ABSTRACT
Beginning by opening up the various meanings of a single signifier, ‘queer’, this chapter broadly outlines the scope of this book. Keeping the contradictions and dynamic nature of queerness alive, it introduces the wider tropes of queer politics in India in the backdrop of queer movements across the world. Explaining how this book is built on my work with lesbian, bisexual, and transmen rights groups as well as on previous writings that emerge from and about queer politics in India, this chapter introduces how I approach queer politics and queer subjects through the interdisciplinary lenses of critical psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and feminist and queer theory. Finally, this chapter inaugurates the case of lesbian suicide in a village in West Bengal that became the motivation for this project, asking what queer politics in India could have done to prevent their suicide, and what their place would have been in such politics had they been alive.
