This chapter explores the complex spatialities shaping the intimate lives of South Asian queer diasporas in the UK, navigating multiple borders, identities, and communities to reveal both the challenges and promises of queer dialogue and connection.
Authors
Dhiren Borisa, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law school, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.
Gavin Brown, LGBT health charity, Leicester, United Kingdom.
Summary
This chapter investigates the spatialities that shape the intimate lives and practices of South Asian queer diasporas in the UK. It explores the uniqueness of South Asian queerness and its negotiation through some of the material and imagined boundaries that frame geographies of belonging, intimacies, and alienation in the UK and transnationally. It examines the multiple ways that queerness complicates and exaggerates processes of racial othering.
The chapter draws on ethnographic encounters, observations and meaning-making of an Indian researcher unfamiliar with both the UK and these diasporic spaces. It navigates through spaces that are presumed queer such as the dating apps or club venues in gay villages in the UK; and spaces that are alternatively produced by South Asian queers as a space of refuge.
In addition to the national borders negotiated by South Asian queer diasporas, the chapter also examines the subcontinental geopolitical divisions, religious differences, caste hierarchies, and communal obligations which are reproduced and lived through these queer diasporic spaces. While negotiating these multiple forms of bordering shapes and conditions queer South Asian’s intimate lives, our chapter also attends to the promise of dialogue between these inter-community, intra-community and transnational imaginations of queerness.
Published in: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands
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