Such a good essay about gender, non-whiteness and the impact of British colonialism by Supriya Ganesh
Growing up in India, I never questioned my gender. When I moved to the U.S. at 18, I began to feel increasingly disconnected from my body.
Especially loved these two quotes:
If womanhood was the virtue as to why white women need to be protected, it followed that non-white women would be masculinized so that racism could be meted out upon us.
I eventually (and thankfully) found community with other queer people my sophomore year, and my women’s-studies courses introduced me to intersectional modes of thinking. I owe a lot to Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, in which she outlined her dissatisfaction with feminist thinkers who excluded women of color, particularly Black women, in their goals and rhetoric. Once this was pointed out to me, it became hard to ignore. Finding queer community also meant I was surrounded by bodies that encouraged gender fluidity and nonconformity. It was healing to express attraction to my own features on other bodies and to be among people who saw beauty in expressions of masculinity in women, femininity in men, and everything in between. We talked openly about experiencing gender dysphoria, how we perform our genders to the world around us, and where the performance fails. I grew more lax with my body hair, played around with my natural texture, dropped the barre classes for weight lifting, and started experimenting with menswear. I was starting to understand what I had been experiencing since immigrating, but the labels available to me (nonbinary, genderqueer) weren’t really right. I still felt like a woman, but I didn’t always feel comfortable performing womanhood in the way the West had deemed appropriate.
Also, as Supriya highlighted in their story,
Much of this [in context of gender fluidity and queerness in precolonial India] was pruned away by the British as they colonized South Asia. Victorian mores determined that brown men were too feminine and brown women too masculine, and the group as a whole was oversexed and in need of population control. Hijras, some of whom held high positions in Mughal courts, were categorized as a criminal tribe, surveilled, and forced to register. I don’t want to paint precolonial South Asia as some sort of utopia that was free of any stigma toward sexual or gender fluidity — this is untrue and dangerous rhetoric that absolves my culture of problems that continue to this date. But it is inarguable that what did exist was less binary than what the British sought to box us into. There is a tense contradiction between claims that LGBTQ+ rights are a western import and historical records that show more progressive, or even indifferent, societal norms in India.
