Peripheral Desires of Ephemeral Cities: Imagining Queer Geographies in India

This research situates within the anxieties of doing geographies of sexualities from Global South and attempts at mapping the city of desires for those located at its Social, political, economic and spatial peripheries. Mapping Dalit queer lives in the city of Delhi, it uses auto-ethnographic storytelling as decolonizing and de-brahmanising queer research. It explores the possibilities in reading the city through an archive of sex - invisible, but made possible within its ephemeral frame. It asks for and of the bodies that produce, practice and live through these ephemeral cities, the ways they survive their desires within geopolitics of their everyday lives.

With circulations of a more global gay aesthetic that is produced within the dreaminess and aspirations of a world class city (images that flow from North to South and accessible to only few and through the logic of respectability), many queer lives and their histories and geographies are often overshadowed by this glamour. My work navigates through these shadowed geographies and foregrounds these stories as sites of sexual freedom which erupt and collapse for many within the city’s risky and precarious geographies. In the process, the research articulates the power in ephemerality in enabling a geographical imagination of utopia that is messy and performative; and equally, expresses the potential of an intersectional understanding of queerness from Global South.

Queering Urbanism is an online event series initiated by B.Queer, The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment’s network for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual (LGBTQIA+) students, staff and allies.  
 
Organised by Claire Tunnacliffe, Jordana Ramalho and Ben Campkin, the series connects queer and trans studies to urban studies and practices of urbanism, foregrounding issues of equity, diversity and inclusion in the built environment.  

Image: Petra Doan