The Sacral Monster: An (Im)Possibility of Indian Queerness

Abstract

Existing at intersections, monsters have historically been sites of possibility that allow for a recognition of queer realities, and contemporary monster stories have become explorations of queer insatiability and queer joy. Yet, the study of queer Indian monster stories has often been overlooked. In this thesis, I aim to address this oversight by employing an autoethnographical approach that centers the queer Indian monster through an analysis of The Devourers (2015) by Indra Das, “The Vetala’s Song” (2022) by Anuja Varghese, and the stories I’ve written for my collection in process, The Taxonomy of a Curse. I situate these texts in the cultural contexts they were written in, the history they evoke, and the mythologies—Hindu and regional—that they reconstruct, while allowing for my own diasporic histories and queer possibilities to exist in the specific genre space of the academic essay. Through this exploration, I imagine the pathways our work collectively constructs, which refuse Eurocentric homonormative categorization while simultaneously resisting notions of queer identity being possibilities only for the upper-class and -caste, pathways that I hope will lead to joyous queer futures in the subcontinent and beyond.