"Unruly Desires: Gay Governance and the Makeover of Sexuality in Postcolonial India"

Abstract

This chapter analyses whether queer desire has been liberated from the postcolonial closet and, if so, how the processes of the market and law have combined to bring about the emergence and legibility of queer desire and the understandings of justice that inform such processes. I question whether these processes have produced an unequivocal victory in terms of bringing justice to highly stigmatized identities and the practices associated with them. I unpack how the effects of either a victory in the courtroom or greater visibility in and through the market result in instantiating queer desire into a linear, regulatory framework - designed to cabin and confine, rather than to liberate or emancipate. Justice is equivalent to nothing more than restraining homosexuals to the borders of heteronormativity. This restraint is partly produced in and through the discourse of tolerance in law combined with the makeover of homosexuality produced in and through the consumptive market.