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Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics . By Naisargi N. Dave . Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press , 2012. vii, 280 pp. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).
Book Reviews--South Asia
Over the last two decades in India, the silence around queerness has been decisively broken. Today, there are queer groups, writers, activists, academics, filmmakers, publishers, bloggers, and artists and ever-proliferating spaces where friendship, solidarity, and political engagement are nurtured. Queer activism's spectacular success has been to bring a legal challenge to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized "sexual acts against the order of nature," culminating in the 2009 Delhi High Court judgment decriminalizing homosexuality. Naisargi Dave's book arrives as part of the proliferating literature on queer lives and practices but is set in a time when queers and queer politics were struggling to emerge into full public view.
Dave's book chronicles the activities of Delhi-based lesbian organizations that emerged at the turn of the 1990s and their role as support groups, coalition partners, and public interlocutors. Two moments of high-visibility activism are studied: the controversy around Deepa Mehta's film Fire (1998) and the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality. The more quotidian sites of study include letters written by women to the lesbian group Sakhi in the 1980s and phone calls made to a helpline run by another group, Sangini. Inspired by the "affective turn" in the humanities and social sciences, the book maps activist interventions onto the emotional landscapes of intra- and inter-group dynamics. Positioning herself as a "participant observer" (p. 24) during...