Liveable Lives: Living and Surviving LGBTQ Equalities in India and the UK

Description

Liveable Lives examines what makes life liveable for LGBTQ+ people beyond equality reforms. It refuses the colonizing narrative of surviving in a 'regressive' Global South and thriving in a 'progressive' Global North. By linking the concept of liveability with the decolonial literature on sexualities, this open access book draws on individual's stories, art and writing to examine how lives become liveable across India and the UK, providing a multifaceted investigation of two divergent contexts where activists refuse local framings of exclusion/inclusion and LGBTQ+ lives are continually re-envisioned. Embracing diverse methodologies, including workshops, in-depth interviews, street theatres, and web surveys, the book stands as an example of a queer collaborative praxis that refuses the familiar Global North / Global South practices of theorizing and data gathering. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Kath Browne is a Geography Professor at University College Dublin, Ireland. She currently leads the Beyond Opposition research, an ESRC consolidator project that seeks to investigate the experiences of people who do not support some or all of the changes to sexual and gender equalities in the 21st century and explore new ways of engaging difference, differently. She is the co-author of Heteroactivism (Zed, 2020), and co-editor of After Repeal (Zed, 2020), and Lesbian Feminism (Zed, 2019). Niharika Banerjea is Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi. Working across and drawing from sociology, geographies of sexualities and social anthropology, Niharika writes about queer-feminist collective imaginaries, queer-feminist pedagogies and queer politics in the context of contemporary India. She is also an active member of Sappho for Equality, an activist organization in eastern India working for the rights of lesbian women, bisexual women and transmasculine persons. She is co-editor of Lesbian Feminism (Zed, 2019).

Liveable Lives is timely contribution to queer scholarship in decoding gender-sexual politics within the homonationalist discourse when the idea of a progressive nation majorly pivots on juridico-political legislative reforms, including equalities legislation around employment, same sex marriage, adoption and parental rights, etc. Following real life experiences of LGBTIQ+-identifying citizens in the UK and India, the book raises politically nuanced questions while debunking hegemonic gender-sexual practices and normative regimes of liveability - say, homonormativity - which are integral to nationalist imaginaries of assimilating queers. * Kaustav Bakshi, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. * Liveable Lives is a positive and critical assessment of the multiple and contradictory ways in which our LGBTQ lives become liveable across two nations, India and Great Britain. Building on Butler's 'good life', the authors extend understandings of liveabilities through decolonial reflections and participants' narratives. Creative transnational methodologies produce rich accounts of legal reforms and citizen rights, the everydayness of living and surviving, and the power of street theatre and workshops. This book is a vibrant and compelling framework for social transformation. * Lynda Johnston, Professor of Geography, University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand * A fascinating and transgressive book on what makes the lives of LGBTQ people liveable from a feminist queer approach. A great example of how to explore the understandings of liveabilities through transnational activist/academic engagements and through the application of a nuanced feminist and decolonial framework. * Maria Rodo-Zarate, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain *