ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with obscenity as a particular and peculiar "traumatic dimension of voice" performed by women onto other women in the traumatized space of a specific slum in the city of Delhi, India's capital city. It explores the evocation of the abuses to map the cartographic and cathartic experience and experiencing of 'love' in, and within, the slums of Govindpuri. The voice of the "other", muting their own, compelled them into undertaking matters, into shutting the other's speakers—even whilst sharing an intimate, immediate and violent identification with the other as always occupying the space of the Other within the hegemonic, masculine performativities and spaces. The chapter emphasizes the manner in which instances where sonic and emotional digressions by the feminine 'self' disrupt and displace the registered hetero-normative narratives, though not without its violences and violations—to the "Self" and "Others".
