This book examines the creation of lesbian communities in India from the 1980s through the early 2000s and explores the everyday practices that comprise queer activism in India.

Queer Politics in India simultaneously tells two interconnected stories. The first explores the struggle against violence and marginalization by queer people in the Indian subcontinent, and places this movement towards equality and inclusion in relation to queer movements across the world. The second story, about a lesbian suicide in a small village in India, interrupts the first one, and together, these two stories push and pull the book to elucidate the failure and promise of queer politics, in India and the rest of the world. This book emerges at a critical time for queer politics and activism in India, exploring the contemporary queer subject through the different lenses of critical psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, and cultural studies in its critique of the constructions of discourses of ‘normal’ sexuality. It also examines how power determines further segregations of ‘abnormal’ sexuality into legitimate and illegitimate queer subjectivities and authentic and inauthentic queer experiences. By allowing a multifaceted and engaged critique to emerge that demonstrates how the idea of a universal queer subject fails lower class, lower caste queer subjects, and queer people of colour, the author expertly highlights how all queer people are not the same, even within queer movements, as the book asks the questions, "which queer subject does queer politics fight for?", and, "what is the imagination of a queer subject in queer politics?" This hugely important and timely work is relevant across many disciplines, and will be useful for students of psychology and other academic areas, as well as researchers and activist organizations.

This book with 27 articles is the first organised literary effort on the part of the gay community to assert itself in a world which still sees same-sex love as queer . The contributors to the anthology come from within the gay community, and hail from distant corners of the country.

The work argues that new media, social networking sites (SNS), both web and mobile, and related technologies do not exist in isolation, rather they are critically embedded within other social spaces. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, especially men's and masculinity studies, queer and LGBT studies, media and cultural studies, particularly new media and digital culture, sexuality and identity, politics, sociology & social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.

Delhi offers a stunning series of more than 150 full-color documentary photographs and companion first-person texts, which together offer an unprecedented portrait of LGBTQ people's lives in India today. Focusing on Delhi, noted photographers Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh chronicle the halting emergence of networks of men and women living under the shadow of stigma and criminalized behavior—in a country where anti-sodomy laws dating back to the British Empire were recently struck down, only to be reaffirmed in a surging wave of homophobia. The photographs in this lavishly presented volume reflect the photographers' celebrated capacity for entering into lives rarely seen. In Delhi, we are invited into the daily routines, work, homes, and intimate lives of subjects from different backgrounds—from urban professionals to day laborers. A visually arresting document in its own right, Delhi presents American readers with a starting point for understanding the profound struggles for recognition by India's LGBTQ community. Delhi was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

Queer Dance challenges social norms and enacts queer coalition across the LGBTQ community. The book joins forces with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial work to consider how bodies are forces of social change.

Combines development theory with practice through a case study of the West African community of Tostan

About the Book A STEP-BY-STEP MANUAL FOR BUILDING INCLUSIVE WORKPLACES—AND A LESS UNEQUAL WORLD. The reading down of Section 377 by the Supreme Court in 2018 has led to a fundamental shift in the rights of India’s LGBTQ citizens and necessitated policy changes across the board—not least in the conservative world of Indian business. In this path-breaking and genre-defying book, Parmesh Shahani draws from his decade-long journey in the corporate world as an out and proud gay man, to make a cogent case for LGBTQ inclusion and lay down a step-by-step guide to reshaping office culture in India. He talks to inclusion champions and business leaders about how they worked towards change; traces the benefits reaped by industry giants like Godrej, Tata Steel, IBM, Wipro, the Lalit group of hotels and many others who have tapped into the power of diversity; and shares the stories of employees whose lives were revolutionised by LGBTQ-friendly workspaces. In this affecting memoir-cum-manifesto, Shahani animates the data and strategy with intimate stories of love and family. Even as it becomes an expansive reference book of history, literature, cinema, movements, institutions and icons of the LGBTQ community, Queeristan drives home a singular point—in diversity and inclusion lies the promise of an equitable and profitable future, for companies, their employees and the society at large.

Ishtyle follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of “ishtyle” to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves, ornamental inclusions in the racialized grammar of desire. Ishtyle allows us to reimagine a global class perpetually represented as docile and desexualized workers caught in the web of global capitalism. The book highlights a different kind of labor, the embodied work these men do to feel queer and sexy together. Engaging major themes in queer studies, Khubchandani explains how his interlocutors’ performances stage relationships between: colonial law and public sexuality; film divas and queer fans; and race, caste, and desire. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the unlikely site of nightlife can be a productive venue for the study of global politics and its institutional hierarchies.