ABSTRACT
This essay examines the difficult and problematic relationship between feminism and the LGBT movement in India seen through the prism of masculinity. The argument is that the masculinist symbolic remains at the heart of the LGBT project. Men (heterosexual, homosexual, trans) need to de-centre men/the Phallus from their privileged and entitled place and that this can be done only through an engagement with critical feminism and critical masculinity studies. I stress that this de-centring cannot be accomplished through a rhetorical sleight of hand, as has been the belief of much Third Wave feminism and queer studies, including trans studies. Instead, I contend, a slow, psychoanalytically informed recognition and displacement of the centrality of men/the Phallus in the task of a critical feminism in dialogue with a critical masculinity studies.
