ABSTRACT
While the previous chapter traces the field of queer politics in India, this chapter takes up the question of how to conceptualize the queer subject born in this field. The first part of this chapter elucidates how the subject of queer politics in India seems to be defined as a legal subject, demanding human rights based on naturalized experiences of discrimination and marginalization. The critique of human rights, inclusion, and equal citizenship enables this discussion to transcend the domain of queer politics into other political movements, like those of race and caste. The second part of this chapter critically explores how this subject of queer politics can be understood psychoanalytically. I dismantle the centered and conscious logic of queer identity politics in favor of an understanding of the subject that is decentered and unconscious. In doing so, the subject is seen as contradictory, and as such, it is argued that any politics that has to do with such subjects must be re-imagined in favor of a decentered logic of a political way of life. Politics – queer or otherwise – can no longer be thought to have a linear trajectory or a cohesive sense of the past with a unitary hope for the future, since subjects are rather queerly embroiled in an intermingling sense of past-ness and futurity that haunts the present. I then suggest that politics – if it hopes to revolutionize the subject – must find a new language that does not seek inclusion, but demonstrates differance.
