Fashioning Fabulation: Dress, Gesture and the Queer Aesthetics of Mumbai Pride

Abstract

India’s ongoing legal movement to decriminalise ‘gay sex’ has been witness to the simultaneous sanitisation of queer spaces. From Pride parades declaring ‘no nanga naach, no flamboyance’ to quotidian policing of excessive dress and gestures, there is a growing emphasis on respectability that stages queerness in the private rather than the public domain. The good homosexual subject is increasingly at odds with public gestures, performances and dresses that might seem too excessive, too flamboyant, perhaps too queer. But what might it mean to sit with the bawdy gestures enacted by kothi, hijra and MSM persons in Prides, in offices, in public spaces and in daily life? This essay makes a case for theorising the fabulousness of gender and sexual minorities in India, pushing homosexuality beyond the registers of legality and epidemiology. By examining the political implications of excessive and risky aesthetic practices, it argues that what is at stake is not only a centring of aesthetics in larger considerations of queer politics, but also the larger work of fabulation: the reinvention of what meanings queer subjectivity can take on in public spaces in India.