“It is a magic word — queer. It creates invisible boundaries around it. When it doesn’t, the others create those boundaries for it. To tell the word what it is not, what it cannot include, what it can long for for but ill lose out on.”
-From The World That Belongs to Us
In 2018, parts of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was invalidated making homosexuality legal in India. This year, Justice Anand Venkatesh of the Madras High Court passed a judgment which issued a slew of guidelines to ensure the protection of LGBTQIA+ persons in consensual relationships from police harassment.
Small steps in a long journey of moving beyond gender and gendered norms, of understanding and accepting what it is to be queer.
Chand is a queer, agender trans research scholar, with a special interest in the intersection of Queer theory and development discourse. Dreaming of a world without gender, this week for Bol, they read their poem, “What is Queer?”
“Queer is the Kajal and bindi that I don
to challenge the binaries of gender and gender itself
Queer is the end of structure
and the resistance to the epistemological violence”
