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Queer Sociality in Urban India: Youth Spatial Inventiveness in Suburban Mumbai

Vijaya, Swati
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1641562912823632

Abstract Details

2021, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
This dissertation explores how young queer women in suburban Mumbai forge spaces of friendship, intimacy and varied forms of togetherness. I utilize the concept of queer sociality to highlight creative queer bonds based upon desire, care and relationality. This project foregrounds the formation of queer sociality as a spatialized process. In the context of my research, I examine how queer sociality interacts with and produces dynamic urbanisms. Thus, the socialities of queer women are practices of urban and spatial belonging in the present, and aspirational practices for their ideas for future urban forms, relations and socialities. The research is a result of sixteen months of ethnography, participant observation, and interviews in the Mumbai Metropolitan Area (MMR), specifically in precincts Thane and Navi Mumbai. Critically engaging with enclaved queer collectivities, the dissertation elucidates inventive urban commons young queer women of different caste, religious, and class backgrounds have generated in the suburbs. I argue that women’s everyday spatial choices enable creative claims to place, a sense of belonging with others, active renegotiation of identity and self, and sometimes, the reassertion of boundaries. In explicating these everyday forms of socialities, I show that activist collectivities are not the primary sites of queer subjectivity or sociality for the young women who participated in my study. I argue that young queer women, who do not necessarily participate in visibility projects, continue to craft multiple forms of queer existence, often in strategic consonance with, across and against dominant cultural codes. Centering queer sociality as an important analytic, I argue that gender, sexuality, age, caste, class and religious identities broker socio-spatial practices. In engaging with these emergent queer socialities, my project contributes to the existing research on Mumbai’s suburban sexual spatialities by explicitly situating young queer women’s socialities as integral aspects of transforming urban social and spatial relations.
Mytheli Sreenivas (Advisor)
Mary Thomas (Advisor)
Womens Studies

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Vijaya, S. (2021). Queer Sociality in Urban India: Youth Spatial Inventiveness in Suburban Mumbai [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1641562912823632

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Vijaya, Swati. Queer Sociality in Urban India: Youth Spatial Inventiveness in Suburban Mumbai. 2021. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1641562912823632.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Vijaya, Swati. "Queer Sociality in Urban India: Youth Spatial Inventiveness in Suburban Mumbai." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1641562912823632

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.