Papers by Sayan Bhattacharya
SLR, 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anthropology and Humanism, 2023
Part of a book forum on Srila Roy's Changing the Subject, this essay hones in on Roy's theorizati... more Part of a book forum on Srila Roy's Changing the Subject, this essay hones in on Roy's theorization of labor in feminist governmentality-from the underpaid labors of non-profit workers to the reproductive labors that vitalize feminist and queer rights movements to the care labors for target groups and the aesthetic labors of the workers in how they present themselves at work. These labors simultaneously contain and enable visions of social transformation. The labors that keep feminist and queer organizing alive are becoming more exhausting and challenging under a totalitarian regime. Hence, defensiveness is, more often than not, the default response to any critique of the politics of such labors. This essay asks if it is possible to engage with such defensiveness as an entry point to explore the everyday workings of queer and feminist mobilizations.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
QED, 2021
Mona Ahmed, a hijra, died at the age of eighty-one in 2017. Before that she lived in a graveyard ... more Mona Ahmed, a hijra, died at the age of eighty-one in 2017. Before that she lived in a graveyard for more than two decades where she built a community of friends and animal companions, a community that was ever changing with both human and nonhuman characters leaving, dying and new members joining. Mona became famous when a photobook titled, Myself Mona Ahmed with text by Mona and images by photographer, Dayanita Singh appeared in 2001. Years later, writer, Arundhati Roy based Anjum, one of the protagonists of her novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness on Mona. Although both the representations of Mona give us a harrowing account of a hijra’s life struggles in a heteropatriarchal world, they also depict the generosity with which Mona/Anjum welcomes various so-called deviants—beggars, mad women, women who have suffered domestic violence, the caste oppressed, the disabled and even nonhumans into the home they built over the years beside the dead. How and why does one build a home in a graveyard? How is such a home so capacious and hospitable that it can welcome anyone who defies the norm?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Global Public Health, 2021
The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on... more The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 26, 2020 stated that India had introduced legal reforms to accord rights to transgender citizens and signalled the Transgender Persons’ (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 as India’s stake to the global regime of human rights. Even though there is not much basis to these rights as the law in question fails to provide any material benefits to its target population, transgender communities have been fiercely protesting against the state and at times negotiating with it to get laws that are more in alignment with their rights. In the wake of serialized deaths and precarities intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, transgender communities also stage other negotiations in the everyday with activists, transnationally funded NGOs and academics researching their communities, encounters that are not as spectacular as the protests against the state but that which ensures their daily sustenance. This paper investigates how they inhabit these systemically exclusionary and violent institutions. Deploying ethnographic field notes from eastern India, this paper argues that they inhabit them subjunctively which is not about refusing engagement with what is inherently oppressive but about the ceaseless conjuring of improvisatory and contingent gestures that are marked by hope as well as uncertainty. The simultaneity of continuous protests, rage, hopelessness, hope, negotiations, supplications and scepticism allow them to not only endure the violence of institutions but also to rupture them and even imagine them otherwise.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Radical History Review, 2021
In 2001 a group of gaymen and kotis (one of several terms used in India for feminine persons assi... more In 2001 a group of gaymen and kotis (one of several terms used in India for feminine persons assigned male at birth, whomay ormay not identify as transfeminine) wrote a play titled Koti ki atma (Soul of the Koti), about a koti who dies of AIDS and returns as a ghost to prevent other kotis from having unprotected sex. This article investigates the sociopolitical context in which the play was written, analyzes its plot, and, most importantly, follows the ghost to track the labors she performs. The author offers a glimpse into the histories of care and queer community-making that exceed the terror of death and state apathy in the wake of HIV in India.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2020
An unruly vision goes wayward, off-tangent and in doing so Gopinath gives us a breath-taking arch... more An unruly vision goes wayward, off-tangent and in doing so Gopinath gives us a breath-taking archive of moments and visuals that are what perhaps Saidiya Hartman will call “revolution in the minor key.” (2018: 467) Yet, how do we account for those outside the field of such a vision, those recalcitrant objects that cannot or refuse to take flight?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History, 2019
This paper looks at how the term MSM circulates in Asia and how that relates to HIV-AIDS with a f... more This paper looks at how the term MSM circulates in Asia and how that relates to HIV-AIDS with a focus on South and South east Asian countries.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
SAMAJ: South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2019
In a 2014 judgment, the Supreme Court of India affirmed the right of every Indian citizen to choo... more In a 2014 judgment, the Supreme Court of India affirmed the right of every Indian citizen to choose their gender identity regardless of gender affirmation surgery. Following this judgment, states across India have been constituting transgender welfare boards and the Indian government has approved the Transgender Persons’ (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2018 that is supposed to be the one law that will safeguard transgender individuals from any form of discrimination. This legal recognition also coincides with a series of media campaigns that depict transgender individuals staking their claim to Indian citizenship through the trope of nationalism, which is always already majoritarian Hindu nationalism. Thus, these twin developments raise the question of whether performing Hindu nationalism is the only way to claim Indian citizenship. Recent queer studies scholarship from India warns us of the danger of queer and transgender movements getting folded into majoritarian Hindu nationalism, creating constitutive outsides comprised of non-citizens who cannot perform such nationalism. This paper argues that such a meta-narrative risks the danger of missing out on the micro-narratives of resistance and protests emerging from within India’s transgender movements that disrupt any singular narrative of transgender individuals performing nationalism to seek citizenship rights.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 5.3 (2018), 2018
In an essay titled "The Virtual Anthropologist," written in 1997, Kath Weston highlights the hybr... more In an essay titled "The Virtual Anthropologist," written in 1997, Kath Weston highlights the hybrid position of the native ethnographer in the academia. While the hard labor of researching on the field is illuminated in the writing of the ethnographer, the writing itself does not account for the labor of composing those sentences. On the other hand, if the researcher is native, that is her field is where her home is, then research itself does not count as labor. i If the queer studying queers is in a geographical location that she calls home, then she is automatically interpellated as the insider. She already has all the data. Hence, how is her fieldwork serious research? So then, where does one locate the labors of the native ethnographer? In the writing or in the research? Weston writes provocatively, "… her work will remain suspect, subject to inspection on the grounds of authenticity rather than intellectual argument or acumen." Drawing on Weston's theorization of the positionality of the native ethnographer, I would like to reflect on the categories of home, field and the native ethnographer in the way they have shaped my experiences as a researcher, part of whose field work is based at home, that is West Bengal, India. As a former journalist and a queer activist in West Bengal, I am often asked to speak about the portrayal of queer issues in the media at workshops organized by queer support groups in the state. Last year, a transgender organization in the state asked me to speak at one such workshop. The group works on HIV awareness programs among mostly working-class transgender sex workers, as well as it organizes vocational training courses to increase employment opportunities for transgender people in the area. During the span of the workshop, I stayed with one of the
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Books by Sayan Bhattacharya
Queer Potli: Memories, Imaginations and (Re)imaginations of Urban Queer Spaces in India, 2019
As the city rapidly gentrifies, more and more physical spaces of cruising disappear. What happens... more As the city rapidly gentrifies, more and more physical spaces of cruising disappear. What happens when a mode of public transport becomes a zone of cruising? What kind of queer politics does it engender as well as foreclose?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Women Speak Nation: Gender, Culture, and Politics, 2020
This paper examines how death is instrumentalized by the Indian queer movements to demand queer r... more This paper examines how death is instrumentalized by the Indian queer movements to demand queer rights from the Indian nation state. Taking the suicide of a subordinate caste lesbian couple and its audiovisual documentation by a queer collective as its departure point, the paper interrogates the politics of representation of queer identities in India. The joint suicides of the women become the exemplars of why queer rights are urgent. The finality of their deaths means that any access to their life worlds is impossible but their deaths continue to be minefields of value, both as evidence of queer victimhood as well as justification for the need for queer rights. In other words, the two women are simply defined by the event of their deaths. While rights discourse demands that there be a harm which can be redressed by the nation state, this paper asks what foreclosures does the spectacularization of the harm, in this case queer death, demand? Finally, how might we or is it possible to imagine queerness differently?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India: Anxiety and Intimacy, 2020
This paper takes up the site of same-sex marriages in India to argue that queer feminist discours... more This paper takes up the site of same-sex marriages in India to argue that queer feminist discourses on marriage often fail to account for the complex ways in which marriage subverts heteronormative norms. The paper reads three recent moments of public articulation of queer intimacies in India and the way they have captured the mainstream imaginary to first rehearse the dominant arguments for and against marriage. Then it deploys ethnographic observations to problematize such a binary frame of debate to closely read what work such marriages perform within the scripts of normative institutions like the family, education and the state in India.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Reviews by Sayan Bhattacharya
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2022
Review of Legalizing Sex: Sexual Minorities, AIDS, and Citizenship in India by
Chaitanya Lakkimsetti
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Talks by Sayan Bhattacharya
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Sayan Bhattacharya
Books by Sayan Bhattacharya
Book Reviews by Sayan Bhattacharya
Talks by Sayan Bhattacharya