ABSTRACT
While there is often a common sense understanding of sexual ‘progress’ as being tied to legal rights and secularism, this chapter questions the relationship between narratives of Western secular feminism and queer theory by examining the embodied politics of feminist and queer movements in India and the articulations of sexual politics outside of Orientalist and colonial categories of citizenship. Understandings of political subjectivity rooted in Orientalist thought fail to apprehend the divergent ways in which sexual politics are articulated outside the grammars of the Western polis. One should perhaps consider a larger political context that produces what Puar terms homonationalism, a discourse within which sexual politics coincide with the aims of postcolonial Western powers 1 (Puar 2007).
