Queer Activism in Bangladesh

Abstract

Queer activism in Bangladesh is an ethnographic study of LGBTQ politics in Bangladesh that analyzes the relationship between “queer” and “development” through the concept of “nascent.” The framework of “nascent” in this project captures the ways queer activism informs and disidentifies with development and progress, and a sense of having “gone back in time” when queer activists experience and endure when confronted with violence. Challenging the expectation that LGBTQ or any social movements have a knowable teleology and political arc or that they must reach a stable point in the social order to have an impact or warrant scholarly attention, this research focuses on aspects of illegibility, in-betweenness, and informal to analyze the dynamics of queer existence and activism in Bangladesh within contexts of global development, rapid economic changes, political instability, religious orthodoxy, and international and regional LGBTQ+ movements. This research hence asks: What do queer documents and processes of documentation look like in Bangladesh? Given the significance that documents and documentation play in development and queer activism, how do we document the sensuous, and document sensuously? “Nascence” thus theorizes emerging queer strategies, explores illegible and legible organizing sites premised upon innovation, contradictions, and possibilities, and develops a sociology of queer politics beyond success, visibility, and linearity. It examines ephemeral queer archives as quotidian sites of enduring possibility in the face of development’s instinct to categorize; queer subjectivities of kotipona (a gender and cultural category shared by hijra, femme gays, and transgender women), that generates innovative and “obscene” filmic representations of sexual desire that escape state censorship and surveillance; and interstitial space-making and activism that intertwines sites of “home,” “NGO office,” “party,” and “state” and informs ambiguity in expressions of identity, friendship, kin, and political membership. By integrating Queer of Color theory, Postcolonial studies of Gender and Sexuality, and Feminist analyses of International Development, this research offers a fresh perspective on studies of queer activism in the Global South.