ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the historical development of South Asian queer studies, a field that owes much to diaspora and HIV/AIDS as its starting points, and with liberalization in the 1990s as its precipitant. The chapter tracks the development of queer studies in the region to signal shared patterns emerging from the legacies of colonial history, and the divergences that are the result of differing geopolitical, cultural, nationalist, economic, and modernity agendas. Noting the arenas of representation and health as the major sites of queer theoretical intervention that emphasize cultural politics of identity and sexual politics of liberation, the chapter raises questions about the degree to which the field is complicit in new technologies of the body and of epistemology in the very neoliberal framework that criminalizes and ostracizes homosexuality. It ends by speculating on what working within postcolonial theory might do for queer studies in the context of South Asia.
