Lesbian and Gay Activism in New Delhi: Naisargi Dave’s Ph.D. dissertation

The academic types among us might be interested in Dr. Naisargi Dave’s Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Michigan (2006). Professor Dave  currently teaches Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Between queer ethics and sexual morality: Lesbian and gay activism in New Delhi, India
by Dave, Naisargi N., PhD, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, 2006, 0 pages; 3237941

Abstract: The argument of this dissertation is that we can understand activism as a series of confrontations between ethics and morality. The subject of this dissertation is lesbian and gay activism in New Delhi, India and the network of associations between these activists and other people and organizations in India and transnationally. Working and living with activists from two organizations in New Delhi, I came to explore the question of why activists are activists. The answers that I came to, through my everyday ethnographic engagements, were within the realm of the ethical. These activists act, I argue, in and through affective, ethical orientations towards existing, normative moral orders. I attempt to show that the ethical impulse of sexuality activism is to create and enable new forms of human possibility—including of love, sex, and friendship—where strict moral codes for ‘right’ behavior currently exist. The central question of this dissertation is how the political processes that activists must engage in order to turn their ethical aspirations into social reality work to normalize those radical ethics into new and newer moral codes. The affective and political consequences for activists of these confrontations between the ethical and the moral form the ethnographic center of this dissertation. Each chapter of the dissertation seeks to make sense of one primary moral discourse and its normalizing, and productive, relationship to the ethical possibilities of queer activist practice. I move from the imperatives of lesbian community and identity, to the formation of institutions and organizations, to the mandatory forging of alliances between lesbians and other, more established movements, to the imperative of visibility and rights-claims in the public sphere, to engagement with legal reform and the state. In the epilogue, I re-imagine the notion of radical queer ethics as relationships of love and care.

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