What’s so ‘queer’ about coming out? Silent queers and theorizing kinship agonistically in Mumbai

Abstract

What kinds of creative potential exist in silence – in not coming out? This ethnographic study takes the strategic silences that queer persons in Mumbai deploy regarding ‘coming out’ as productive for theorizing the connections between kinship and queerness. While some strands of queer critique conceptualize the relationship between kinship and queerness antagonistically, the author deploys the concept of agonistic intimacy outlined in Singh’s Poverty and the Quest for Life (2015) to consider how queers might inhabit heterosexual kinship networks through the interplay of contestation and submission. Silence, then, need not signal the image of the transnational queer in need of saving, but a mode of negotiating desires for respectability and queerness.