— Amina Mehboob
Panel 5 was moderated by Professor Avishek Parui. The panelists were Aman Sinha from Ambedkar University, Gargi Tilak from English and Foreign languages university and Uddipta Roy from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad.
Aman Sinha’s paper was titled Queering the city: Textualizing Sexual Alterity within Modernist Fragmentations. It explored the intricate relationship between geographies and sexualities. He began by asserting that identities require performity and cultures of sexualities also have an influence on the identities of these geographies. Modern metropolis helps the queer community in the performative act of reconfiguring the city. Cities and city spaces allow gay men to connect with each other which is otherwise prohibited. Modernist writers writing on the ‘city’ have identified the space with a sense of fragmentation, a limbo, a notion of exile. However, it is in these fragmentations and fleeting moments that a distinctively queer culture began to thrive. The paper explored the relationship between city and queerness in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the dance and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s room. In both these novels, the city act as a narrative character and has a voice. In Holleran’s work, the city humanises and dehumanises the main character. He along with the other gay characters reach a state where they cannot differentiate between themselves and the city (New York). In the novel, the city becomes a paradox. Giovanni’s room is about the inescapability of desire projected in the city. The protagonist in the novel forms a set of homosexual relationships in the city of Paris from which he was unable to escape. Here, ‘city’ becomes a fragmentary space. and a dialectical merge happens between the character and the city thus leading to the collapse of one’s identity. The paper concludes by saying that the emergence of gay subculture should not be seen in a completely positive light because queerness is not free from the power networks of heterosexuality. The author also urges Queerness to be not limited to identity politics alone.
Gargi Tilak’s paper was titled ‘“When I was restricted from accessing spaces, I decided to create one”: The Politics of Gender, Spatializations and Transwomen Vlog Narratives in Malayalam. She started by stating that there is a strong correspondence between physical space and social space. She then brought the focus to cyberspace and how it has increasingly become a personal space where one’s identity formation and self-construction takes place. Unsurprisingly cyberspace is dominated by heteronormative culture and any near visibility of queerness online invites attack. Malayalam virtual space is a space of patriarchal construction and is inherently misogynistic. The panellist quoted feminist geographers Pollock and Massey and pointed out that these spaces need to be emancipated from the gendered or sexed dispositions. She based her paper on trans-vloggers Heidi Saadiya and Seema. She explained how transwomen vlog narratives are ever-evolving, autobiographical and has an authenticity because transwomen themselves are in charge of the narrative. These vlogs come under the category of territory orality. She states that unlike other forms of autobiography, vlog narrations are not introspective. These vlogs give transgenders a visibility that has been missing for a long time. The panelist claims that YouTube channels of vloggers such as Heidi Saadiya and others are definitely a milestone in the digital gender revolution in Kerala as they play a crucial role in changing the perception of transgender bodies. These vlogs also compensate for transgender marginalization and invisibility to an extent. This paper discusses the primary, secondary and tertiary oralities of transgender life narratives, identifies and problematizes the practices that inform the gendering of spaces that inherently shape social structures.
Uddipta Roy’s paper was titled “Eyeing at the park/Clicking on the ‘Tap’ icon”; The pandemic and queer geographies: spatialising the (sexual) dissident in Kolkata. The paper aims to understand the politics of queer spaces in Calcutta. The author has conducted interviews and auto-ethnography. This work tried to de-enmesh the sexual politics within multifaceted consternations of power. Space is politically subversive. He stated that the physical space/virtual space binary was both simultaneously real and utopic. He explained how the gay people in Calcutta city has their own social world and the pandemic has severely impacted them. The paper analysed queer spatiality through a Foucaultian lens.
The panel was thus concluded with floor opening up for question. Professor Avishek Parui congratulated all three panelists for eloquently using complex theoretical models to analyse virtual, ethnographic and other forms of spatiality.
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