: backward) cultural disposition, he suggests that we mine the silence for culturally specific codes of loving attempts to stay connected. These codes do not map seamlessly onto Western understandings of love as individualist “freedom from interference” in one’s life choices. Several iterations of this politics of love and respect, grounded in a “determination to stay,” emerge throughout the collection and point to avenues of complex communication between queer/LGBT identified South Asians and our families of origin (Bagri 2015, 99).
Raju Singh, a transgender diasporic South Asian based in London, elaborates his strategy of “being there” as an avenue toward communicating his gender disobedience to his mother that counters colonial translations that equate being transgender with being monstrous. He writes: “I had made a promise with myself when my mother found out that I was transgender, that I would be patient and make sure that any changes happened while she was around, and also that we would always be in contact no matter how hard it was” (2015, 166). A commitment to physical proximity to his mother through his transition was integral to his mother’s capacity to “realize I was not turning into a freakish monster” (166). Recognizing the limits of verbal linguistic codes, especially in English, to communicate the ways his mode of being exceeds gender labels, especially the Western gender binary, Raju turns to cooking and creating recipes with his mother as a communicative strategy. By considering the centrality of food as a culturally specific mode of forging loving ties with family of origin, he explains:
Losing most of my family has made me realize why spending time together is much more important than any word or label. We have been meeting up regularly, after a necessary break, coming up with recipes which we make together, mostly so we don’t have to talk. No awkwardness, just distraction in a shared interest. That works. Talking would be too much, so we cook, a maternal legacy. I somehow subconsciously instigated this pattern so that we could spend time together in a way that isn’t stressful or uncomfortable for us both. (160; emphasis added)
Although, as Raju explains earlier, his mother expressed her inability to use the correct gender pronouns as her daughter became her son, Raju refuses to let words and labels become more important than spending time with his mother. The act of generating recipes and cooking together, Raju explains, honors a “maternal legacy” often devalued in heteropatriarchal revisions of South Asian cultural histories. In doing so, Raju’s transgender identification signifies a commitment to honor and participate in his mother’s ways of living and contributing to the family’s well-being. This nonverbal action communicates the complexity of Raju’s disobedience to South Asian gender norms that English or South Asian verbal languages cannot hold.
Forging loving connections dependent on learning to read resistance across worlds of sense, rather than seeking acceptance via “unconditional love,” is a central method(ology) and political goal in Lugones’s call for deep coalition. Instead of “accepting what is” in an affirmation of unconditional love, which presumes one should love even those who harm them, the project of not disposing of our families of origin in our movement work becomes an ongoing project of mutually enacting and communicating a love that, in the words of June Jordan, can be verified among those doing and receiving the loving (WT 85; Jordan 1990, 175). The common goal in queer South Asian organizational outreach efforts to promote “acceptance”14 presumes a unidirectional effort (with evolutionary undertones) of getting parents and other blood/legal family of queer and LGBT South Asians to grow (educate themselves) into acceptance. Those parents who do come to accept their queer/LGBT-identified children become celebrated examples of model South Asian parents who evidence an unconditional love for their children. The plea for understanding is tied to a plea that South Asian immigrant parents relate to their sexual and gender nonconforming children, an act presumed to be dependent on, and evidence of, loving one’s children without conditions. To love without conditions is to love an other no matter what they do. Such love is not based on actions but rather an attitude of acceptance and cannot be verified as a commitment to nourishing a collective well-being of consciously interdependent selves. Unconditional love involves the removal of agency from both parties, hence the removal of choice. And hence, the erasure of resistance.
Asking our families of origin to “accept us for who we are” because we are helpless to change our sexual and gender identifications asks them to identify with our pain of isolation and helplessness and frames them as oppressors should they not do so. This leads us back to a logic of disposability with the “accepting” parents as worthy of inclusion and the “unaccepting” (read: unloving) as not-(yet-)acceptable. Shifting the focus of queer South Asian praxis to witnessing faithfully our families of origin also shifts our understanding of love to one that is, indeed, conditional. Specifically, this is a love conditional on our ability to identify with each other’s inhabitations and enactments of resistance against oppressions and our commitment to nourish and amplify this resistant ground toward our collective and mutual well-being. As such, witnessing faithfully becomes a project of preparing the ground for communicating a love that can be verified across different worlds of sense.
I am grateful to Sarah Hoagland, Nelima Gaonkar, Norma Valenzuela, and Leora Tyree for their generous engagement with earlier drafts of this chapter. Thank you, as well, to Mala Nagarajan and Vega Subramanian and all the queer South Asian collectives, networks, theorists, activists, friendships, and support groups who have sustained me through my multiple becomings.
1.Queer South Asian organizational events that bring together queer South Asians and their families of origin like “Loving Ties: Honoring South Asian Queer Women’s Families” (Khush DC 2008), “Desi Family Pride” (South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association NYC 2012), and “We are Family” (Queer South Asian National Network 2015) highlight a recognized need and desire for queer and LGBT-identified South Asians to remain meaningfully tied to their families of origin. Similarly, queer South Asian theorists Gayatri Gopinath (2005) and Jasbir Puar (2007) offer reading strategies to identify familial home spaces and ethno-religious South Asian communities of place as integral to queer South Asian liberation in the face of racist and (neo)colonial state violence.
2.I put the qualifiers “accepting” and “unaccepting” in quotation marks throughout the text to register their colonial/modern categorial logics when used by queer South Asian organizations to celebrate “accepting” South Asians families who embrace their queer-identified relative and, implicitly, to condemn those “unaccepting” families who have not evolved into queer acceptance and, instead, may coerce, ostracize, or disown their queer-identified relative.
3.Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA) “Parents Who Love their LGBT Kids” Campaign. See www.autostraddle.com/this-powerful-multilingual-campaign-features-asian-parents-who-love-their-lgbt-kids-295968. Accessed January 16, 2016.
4.Vega Subranamian, in conversation with the author, October 14, 2012.
5.Chandan Reddy (1998) clarifies the inability for communities or families of choice to replace communities and families of origin associated with “home.”
6.These are parental reactions that queer-identified South Asians discussed in queer South Asian support groups and workshops in which I participated as part of my own struggle for over ten years.
7.See, for example, Give a Damn! True Colors Fund Project. www.wegiveadamn.org/issues/youth-suicide. Accessed August 28, 2015.
8.During a session focusing on narrating the coming-out experience to family, one participant stated adamantly that his approach to his family has been, “if you don’t accept me, then you’re a bigot!” This approach is echoed in the slogan appearing on a protest sign during a Queer Azaadi (freedom) march in Mumbai, India: “Not Gay as in Happy, But Queer as in Fuck You!”
9.M. Jacqui Alexander invokes the phrase “self in community” to reference a collectivist sense of self that actively recognizes and inhabits one’s interdependence and connections to others (2005, 282).
10.I am defining “Indian English” as English domesticated by patriarchal Indian elites in collaboration with British colonials.
11.In the documentary Jihad for Love, one of the gay Muslim men explains that his mother was less upset about his being gay than his lack of marriage-ability.
12.Alton Becker (1991) uses the term languaging to reference the embodied ways of relating, feeling, and being within a particular language and its specific domain of distinctions.
13.Vega Subranamian, in discussion with the author, October 14, 2012.
14.Queer South Asian organizations in Los Angeles (Santrang), Chicago (Trikone), and Washington DC (Khush DC) explicitly state on their websites that promoting “acceptance” of LGBT South Asians is one of their goals.
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