No Middle Ground

Compartmentalization of genders gets extremely stringent in a society like Pakistan that is increasingly laden with erroneous and narrow interpretations of religious and moral codes. Gender politics, like all the other control apparatuses of society, is becoming increasingly hermetic and overwhelming. Discourse, dissent and deviation meets with strong opposition, more often than not verging onto violent and zealous responses. Society may be failing on many accounts but the conventional shared culture and prevalent societal structure is still held dearer than life. We are at this moment miles away from public homosexual marriages or widely accessible medical procedures for sex-transformation – in fact, it would take an overhaul of society to achieve these things. Right now, we still work hard to ensure that our boys are robust and bullish and our girls submissive and meek.

An unconventional phenomenon like a cross-dressing anchor hosting a talk show gets confused reactions. I was recently talking to Ali Saleem a.k.a. Begum Nawazish Ali, who happens to be a friend from childhood, about the kind of reactions that he gets when meeting people in his everyday life. Ali is in his late twenties, usually sports a two-day- old stubble and a wardrobe of very conventional male clothes. He has a second avatar, though: hosting this popular show at a local TV channel [this show no longer airs – eds.] as Begum Nawazish Ali clad in a glittering, revealing sari  is an enormous departure from his off-screen personality. “I travel a lot,” he says, “and mostly meet people at airports or when I am checking into a hotel. While I have noticed that society is generally accepting of me due to my star status, they get very uncomfortable if their young son or daughter requests for a photograph with me or shows too much interest into what I do. This reaction is not only because of the presumed sexual-preference that an act such as cross-dressing suggests but also because what I symbolize is a challenge to the accepted gender behaviour.”

Similarly for girls, a departure from the recognized stereotype of a full-time homemaker into a career-pursuing individual is in itself challenging; anything beyond that such as a conscience decision to stay single at a marriageable age is incomprehensible for society. Society polices and enforces “normal.” Any alternative trend, bet it something as simple as a colour choice or something as crucial as a career path, is curbed with full vigour.

Parental instruction, peer pressure, taught syllabus – everything encourages such stereotyping. All social and economic structures reinforce such ideals and thus reject divergence and diversity. This results in greater intolerance to dissimilarity as well as confusion and despair among the already ostracized sexual minorities.

And the Flame Shines Bright: Sudar Foundation & the Rights of Aravanis

Ennai naanaga vazha vidu – Let me live as myself”
– The last line of the play Uraiyada Ninaivugal performed by members of Kannadi Kalai Kuzhu, the cultural troupe of Sudar Foundation.

“Sudar”, which literally means flame, is a registered trust for more than two years now but has been doing work around the rights of transgender people for more than five years. It is a group of fifteen transgender people (known as hijras in Hindi and aravanis is Tamil) who have come together to form this organisation. This group live as a family and work with each other. Many things make Sudar Foundation different from most other organisations of and/or working on rights of transgender people in India. One such aspect is that as an organisation they did not begin their work with that on HIV/AIDS. While work related to the infection is very important, as Priya Babu, the treasurer of Sudar Foundation says, “All groups of transgender people that are involved in work around social change within the community, almost always work on issues of HIV/AIDS. This puts forward the false image that this is the only issue of the community and contributes to the myth that this community is more susceptible to or spread the infection more than others”.

She says, “There are other issues that are equally important if not more, to the community”. The price they often pay for this political stand is the lack of funding as the most common funding for organisations in the aravani community is for work around HIV/AIDS. In spite of these hindrances, Sudar Foundation takes up a series of issues of concern to the community and expresses themselves in various forms.

One such expression is their cultural group, which has now produced two plays. Kannadi Kalai Kuzhu, which means mirror cultural troupe is the only all aravani theatre group in the nation. Both their plays manasin azhaippu (the call of the heart) and uraiyada ninaivugal (frozen memories) portray various aspects of the lives ofaravanis. They have been produced with support from Voicing Silence, a project of M.S.Swaminathan Research Foundation. The first play portrays various kinds of rights violations of the community and expresses dissent against the same. The second play is one that looks inwards. They interrogate the notion of family while talking about their experiences with their natal families as well as their adopted family of aravanis. They conclude that a family can be of different kinds and it is a space of acceptance, warmth, care and mutual support. These plays are in Tamil and the troupe has travelled around Tamilnadu. They have received support from various progressive groups in the state including those that work on issues of caste and class.

Mangai, a feminist theatre director based in Chennai who has directed both the plays with Kannadi Kalai Kuzhu says, “Members of the group have opened up to themselves and with each other through the process of theatre.” She also states, “Working with Kannadi Kalai Kuzhu challenges notions of genders on stage and creates a new idiom”. Members of the group such as Malathi said, “Theatre has helped in significantly increasing the confidence levels. It makes us much more comfortable with our own bodies.”

Members of Sudar Foundation now run a self-help group, which has received acclaim from the state government. They have used the revolving fund available to the self-help groups to build homes. They have built fifteen homes, solving one of the most significant problems of the aravani community – accommodation. They built the houses on land granted to the group by the Tamilnadu government. This grant did not come easy. Members of Sudar Foundation struggled for five years to get the land. Nestled in a tiny village beyond chengalpattu town, these fifteen small homes have given the freedom and peace of mind that comes with owning a house to anyone. Especially in this community, it is almost impossible for them to own houses and rents shoot up the minute the owners know they are aravanis, if they allow them to rent the house at all in the first place

About future work of the self-help group Priyadarshini, the secretary of Sudar Foundation says, “We will invest the money in small businesses and hope to make a minimal profit which we can then use to take care of our personal expenses as well as those of the Foundation”. She says, “This experience will teach us to handle money as well as to invest in a way that is lucrative.”

Yet another significant victory for members of this group and the aravani community as a whole is the case that they filed and won in the Trichy high court, Tamilnadu asking for aravanis to get voters identity cards. The loophole however lay in the fact that the judge ruled that they could receive their card in any gender they wish- male, female or transgender. Thus in implementation the officials in many cases harassed them and insisted on giving them cards as male and not as anything else. The victory however remains significant however symbolic it may be.

The some members of the Foundation also took a three month course on beauty care and massage therapy. Those members are now qualified beauticians and are awaiting some economic support to start their own beauty parlour. Not all the members have received even basic school education. They often leave school around puberty when changes begin to occur in their bodies and the harassment in school becomes unbearable. Others are from poor families who could not afford to send their child to school. The few who are educated, some who have masters’ degrees have not been able to get a job or have lost their jobs because they are aravanis.

Thus, the issues of the community in terms of ensuring basic standards of living are immense. Sudar Foundation however does not stop there and go beyond to a politics that is complex and nuanced. Selvam who is a female to male transgender individual is part of the group. This is uncommon and often disallowed among traditional aravani jamaats or communities. Members of Sudar Foundation however have fought this tradition and supported Selvam. Selvam is growing up to be a hard working young man and contributes immensely to all the work of Sudar Foundation. Selvam says, “They are my family. I cannot imagine living anywhere else with anyone else.

It is thus apparent that Sudar Foundation has a long way to go in terms of their work. Their battles continue from daily sustenance of both individuals and the organisation, to political expression and legal struggles. The heartening aspect however is the group is not only hard working, they are willing to constantly question themselves as much as the outside world. They work with a politics of ensuring basic rights, which they believe is possible only through collective work and critical thinking. They untiringly inch towards creating a world where they all can live with dignity and respect. They are a critique of normative civil, political and social structures and a heartening lesson to all those interested in processes of social change.


Wanna Fuck?

“Wanna fuck?”

I had just ambled my way up from the platform at the Place des Arts Metro station and was waiting for the bus in the warmth just inside the double-glazed glass doors, peering at the snow-laden outside. That’s when the rather runty fellow with the somewhat shifty eyes and definitely shifty gait had inched over to me.

“Haven’t we met?” he asked, smiling.

I would’ve remembered if we had, though not for the reasons so often vomited forth by Messrs. Mills and Boon. He was about my height, so not very tall, especially for a North American male. His hair was a mess of mousy curls, with just a hint of winter dandruff; his moustache was, well, barely the beginning of one, and his smile revealed a gap between his front teeth that I could imagine shoving a sizable toothpick through. But I truly am not a lookist so I smiled back.

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mm hmm.”

“Isn’t your name Lucia? We met in Toronto.”

Lucia?
“I’ve never been to Toronto.”

“But your name is Lucia?”

“Nope.” Still smiling.

“But you’re Italian right?”

I have some English blood but no Italian as far as I’m aware.

“Nope. Pakistani.”

His shifty eyes widened. “Really? You don’t look it.”

I got that a lot in Montreal. A hairdresser once even said she thought all Pakistanis were ‘dark and ugly’, which perhaps should’ve boosted my ego a little but only made me grumpy. I didn’t go back to her again.

“Yes, really.”

“Well, you’re very pretty. No, sexy… so sexy…”

Ah! There it was! My first pick-up in a strange land. Not knowing quite how to respond, I just let out an odd spluttering sound from my nose and started out the door. (The bus had just pooshed! in).

“So tell me about your country.”

There were no vacant seats on the bus so I had to stand alongside him.

“Well, it’s next to India.” (I found that it was necessary at that time to point this out to most goras; at least us Pakis don’t have to do that anymore). “It’s very hot there most of the year, so I’m finding it hard to get used to the cold.” I emitted what I hoped was a sweet, guileless, utterly babe-in-the-woods kind of chuckle.

“Uh huh, uh huh… Wanna fuck?”

At once my mind raced back to the countless instances when I had encountered the desi version of this back in the land of the pure. Of course, our sheedas had almost always shown enough restraint to not be so direct. The most I had had to endure were the kissy noises or the ubiquitous singing of the filmi song. Friends had not always been so lucky to get ‘decent’ ‘eve-teasers’. One had been pinched in Liberty Market while out shopping for bangles on the eve of Eid. Unfortunately for the pincher, said friend was hardly the shrinking violet type and she chased him down and slapped him in front of the suitably impressed crowd. Another friend, equally, if not more, plucky, was felt up through her open car window while stopped at a red light. Her tormentor thought he would make a smooth getaway on his Kawasaki but had obviously forgotten that Lahori traffic can trip up even the most slippery of folk. He zoomed off after extracting his hand but was stopped dead when the cars up ahead refused to budge for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, my friend roared up in her Alto, rammed straight into him and then drove off without a glance backwards.

But that was back home. This was the First World, the civilized world. I had never created a fuss back there, for that is what we are tacitly taught to do, and I certainly didn’t want to be a self-righteous, hysterical touch-me-not here.

“So, wanna fuck?”

The seat just to the left of me was now empty.

“Uh, no thank you” I said cheerfully, and sat down.

It was a long ride home.


The Gender Spectrum

A bisexual friend explained to me once the gender and sexuality spectrum. At the opposite ends lie male and female, homosexual and heterosexual, and there are a whole range of combinations in between. She told me that most people lie somewhere closer to the middle. Surprise! Surprised?

Most societies have norms and cultural practices that discourage the expression of tendencies that stray from the straight path (pun obviously intended). It is just easier to order the world in neat boxes. Shades of grey are trickier, more complicated to make sense of.

The answers, for those of us willing to explore, lie in science – social science, or the “soft” sciences as the critics like to say. It is shocking to me that the fact that gender is a social construct is apparently debatable. Equally outrageous are refusals to admit that gender characteristics, attributes and stereotypes are the product of socialization.

There are sociological explanations for why female children generally like dolls, and male children planes or cars. The explanation for why boys don’t cry, for example, is to be found not in their genetic code, but their sociological makeup. Likewise, it is not inherent in females to be generally more caring and loving than their male counterparts. This is the expectation society imposes on them and enforces through a system of reward and punishment.

Religion, tradition, cultural norms and moral values often times work against the free growth and expression of a variety of human tendencies. Even the more liberal societies impose restrictions on who we can and cannot be. It is interesting to see how different cultures set the standard for acceptable behaviour, and exactly how much deviance is allowed.

For example, we accept the hijra for someone who lies on the gender spectrum where we cannot place per (the preferred pronoun over him/her; stands for person). But we have assigned to the hijra a specific role – performer for our benefit. This is acceptance without respect; perhaps tolerance, but without understanding.

Let us have a dialogue, or monologue, on what it means to be female, male, some combination of both, neither, other. Let us debate what is innate versus that which is acquired. Let us then challenge generalizations and celebrate the uniqueness that defines the human experience. Let us break away from social constructs that split us into black or white, and embrace the rainbow colours of being.


The Art of Naming: Meditations on Queer Activism

…when words found mouths
when tongues wagged their way
into minds,
and each object shrank, suddenly,
to fit its own precise outline.
You could say
that was when the trouble started:
When things stepped into the cage
of a purpose I must have had
somewhere in my mind.
– Imtiaz Dharker, ‘Words find Mouths’

What is in the name: homosexual? If you say it again and again, homosexual, homosexual, homosexual, it begins to sound like a creepy symptom. It is one of the bad habits of words, to give way on the slightest bit of repetition. The word leaks out of itself on being repeated, becomes what it originally (!) was – the deceived one brought into the menacing contract of meaning making. Repetition is a paradox: it both consolidates and shatters. To repeat something is to validate it, confirm its thereness and give it a nod of approval, like in a chant or in sloganeering. At the same time, repetition, for repetition’s sake has a sincere cheek; it kills the word with a master stroke: pulls it out of contingent frameworks and shows the ghastly madness of the name, like in the babbling of a child.

Give a slogan to someone who’s three and you would know. The words straight, lesbian, gay, homosexual, MSM are names with the classic weaknesses of names; words which totter if they are not continuously and shamefacedly propped up by dense political, medico-legal or religious frameworks of conception that are consubstantial with their usage. Every name is a product of a particular framework. The name does not define; it is rather a variable within a hopelessly circular (infinitely repeatable!) process –that first gives the premises of naming and then performs the act of naming based on these premises – and then smugly locates this whole process at the origin of things, before everything else, ala ‘I am gay’, ‘Are you a lesbian?’, ‘We are queer, we’re here, get used to it’, exercises in definition-making, processes of self-identification, loveable repetitions but not simply so!<\p>

I am not sentimental about LGBT activism (with about twenty years of a movement behind us in India, no one better be!) but I would be a part of all of it all the same, with an unforgiving self-irony and a constant clapping on one’s own head. Queer activism, here and now in Delhi, as I have lived through for the past three years, is composed of varied definitional excursions that are precisely that, definitional excursions, baggy monsters, simplifying technologies that take enormous and complicated raw material, lets say of the morass of human sexuality (itself a finished product of another technology), and try to produce, indeed with success, finished products, peculiarly sexualised individuals, gay or straight. These are historical occurrences; contingent responses for a world that can only be handled with strategic generalisations, with the steady repertoire of names, with banners asking for gay rights, hijra rights, lesbian rights, or with pleas composed of canny statistics. Queer activism in Delhi then, composed of a heterogeneous lot of organisations, collectives and individuals, responds practically(!) to this situation of frameworks. For the current case that the Naz Foundation and Voices Against 377, a collective of several queer, child-, women’s and human rights groups, are fighting in the Delhi High Court against the anti-sodomy law in the India, section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, we (the activists? I won’t dare choose to speak for everyone, though!) would present ourselves as minority legal subjects within the immediately available framework of the Indian legal system. Using the weapons at hand, we would shape ourselves strategically and then indulge in another process of self definition: legal State citizens, Indians, sexual minorities et al. That some of us provisionally or really buy into such logics of articulate, if not artificial, self definitions and make them the markers of understanding ourselves for ourselves (in our personal diaries!), can not and should not be denied. Politics is a name for strategies; the desire for and the social process of change have to make use of available names, categories and obstructions and then plunge into a continuous process of remoulding these. We can not start (or end) with something that is already mutatis mutandis. Queer activism, as I have seen in process in Delhi, is the utopian process that deliberately excludes the possibility of a Utopia. A utopic process that finally understands the concept of Utopia (for it is only the concept we can possibly discuss; Greek ‘ou’ is ‘not’, topos is ‘place’, ‘utopia’ is a ‘noplace’, it does not exist!). The Utopia is the defeat of all that is utopian and not what we could and have always easily and non-rigorously believed in, that – Utopia is a the realisation of the utopic. The Utopia is implicit within the utopic; it does not follow it like a flower does a bud or like a child does a foetus.

This is not to think about the process of naming as simply undesirable or desirable within activist agendas, to get caught in the enquiry of whether it is right or wrong. To say that the concept of the name works contingently i.e. historically, that we circularly imagine them into being within certain points of history, is not to say that they are unreal or fantastical with no palpable effects. The imagined, with all its imports, can hardly be dispelled or easily demarcated from the real. There is no escaping the realities of the name (as if that was desired or possible; names are the basis of how we interact, it is how we generalize ourselves, names mark our presence even when we are absent, kill me, I’ll still be known by my name! The name is everything!) but it is possible for all of us to see what conditions make what names possible for which people within certain moments of history. I could call myself gay; have done that in the past, might do that in the future, but what are the stakes involved; here, not the stakes of security, rather the stakes of the very process of finding and legitimating a name for oneself, queer for instance, or even Akhil. When and how does the fact that I love men (and sometimes women), that I want to fuck them or get fucked by them, become a variable for what I – want to – call myself? When does the sex-bit get into the name-bit and how does this process work? When does desire become sexuality or sexual-orientation i.e. if it does exist prior to them? Queer activism considers that it is significant to resurrect the sex-bit within the name-bit. The heterosexual poses as the unmarked sexuality, it is the presupposition, the grounds we took for granted. The heterosexual need not name himself; he is the beginning of things, he is unlimited dark space. The queer then appears as a name that queers; the sex-bit in the name-bit marks the different sexuality, the light from a chink. This marking is a politically indispensable process and politics rushes in my veins (another way to enter oneself, to access and define oneself!), so that I have no way to describe myself without names that do not already try and define something about me; otherwise they would be non-names (ideal, theoretically truly queer, stupid utopias!).

Queer activism is strategically played amidst this game of names. We commemorate the first gay protest in Delhi, the AIDS Behdbhav Virodhi Andolan’s public protest against police harassment of gay men, on the 11th of August, 1992, we co-memorate this event and its participants; collectively memorialize the first gay protest that then (threatens to) become our common undisputed history as stringed together through a certain name (they were queer, we are queer!). Names are these trajectories we carve for ourselves and others that are carved for us within the otherwise perversely multiple ways in which histories of individuals or a people can be drawn. One of the events that my queer collective Nigah (nazariya? nazar? a way of looking? a perspective? a name?) organised to mark this now historic date of August 11th was when we met at a particular venue at Cannought Place, made presentations about queer urban histories, talked about them, talked about personal experiences and all our first protests, loves, kisses, and then wore T-shirts that we had painted a day ago and walked around the inner circle of Cannought Place wearing those T-shirts with red roses in our hands (the first(?) public LGBT gatherings in Delhi used to happen on the terrace of the India Coffee House in CP; they used to keep a red-rose on the table as a clue, a locally acknowledged symbol; we chose to extend this curve of history, keep on a tradition, use their strategy of self-identification, use their name) and finally got together in Central Park and ended the evening with more songs and chats. The T-shirts we wore (see Figure. 1) on that day with slogans such as 377 Stinks, We’re Queer, We’re here, Get Used to it!, Aadmi hoon Aadmi Se Pyaar Karta Hoon, Queer and Lovin It!, Aawaz Do Hum Anek Hainet. al. function like names; they form a visual vocabulary for self-identification within a dense public space like CP in Delhi. They want to disrupt the unmarked heterosexual space, dirty it and produce effects of other and strategic namings and spellings (new spells that we cast?). These names, as I have pig-headedly (?) tried to drive home the point, are not at the beginning or the end of things; they are caught in the mire, just like the people they seek to stain.

 


The Inscrutable North Indian Man

Living in north India as an out gay man who does not dress, talk or walk like your usual hetero Hun exposes you to some unusual insights into north Indian masculinity and I’m willing to venture that these are true of Indian masculinity all over the country, given similar experiences in metros and semi-rural sites across the country.

The first of these insights is that any, and, I repeat, any, man in India is up for a quick blowjob and a poke in the hay with another man. North Indian men are almost aching for it and hardly need a smile or some eye contact to come up and ask for it. I’ve been propositioned by autowalas, rikshawalas, random Romeos on street corners and, of course, many married unclejis. I, of course, research masculinity, and so am ready for such encounters merely for the sociological riches they offer. Giving some overheated Jat hottie a blowjob at the end of a long interview does not seem like a bad deal at all to me. I am quite happy, as you can imagine, to oblige.

The north Indian male of the species is usually a gym bunny who wears an obviously fake tight T-shirt with the high-end brand name on it spelt wrong and jeans with designs on the back pockets in gold bits and baubs. His chest and biceps are quite disproportionate to the rest of his body, especially his spindly legs and his tight, bulging crotch may just be the effect of a badly dried pair of boxer shorts curling up at the edges and full of stiff, dried-up semen in the middle. But he is high on himself, clearly thinks he’s hot and will gladly wax eloquent on why he goes to the local gym everyday: which is to be healthy, look good, win the women and be able to defend them when the time comes. Matters will soon turn to sex and then, after some minutes of strenuous denial…. well, you have to get as many questions in before it is time for the payback.

So, there’s insights two, three and four for you: one that, bulky and ugly biceps and chests are what north Indian men, and, once again, Indian men in general, think makes them hot. Two, Indian men love themselves and think strength means big bodies with which to defend women in the big bad jungle that is contemporary Indian life and three, that every Indian man has done a man at some point in his life and will do a man again, with an interlude of denying any such possibility as ever being part of his universe, an interlude that lasts all of five minutes.

The north Indian man will tell you that he works his body to win the respect of his male friends and that feeling each other’s biceps is just part of the respect-winning exercise and nothing else; he will always maintain that there is competition between the men who work out, but none of it is even remotely sexual. If he’s in a good mood, he’ll tell you that sex is not a good thing and losing semen is like losing blood and must instantly be replenished by lots of protein-rich food. If he is insane (and believe you me, a lot of them are), he will speak to you of the perils of crooked penises, of nerves in the penis that must be pressed and those not pressed and those that never should be pressed lest it lead to imbalance of fluids in the body. No doubt much of this invaluable information has been gleaned from local, indigenous quacks who are visited for a variety of reasons, from erectile dysfunction to general susti which needs an ilaaj.

Of course, as you might have gathered by now, this is not the South Delhi upper class gym bunny (who will never participate in such a conversation and will have gay sex, when he does, only in the toilet of a farm house at some dismal gay party) but the Hindi-speaking mofussil boy from interior Delhi or Haryana, Punjab or Uttar Pradesh. The next thing you will learn is that this guy does not keep his conch clean. So, you must be ready with what I call my smegma kit: a small towel (or the spare toothbrush, if you don’t like the vibe of the guy too much or you think he needs to be brought down a few notches with some good, old-fashioned penile scrubbing), a small bottle of water (and flavoured condoms if you are a sucker for candy and super-safe sex). All, or some, of this must be used before you hunker down.

The next insight is that sex for the north Indian man is only the butt-fuck and the blowjob. Nothing else matters and when it comes down to it, they’d settle for only the butt-fuck. If you are not up for it, they are sorely disappointed and will still hit on your ass crack, fuck you between the legs, in the space between your asshole and thighs and generally anywhere there anyway. The other insight is that their women are not giving them blowjobs. Lower middle and working class Indian women do not do blowjobs. They think it is dirty and they simply refuse and our macho men have no option but to deal with that. Of course, they would not dream on going down on the women, so in some sense the women are only being fair. One of my fuckbuddies, an autowala, wants to meet me everyday only because his wife will not go down on him. The only thing he likes other than the blowjob is for me to suck his man-tits. Which leads me to my next and final insight, the father of all insights.

Suddenly, in the middle of it all, the testosterone-ridden, supermacho, overheated, aggressive, abusive north Indian man will turn around and ask you to pound his ass.

Amen.