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Negotiating (Non)Belonging: Queer Selfhoods and Socialities in Neoliberal Urban Mumbai
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2025-05
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Anthropology
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Ruhnke_temple_0225E_16044.pdf
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https://doi.org/10.34944/feya-q929
Abstract
Over the past decade, changes in Indian national policy, commercial funding circuits, and media visibility have popularized a language of queer identity among middle-class young adults. In Mumbai, a scene of social spaces presents invitations to “come out” and participate in designated spaces of queer community, where individuals negotiate how their experiences relate to norms of sociality and expression in collective contexts. Focusing on the experiences of middle-class young adults, this dissertation traces the “politics of belonging”—how political projects, nationalisms, and activisms construct and circumscribe group membership—to queer social spaces in Mumbai. Drawing from 10 months of ethnographic research among Mumbai’s queer social/nightlife scene, a digital media advocacy organization, film festivals, semi- structured interviews, and oral histories, this study analyzes how class and caste differences cohere through urban sites of collectivization and cosmopolitan queer online discourse. While online circuits of (in)visibility, neoliberal urban geographies, and nationalist state discourses circumscribe upper-caste, upper/middle-class urban India as the realm of possibility for queer existence, access to these spaces of social support remains unequal. Examining sociality and identity under urban inequality, this dissertation critically explores how state-led productions of ethnoreligious Hindu national identity and global homocapitalist markets shape queer communities, media discourses, and political solidarities.
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