Questions of home, dwelling, and domesticity have fueled my work ever since I wrote my first book, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005), almost twenty years ago. I understand “home” in that book across different spatial scales: as household/domestic space, as racialized community space, and as national space. In all three instances, I am interested in how queer desires, embodiments, and subjectivities are held as ex-centric to the space of “home” and are seen as perennially outside and antithetical to its fictions of purity, sanctity, and cultural authenticity. The concept of queer diaspora, as I theorize it in Impossible Desires, makes a central intervention into the “home” as imagined within dominant nationalist and diasporic discourses. The queer diasporic texts that concern me in Impossible Desires carefully delineate the patriarchal strictures of familial, communal, and nationalist home spaces and the violences they exact on nonconforming desires, embodiments, and subjectivities. Yet rather than simply imagining home as a space to leave behind in order to escape into a more liberatory elsewhere, these texts remake the space of home from within. As I write: “For queer racialized migrant subjects, ‘staying put’ becomes a way of remaining within the oppressive structures of the home . . . while imaginatively working to dislodge its heteronormative logic. . . . Home is a vexed location where queer subjects whose very desires and subjectivities are formed by its logic simultaneously labor to transform it.” I continue: “These queer diasporic texts evoke ‘home’ spaces that are permanently and already ruptured, rent by colliding discourses around class, sexuality, and ethnic identity. They lay claim to both the space of ‘home’ and the nation by making both the site of desire and pleasure in a nostalgic diasporic imaginary. The heteronormative home, in these texts, unwittingly generates homoeroticism” (Gopinath 2005: 14).
By excavating the ways in which queerness emerges in the interstices of heteronormative structures, the queer diasporic texts that are the focus of Impossible Desires powerfully repudiate colonial and developmentalist discourses that posit the space of the home in the global South as a homogenous site of oppression, as opposed to the apparent freedom and liberation offered by the global North. The notion of queer diaspora and queer diasporic aesthetic practices make the double move of undoing this progress narrative while always remaining cognizant of the very real material and psychic violences of home spaces in multiple national locations. Queer diasporic practices render intelligible those forms of queer relationality, eroticism, and embodiment that inhere within these home spaces of apparent “unfreedom.” I therefore suggest the need for a “queer diasporic reading practice” that makes these forms of queerness intelligible and that can “see” what queerness looks like across different diasporic and national registers (26). In my reading of the 1996 film Fire, for instance, which depicts two sisters-in-law who are also lovers in a middle-class household in Delhi, their performance of hyperbolic femininity for each other becomes a marker of queer desire rather than of their availability to heterosexuality. Without this queer diasporic reading practice, I argue, forms of queerness as they emerge within the home may simply be misread as an adherence to normativity when seen through a hetero- or homonormative lens.
My more recent work continues this interest in what queerness looks and feels like within the home in all its valences. In Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (2018), I open with a meditation on a particular series of photographs from contemporary Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari. Zaatari excavates and places back into circulation the studio photographs of Hashem El-Madani, a photographer from Zaatari's hometown of Saida in southern Lebanon, taken some fifty years earlier. One series of portraits from El-Madani's collection that Zaatari reproduces is that of a gender-nonconforming figure named simply as “Abed, a tailor,” who is pictured posing with stereotypically feminine gestures with friends (perhaps lovers) and family members with ease, confidence, and intimacy. I open Unruly Visions with this image of “Abed, a tailor,” since Zaatari's project of resurrecting and resignifying El-Madani's images continues my own interest in how to read queerness across time and space, in different “home” spaces. Zaatari's re-presentation of “Abed, a tailor”—the portraits’ seeming depiction of a gender-nonconforming individual ensconced within a social world—suggests how queerness was simply part of the texture and weave of everyday life in mid-twentieth century south Lebanon, rather than being exceptional and aberrant.
As in the texts I consider in Impossible Desires, Zaatari situates queer embodiment, intimacy, and relationality squarely within the space of the home rather than outside of it. In so doing, Zaatari enacts what I term a “queer regional imaginary,” where I add the region in its subnational sense as another spatial scale through which to understand the “home” (Gopinath 2018: 5). In his re-presentation of the portraits of “Abed, a tailor,” Zaatari excavates a regional photographic archive in south Lebanon to bring its queer valences to the fore. He evokes the alternative gender and sexual arrangements that may exist in the imagined space of the region but that get occluded within nationalist historiography. My reading of Zaatari therefore suggests that the story of the region, as an alternative space of home, is not the story of the nation: there can be something queer about the region that puts it out of step with the temporality of the nation. It is in that temporal and spatial slippage where queerness—in the sense of alternative forms of gendered embodiment, relationality, desire, and intimacy—can emerge. Zaatari's work poses the question that animates both Impossible Desires and Unruly Visions: how does one dwell in the context of displacement? The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora that have concerned me throughout my career poignantly suggest the imaginative possibilities of precisely those forms of dwelling, of making home, in the context of precarity and disorientation, uncertainty and suspension.
