A nation for us queers, or the GAYS as we are called, will get flushed down as absurdist politics; queer is not a nation, not a land, but guarding heterosexuality, is, as the evangelical god Bush reminds us, very much what makes the nation. Clearly, our politics is not any less absurd than those of existing nations.
So is a nation of the queer possible?
The case for a possible nation proposes a necessary inquiry into how nations are built. How are nation’s constructed? Who is “in” the nation and who is “out”?
The craft of establishing a nation is an art of politics. Nation is an image of identity. South Asia, as with many other geographical locations, has been shaped by the strokes of identity politics. But the nationalization of identity, claiming a separate land for a people’s “true” being, always, as Foucault cautions, risks homogeneity – and in South Asia’s case, heterogeneity. Foucault does not speak from the dead alone – nation-building, says University of the Western Cape academic Desiree Lewis, is yoked in heterosexist relations.
Essentially, all nations are a nation of heterosexuals, a land of heterosexuals. The heterosexual is “in” and the opposite is “out”.
Find it hard to swallow? Let me bring South Asian’s past into South Asia’s present:
“August 1947, flags are painted and canvassed within geographical borders – the galleries of the nations, India and Pakistan, open its doors to the world. These nations exhibit histories, histories of how, in the name of freedom, people of one land were split into two lands – India for the secular, Pakistan for the Muslim. Those artistic politicians, Nehru and Jinnah, comment on their
delicate strokes and the care with which they split British India. However, what they do not tell you is the care they took in not splitting the land’s sexual ideology: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code renders sex against the “order of nature” a crime! And as for Pakistan, the non-heterosexual, let alone heterosexuality, does not exist! India and Pakistan remained, much-like Ted Haggard, COMPLETELY HETEROSEXUAL! Politics truly makes for strange bedfellows. Partition did not split the balls of the politicians!”
Fast forward to the current era and little has changed.
Yes, the Indian legal system finally got done with Section 377 and a voice for queers has galvanized in Pakistan. But tolerance is not acceptance. That queers are finally “tolerated” in these lands does not make the situation any safer – it intensifies the danger. The stigma against non-heterosexuals continues to wound the queer community. And, not to anyone’s surprise, religious edicts have been issued against the Government of India’s decriminilization of
non-heterosexuality.
Given the marginalization, is a separate nation a solution to a systemic problem?
South Asia is no stranger to separatist voices. In 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh in what is contextualized as a cultural, nationalist struggle. Sikhs in India’s Punjab have long been agitating for the formation of Khalistan and Kashmir is a modern-day hotbed of nationalist struggle. Amidst these calls for identity recognition, queers certainly have a case to voice the same – QUEERISTAN has a basis. Not Indian. Not Pakistani. Human.Queer.
But what Queeristan will look like is a subject of our idealization – at least for now. The most I can say is that citizenship will be open to heterosexuals too!
Queeristan movement- anyone want to help paint Queeristan?
Author: Ali Abbas
