Activism as Ethical Practice: Queer Politics in Contemporary India
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why are activists, activists? In this article I address that question, as well as what it means for an ethnographer to ask it. Based on fieldwork with lesbian and gay activists in New Delhi, I argue that activism emerges as ethical practice, and that ‘ethical practice’ consists of three affective exercises: problematizing established social norms, inventing alternatives to those norms, and creatively practicing those newly invented relational possibilities. But the political institutions that activists must engage in order to effect the transformations that they seek are far from conducive to the cultivation of the ethical practice that is at the heart of activism, and this article is partly an ethnography of this tension. I study this tension by tracing a series of key movements in Indian lesbian activism from 1987 to 2008, bookended by the public revelation of two married policewomen in rural India and a Gay Pride parade in central Delhi. Through this narrative, I show how each new shift in activism demands the foreclosure of possibilities and practices that emerged before it. On a reflexive note, I draw a parallel between activism as a fraught, contested undoing and remaking of its very premises and ethnography of activism as entailing the same.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it