ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I try to put forth a new conceptual category of the sexual subaltern subject in order to think through their absence. I briefly trace a history of what ‘subaltern’ has meant in the Indian context, and then attempt to resignify its meaning to now include queer subjects like the ones who committed suicide, who lie outside the empire-nation exchange (following Spivak’s conceptualization of the subaltern), but are also marked by their turn away from conventional modes of heterosexuality. The sexual subaltern is a subject who is positioned in the absence of history, located such that they can expose the failures of our disciplines and politics, relegated to the margins of margins. As such, to inaugurate a sexual subaltern figure in queer politics in India in particular, and queer theory in general, is to take forward our current understandings of what it means to be queer, in order to see how to do queerness. This is also an attempt to bring together the different (and often contending) logics of history and psychoanalysis.
