Shimmers in the Dark: On the Possibilities of Intimate Touch in Bombay’s Queer Sexpublics

Abstract:In Bombay’s cruising parks, gay parties, pride events, and virtual spaces—what I call queer sexpublics—queer sex, touch, and intimacy flourish. Though queer and trans people perpetually negotiate risk and rejection in search of love, sex and intimacy, queer sexpublics enable practices that allow them to both endure as well as play with state and social violences. Drawing on 28 months of fieldwork conducted in Bombay between 2013 and 2019, this talk asks: How might queer and trans lives be lived outside of and against the reaches of cultural intelligibility and legal and social recognition? And how might queer studies and anthropology engage this abundance of life in the face of violence, risk, and erasure—“More Life” (Chambers-Letson 2018)—as a means of recognizing minoritarian lives not just in the moments when they are in crisis, but also when they brim with unbridled possibilities? I develop the concept of the shimmer—fleeting, coded moments of queer touch and intimacy–to examine unruly, temporary, and critical forms of life that are simultaneously ephemeral (here and then gone) as well as speculative (strategic calculations of risks for rewards). Shimmers name how people eke out forms of possibility, pleasure, and intimacy amid precarious and risky existences.

Dr. Brian A. Horton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis University. At Brandeis, he is also an affiliated faculty member in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, African and African American Studies, and the South Asian Studies Program, which he currently chairs. Brian is a sociocultural anthropologist working across queer anthropology, South Asian Studies, and “otherwise anthropology”—or an anthropology of the political, social, ethical, and aesthetic possibilities that emerge from ongoing structural violence, precarity, and crisis. Across each of these broad domains, his research and teaching center the thresholds between pleasure and violence; wherein he asks how gender, sexual, and racial minorities experience and endure myriad forms of violence while simultaneously enacting new possibilities and futures. Currently, he is working on his first book-length monograph, Shimmers of the Fabulous: Public Sex and Intimate Touch in Queer and Trans Bombay. His work has appeared in Sexualities, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and QED: Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking.

Co-sponsored by South Asia Program and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. thank you.

Contact Liz at ek61@cornell.edu if you have any questions or if you need accommodations.

FLAS fellowships at Cornell support undergraduate, graduate, and professional students studying modern South Asian and Southeast Asian languages and related area studies. Funding is offered in collaboration with the Einaudi Center’s South Asia and Southeast Asia Programs.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports college graduates conducting research or teaching English in more than 150 countries. Applications are due in the fall; students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year.

Contact: fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu

Learn about the Laidlaw Undergraduate Research and Leadership Program. Open to first- and second-year students, this 2-year program provides generous support to carry out internationally-focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and join a global network of like-minded scholars from more than a dozen universities. Join us to learn more about the program, its benefits, and the application process, as well as tips for approaching potential faculty research mentors and writing a successful application

HYBRID EVENT | Twenty years after 9/11, America has finally ended its longest war. But the precipitous fall of Kabul serves as a poignant reminder that the threats to American national security remain acute and are ever-evolving. This congressional policy forum will reflect on the tumultuous past two decades and offer insight into the future of American foreign policy.

Speakers

Rep. Jim Himes, Chair of the National Security, International Development and Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee and Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Former Rep. Chris Shays, Former senior member of the Budget, Financial Services, Homeland Security, and Government Reform committees

Moderators

Steve Israel, Director, Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University and former U.S. Representative (D-NY)
Sarah Kreps, the John L. Wetherill Professor in the Department of Government, Adjunct Professor of Law, and the Director of the Cornell Tech Policy Lab at Cornell University. Active duty officer, United States Air Force (1999-2003).

Hybrid event

The in-person option will be held at the Cornell Club in NYC. The virtual option will be made available via livestream.

Let us know how you plan to attend. Registration required.

On the 25th of April 2015, during the Gorkha Earthquake, a massive glacier-rock avalanche destroyed the village of Langtang, killing over 300 people and causing unthinkable destruction and loss. My work examines the afterlives of this unthinkable event and the ways in which the people of Langtang have worked to rebuild and revitalize their communities, drawing from over five years of ethnographic research and post-disaster volunteer work, as well as my own firsthand experience of this tragedy. In this lecture, based on a chapter of my forthcoming dissertation, I analyze the ways in which the April 2015 disaster articulates with diverse ways of knowing and living with avalanches in the Langtang Valley, as the people of Langtang and climate scientist work to anticipate increasingly volatile hazard regimes and reckon uncertain climate futures.

The Langtang Valley is one of the most important sites for glaciological and climatological research in the Himalayan region – though relations and dialogue between scientific teams and the Langtang community were both uneven and limited prior to the 2015 disaster. In what ways have these situated patterns of knowledge production changed in the wake of the 2015 event, and in relation to disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction efforts? How do attempts to know cryosphere hazards and climate futures in Langtang draw together concerns about climate justice, epistemological pluralism, political ontology, and moral ecologies in the Himalayan region (cf. Sherpa 2014; Butcher 2017; Gagne 2018)? In what ways do differently positioned Langtangpas experience and conceptualize these vital uncertainties?

Austin Lord is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell. Austin's dissertation research, titled “Inhabiting Impermanence: Disaster, Afterlives, and Vital Uncertainties in the Nepal Himalaya” focuses on the ways the people of Nepal’s Langtang Valley organize time, meaning, and uncertainty as they navigate intersecting disasters – a massive glacier avalanche, an earthquake, a pandemic, and climate change. This work is based on over five years of ethnographic research and volunteer work with Langtang communities. His broader research agenda focuses on post-disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction, hydropower development and water resource management, infrastructural politics, and the making of environmental knowledges in the Himalayan region. His scholarship has been published in journals and forums such Economic Anthropology; Cultural Anthropology; Political Geography; WIREs Water; Modern Asian Studies; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; Himalaya: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies; Eurasian Geography and Economics; The Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), and Limn, as well as a handful of edited volumes. For more information and links to his academic work see here.