Mitigating Anxieties: Cleaving as Queer Becoming

Abstract

Cleaving, a principle of theatricality, proposes that a ‘cleft’ or a ‘cleaving’ holds within it the promise and ability to shift, change, alter, and create emergences. I find the instability and transformation that cleaving energises to be resonant with the instability of sexual or gender non-conforming expression. In this essay, I present a rubric of cleaving as queer becoming by bringing together my memories from the production process of the play Yavanavvanam (2018) and a recent photo-performance (2021) of self gesturing at my own trajectory since then. These dynamic fabrics are braided and punctuated by analyses of mitigating anxieties surrounding the abrogation of the anti-sodomy law in India and the legacy of the Rohith Vemula anti-caste movement at the University of Hyderabad.

Keywords:

• cleaving
• queer becoming
• emergence
• anxieties
• syncopation

Notes

1. I want to acknowledge and recognise the amount of collaborative work and effort (across time zones and spatial divisions) that has gone into the writing of this article over the past two years. With all the trials and tribulations that the COVID-19 pandemic threw the world into the throes of, it is without a doubt that the support and guidance I have received consistently from Dr. Manola K. Gayatri has been nothing short of miraculous, a testament to the capaciousness of their generosity of spirit and intellect. I would also want to acknowledge the two other editors of this special issue, Professor Stephen Farrier and Professor Alyson Campbell for their attention to directing critique with care, despite offering me very many cues to ‘perform’ (read: write), as it were, over many moments in the crafting and re-crafting of this essay, and my failure to catch the beat on time. This essay is also a gesture towards reclaiming my time (nearly a decade) at public universities in India which have taught me my most lasting and generative lessons on social positionality (at least, of all that waits to be unpacked), in so many rich and myriad ways.

2. I suggest a more active verb form as a departure from the one specified by Josette Féral and Ronald P Bermingham, ‘Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language’, SubStance 31, no. 2 (2002): 94–108.

3. Anand Teltumbde, ‘Rohith Vemula’s “Dalitness”’, Economic and Political Weekly 51, no. 28 (2016): 10–11.

4. Rekha Pappu and K. Satyanarayana. ‘Gender and Caste in Indian Universities: Some Reflections’, in Gender, Caste and the Imagination of Equality, ed. Anupama Rao (New Delhi, India: Women Unlimited, an Associate of Kali for Women, 2018), 269–292.

5. Sasheej Hegde, ‘Do We (Still) Need a Concept of University? A Critical Note’, SocialScientist 46, no. 7–8 (2018): 29–40.

6. Gaurav J. Pathania, University as a Site of Resistance: Identity and Student Politics (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press India, 2018), 1–32.

7. Rohit Azad, Janaki Nai, Mohinder Singh, and Mallarika Singa Roy, eds., What the Nation Really Needs to Know: The JNU Nationalism Lectures (Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2016).

8. Brahma Prakash, Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the ‘Folk Performance’ in India (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2019).

9. Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender’, Social Scientist 22, no. 3/4 (1994): 93–117; Rahul Rao, Out of Time: the Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1–32.

10. Prakash, Cultural Labour.

11. Borrowing from Nishant Upadhyay, ‘Hindu Nation and Its Queers: Caste, Islamophobia, and De/Coloniality in India’, Interventions 22, no. 4 (2020): 464–480.

12. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Theatre and the Publics of Democracy: Between Melodrama and Rational Realism’, Theatre Research International 41, no. 3 (2016): 202–217.

13. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 89.

14. For the purpose of this paper, I use ‘queer’ as a capacious term to reflect the incongruities and overlaps that sexual and gender non-conformity within theatre and performance practice accrue.

15. Lyric borrowed and repurposed in the manner of Rebecca Schneider on the ‘pose’ (see footnote 13), from the Young T & Bugsey song ‘Strike A Pose’, YouTube, June 6, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng83tmoQ3yU (accessed October 23, 2022).

16. This is also a condescending term, as I have come to understand it – given the complexity of the usurping of cultural loci of production by dominant castes from similar social locations to mine who forayed into the performance space. This is as per postcolonial anxieties to devise and control cultural production; leading to the tripartite institutional divisions of the ‘classical’, ‘traditional’, and ‘folk’ performing arts.

17. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–52.

18. This formulation is not bracketed to Brahmins themselves; it is a terminology to represent the larger casteist framework wherein gendered bodies, as particular to women in the binary, are exploited and are made sexually ‘available’ to those men who are of the dominant castes. Honour resides in the sexual ‘integrity’ of the womenfolk.

19. Translates to ‘artists’, not unlike the devadasi in certain repertoire and habitus formations. Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: devadāsīs, Memory, and Modernity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 189–221.

20. Jessica Hinchy, ‘Obscenity, Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India’, Asian Studies Review 38, no. 2 (March 2014): 274–294.

21. Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1–24.

22. While the female impersonator induced a gender conformity to the binary, in the contemporary we note efforts to tussle with and destabilize this history, cleaving forth a politics of gender nonconformity. R. Supraja, ‘Destabilizing Impersonation, Cleaving Gender Non-Conformity: Akshayambara and Lady Anandi’, Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques 23 (June 30, 2021). https://www.criticalstages.org/23/destabilizing-impersonation-cleaving-gendernonconformityakshayambara-and-lady-anandi/ (accessed November 3, 2022).

23. Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India’, Gender & History 11, no. 3 (1999): 445–467 (447).

24. Soneji, Unfinished Gestures, 190–191.

25. Ibid., 11–12.

26. To borrow from Soneji’s conceptualization in Unfinished Gestures.

27. Harkening to Kareem Khubchandani’s scholarship where they locate mannerisms of (diasporic or otherwise) South Asian gay boys and men in scenes of nightlife and the dancefloor as honing the diva gestures of famed Bollywood actresses. Kareem Khubchandani, ‘Snakes on the Dance Floor: Bollywood, Gesture, and Gender’, The Velvet Light Trap 77 (2016): 69–85.

28. Mythology, gender, and the epic Mahabharata converge at this conceptual ‘Shikhandi’ here references the character who transitions (anachronistically, ‘FtM’) in the epic Mahabha-rata. Jason Keith Fernandes, ‘Probing into the Freedoms of Queer Liberation in India’, Economic & Political Weekly 55, no. 1 (January 4, 2020): 54–62.

29. Referring here to the claims of homosexuality being ‘un-Indian’ and an import from the West, particularly with regard to the right-wing riots surrounding the release of the film Fire (1996). There have been many essays and articles demarcating this moment in time – indeed, some of the germinative works on same-sex love in India (keeping in mind the anachronism of the term) were published around the turn of the century.

30. Fernandes, ‘Probing into the Freedoms of Queer Liberation’, 58.

31. Amrit B L S, ‘How the ABVP Was Able to Return to Power in University of Hyderabad After 8 Years’, The Wire, October 8, 2018, https://thewire.in/education/university-of-hyderabad-abvp-elections. (accessed March 5, 2021).

32. For a detailed overview of how the necropolitical has played out with reference to queer and trans publics specific to Hyderabad, India post the 377 judgement in 2018, look to Pushpesh Kumar, ‘Mapping Queer “Celebratory Moment” in India: Necropolitics or Substantive Democracy?’, Community Development Journal 55, no. 1 (2020): 159–176.

33. For a report on how the pandemic has exacerbated the issues prevalent in the trans* and intersex communities in India, look to the ‘Exclusion Amplified’ report published by CLPR. Vikramaditya Sahai, Almas Shaikh and Aj Agrawal, ‘Exclusion Amplified: A Report on How the Pandemic Has Impacted the Trans and Intersex Community in India’, South Asian TransLaw Database (Centre for Law and Policy Research, July 25, 2020), https://translaw.clpr.org.in/reports-and-policies/exclusion-amplified-a-report-on-how-the-pandemic-has-impacted-the-trans-and-intersex-community-in-india/ (accessed October 30, 2022).

34. Arunima G., ‘Thought, Policies and Politics: How May We Imagine the Public University in India?’, Kronos 43 (2017): 165–184; Apeksha Priyadarshini, ‘How Dismantling of GSCASH Has Impacted the Dignity and Freedom of Women in JNU’, The Wire, March 28, 2018, https://thewire.in/education/howdismantling-of-gscashhas-impacted-thedignity-and-freedomof-women-in-jnu (accessed November 3, 2022); N. Sukumar, ‘“Red Sun in the Blue Sky”: Rohith Vemula’s Utopian Republic’, Social Change 46, no. 3 (2016): 451-57.