The Gays Aren’t All White, The Desis Aren’t All Straight: Exploring Queer Subjectivity in the Toronto South Asian Diaspora
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this research project is to approach a better understanding of queer South Asian diasporic identity and experience as it exists in Toronto, Canada. It attempts do so through the narratives of five individuals who self-identify with this subjectivity . A review of literature found that our current sexual subjectivities have emerged in co-production with our racial ones – demonstrating both the social contingencies of ‘sexuality’ as we understand it today, and the current utility of sexuality discourse towards racializing ends. This review also found that South Asian queer diasporic individuals – in the negotiation of their multiple Otherizations – have the potential to be both complicit in, and resistant to, the overlapping structures of race and sexuality through which human difference is organized and hierarchized. Given this theoretical context as a foundation, this project found that queer South Asian diasporic individuals encounter both racism and homophobia/transphobia, and yet lack the availability of community spaces in which to process and heal from such incidents – and as such, experience feelings of loneliness, displacement, and invisibility. Further, many subscribe to a belief in a conflict between their racial and sexual identities – a conflict that has inspired different and opposing strategies for reconciliation. All participants found both value and limitations in the frameworks and languages available for organizing their subjectivity – including in the concept of ‘queer’ that is increasingly adopted as a catch-all for non-normative sexualities worldwide - but differed in their conceptualization of the self as ‘essential’ versus context-dependent. An unanticipated finding was a common distancing from the institutionalized religions they had been socialized into. These findings elicited further analysis on the complicity of queer South Asian diasporic individuals in processes of racialization, the limitations of Western queer ‘Pride’ movements, and both the elusiveness and hope of a ‘home’ for those Otherized on multiple grounds. Finally, and importantly, this project found that the stories of queer South Asians living in Toronto are ones of savvy, resilience, creativity, resistance – and indeed, of joy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".