LGBTQ Activisms and Hindu Nationalism in India: An Ethnographic Inquiry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary Indian society is marked by increasingly violent majoritarianism that is redefining India as a Hindu nation. In recent years, the heightened persecution of religious minorities and an ever-expanding definition of “anti-national” has justified violence against a widening range of people. Paradoxically, in this atmosphere of shrinking public freedoms and increasing state-sanctioned ethnic violence, there has been a simultaneous expansion of LGBTQ representation in mainstream English media and nominal advancements in LGBTQ rights. As a result, a distinct form of LGBTQ support for Hindu nationalism has become popular, even as other LGBTQ activisms have amplified their efforts to resist Hindu nationalism. Within this context, this dissertation examines how and why LGBTQ activists support and resist Hindu nationalism, and how this reconfigures what it means to be queer in Hindu nationalist times. \n\nI address these questions through a queer feminist digital ethnography of LGBTQ activists in New Delhi and Mumbai, conducted between February and October 2020. My ethnographic findings indicate that LGBTQ support for Hindu nationalism is often advanced without Hindu nationalist support for LGBTQ rights. Based on this, I argue that what we see in India is aspirational homonationalism, where Hindu nationalist rhetoric is buttressed in the present to accrue LGBTQ rights and inclusion into the nation in the future. Further, LGBTQ complicity with Hindu nationalism signals deeper desires for national belonging, especially when juxtaposed against the persistent claim that homosexuality is “alien” to Indian culture. My findings also demonstrate that LGBTQ activists resisting Hindu nationalism are amplifying these efforts despite experiencing the larger atmosphere in contemporary India as dangerous and stifling. Queer feminist and Dalit queer and trans* activisms, in particular, resist the underlying narratives of LGBTQ inclusion that support Hindu nationalism, rejecting the violence of Hindu nationalism in the process. \n\nI conclude that LGBTQ complicity with, and resistance to, Hindu nationalism maps onto existing antagonisms between gay rights activisms, queer feminisms, and Dalit queer and trans* activisms. As aspirations for homonationalism become more deeply rooted within LGBTQ activisms, and as its critiques become more stringent, Hindu nationalism deepens pre-existing fissures within these activisms by becoming another axis of difference in larger struggles over what LGBTQ activisms should fight for, and what LGBTQ lives should look like.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".