Vinita Chaudhry
Association for Asian American Studies Conference
23 April 2015
Serving the Desi Queer Community: Experiences of Exclusion and Marginality in South
Asian American Queer Organizing
This paper draws from my undergraduate thesis fieldwork with SALGA, a South Asian
queer organization in New York City. Although the use of the word “queer” shifts in meaning in its
usage in scholarship, I use it here to denote a range of identities that fall outside of a hetero- or
gender-normative context, including (but not limited to) identities within the LGBTQ spectrum. I
spent three months in the summer of 2013 living in New York City and working as a youth outreach
intern for SALGA. I conducted participant observation at parties, support group meetings, board
meetings, film festivals, and a number of other events, and interviewed thirteen individuals either
peripherally or centrally involved with the organization. In this paper, I demonstrate the ways
transgender, gender non-conforming, and working-class people were often excluded from SALGA
spaces and organizing. Using my ethnographic data and drawing upon frameworks from queer
theory, political economy, and linguistic anthropology, I look closely at these experiences of
exclusion within South Asian queer diasporic organizing. By centralizing the experiences of my
working-class and transgender identified interlocutors, I argue for class and gender identity as useful
lenses for the continued study of South Asian queer subjectivity and activism in the United States.
I will begin with an anecdote from my fieldwork. On a sunny Sunday afternoon in June
2013, in Queens, New York, the energy and excitement in the air was palpable. After marching a few
blocks in the local neighborhood, SALGA, which once stood for the South Asian Lesbian & Gay
Association but now simply goes by “SALGA,” sat at our tent at the Queens Pride festival. A
number of LGBTQ organizations surrounded us in similar tents, handing out free promotional
materials, selling food, drinks, clothing, and jewelry. SALGA board members sold T-shirts with
words that read: “SALGA: Desi Queer Pride,” surrounding the image of a multicolored handprint.
People from a variety of backgrounds came by the table to ask about SALGA’s renowned parties, its
mission and its leadership, as well as to make comments about the past and present work of the
organization. As a newly hired intern for the organization just beginning my fieldwork, I sat quietly
and observed board and community members interacting.
One significant encounter that afternoon occurred when a South Asian man with no teeth
came up to the table. He did not respond to our greetings in English, but rather smiled and started
to take a T-shirt. After the board members tried first in English, then in Hindi, to explain to the man
that the shirt cost fifteen dollars, the man reluctantly walked away. The board members and I
assumed this man to be an older “uncle,” or a South Asian community elder, who must have
misunderstood SALGA’s mission and work. We all assumed that the man was not a part of the
“Desi Queer” community that the shirt represented, and that the organization largely aims to serve.
Although there was no clear way to determine the man’s sexual or gender identity, the man’s
inability to communicate, disheveled look, and overall awkwardness, led to our assumption that he
was not queer. He seemed a lower class immigrant, common in Queens, a borough in New York
City with a rich history of migration and settlement. The man likely represented or descended from
working-class South Asian immigrants who are, as historian Vivek Bald writes, “at the margins of
US immigration history.” 1 Our assumptions about this man and his intentions are inextricably tied
to the relationship between South Asian queer organizing and class privilege.
Our perception then reveals a great deal about how SALGA imagines its spaces and
organizing. Philosopher Linda Alcoff writes about the significance of perception in understanding
racialized bodies. According to Alcoff’s understanding of racial embodiment, “we perceive
ourselves, others, the world, and the relation between them, in and through the grids of intelligibility
that exist in our culture, which we have embodied, which, in effect, we are. But this perception
Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013),
Kindle.
1
occurs, for the most part… at a subconscious or preconscious bodily level.”2 The SALGA board
members at the festival and I perceived that this brown man with no teeth could not be interested in
SALGA. Our pre-conscious assumption, based on his class and inability to communicate, reveals the
“grids of intelligibility” through which SALGA perceives reality, demonstrating how the act of
exclusion, particularly on the basis of class, is replicated by SALGA. I open with this particular
anecdote from my ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate the ways hegemonic political and economic
processes intersect to influence the politics and representation of SALGA, whose aims to serve New
York’s South Asian queer community may be compromised as a result. Class privileges within the
SALGA community led to our inability to communicate with this man, and we ultimately ignored
his request. He seemed to fall outside of the imagined community that SALGA aims to serve.
SALGA is a not-for-profit, all-volunteer organization that serves as a political, social, and
support group for LGBTQ people of South Asian descent New York City. The organization has
existed for nearly twenty-three years, and has grown from just a dozen South Asian gay men meeting
informally to reaching over one thousand individuals on its e-mail list-serv. SALGA is the only
South Asian-specific organization in New York City and has established rapport among local
LGBTQ organizations. SALGA banners, T-shirts, and other promotional materials include the
tagline: Serving the Desi Queer Community. The organization’s official mission statement lists
numerous a wide range of goals, including: enabling community members to establish cultural
visibility and take a stand against oppression and discrimination in all its forms by encouraging
leadership development, providing multi-generational support, working toward immigration
advocacy, addressing health issues, and fostering political involvement.3 The mission statement
clearly covers a lot of ground, and according to one of my informants, Kamala, who was on the
SALGA board during my fieldwork, the board revisits the mission statement upon every new term
2
3
Nikki Sullivan, “Queer Race,” in A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 76.
“Salga Nyc Facebook Page,” accessed 20 Oct. 2012, http://www.facebook.com/salga
to make sure that the organization is able to meet its goals. The organization’s board is made up of
ten to twelve volunteers, who meet on a monthly basis to make any major decisions such as changes
to the mission statement, collaboration for events, or financial decisions. Board positions vary
depending on interest, but include logistic-focused positions such as treasurer, communications and
social media chairs, as well as programming-focused positions such as political, youth outreach, and
support group chairs.
Particularly useful for understanding SALGA’s potential and lived realities is the framework
of a queer diaspora, a theoretical lens that works at the intersections of queer theory and theories of
diasporic formation. The framework has been important for queer scholarship’s more recent turn to
look closely at race, ethnicity, and larger national and global political, economic, and cultural
processes. Scholar Gayatri Gopinath, whose work focuses on literary analyses of Bollywood films
and Hindi novels, is prominent in the study of a specifically South Asian queer diaspora. Gopinath
explains, “The critical framework of a specifically queer diaspora… may begin to unsettle the ways in
which diaspora shores up the gender and sexual ideologies of dominant nationalism on the one
hand, and processes of globalization on the other… This framework ‘queers’ the concept of
diaspora by undercutting its dependence on genealogical, implicitly heteronormative logic.” 4
Important in Gopinath’s description of a queer diaspora is a simultaneous critique of dominant
nationalism, processes of globalization, and heteronormativity. Thus, for Gopinath, a queer diaspora
framework allows for significant intervention into both areas of theory. Another important
perspective on “queer diaspora” comes from Jasbir Puar, who critiques the idea of queer diaspora as
inherently radical. She explains that queer diasporas, “are not immune from forms of cultural
Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005), 10.
4
nationalism; in fact, they may even rely on them.” 5 Puar explains that the diverse histories within queer
diasporic communities, related to ethnicity, migration, class, generation, gender, and religion, to
name a few, may ultimately limit the potential for a queer diaspora to challenge such larger structures
as heteronormativity, racism, nationalism, and globalization. She pushes scholars to interrogate these
relationships between the diaspora and larger structures of power in order to understand the ways
queer diasporas may reinstate the very forms of power and oppression they wish to critique and
challenge.
For SALGA, as a physical manifestation of this theoretical concept, both understandings of
“queer diaspora” were relevant. SALGA simultaneously provided a venue for dissonance, critique,
and an interrogation of class and gender privileges, but this oppositional dimension is compromised
by the very political-economic structures the organization wishes to challenge. One of my
interlocutors, a transgender man who I will call Dhaval, told a story that revealed the organization’s
limitations. Dhaval is in mid-thirties and has lived in New York City for over ten years. Although he
eventually contributed a great deal to the organization, his initial interaction with the organization
was difficult. He explained to me that he went to his first SALGA support group meeting before he
came out as transgender and after just moving to the City to become a playwright. He told me, “I
just felt like it was for people who were the wealthy Indians, not the poor artist Indians – like the
folks who had really good jobs and could pay $20 to go to a party, and they all seemed to know each
other and I didn’t know anybody and I couldn’t find my way in. And I was really butch, and I guess
I didn’t know anybody who was really butch at the time. So I think I was just like, ‘whatever, I don’t
need these people,’ and I left.” This particular experience of attending a SALGA support group
meeting and not finding community and comfort directly contrasted the majority of experiences of
Jasbir Puar, “Transnational Sexualities: South Asian (Trans)nation(alism)s and Queer Diasporas,” in Q & A: Queer in
Asian America, ed. David. L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1997), 410. Emphasis
original.
5
my other interlocutors, who were primarily cisgender (gender-normative) but from a variety of class
and education backgrounds. Entering the SALGA space for the first time as gender non-conforming
and a “poor artist,” Dhaval did not feel like SALGA could support someone like him.
Despite this initial experience with the organization, Dhaval returned to SALGA meetings
and joined the board, specifically with the purpose of making the organization more inclusive.
Dhaval became the first transgender outreach chair for the organization, and created separate
support group spaces for women and trans people, as well as an online resource page with South
Asian-specific trans resources. While he was clearly a model volunteer and board member for the
organization, he eventually became frustrated and burnt out with constantly having to be “the trans
guy” for local South Asian queer organizing. He expressed frustration with rifts in the South Asian
trans community, between transgender people on the masculine spectrum (who, he explained, often
left SALGA to do “more radical things”) and those on the feminine spectrum, who, “either weren’t
out of the closet yet or they came once or twice or didn’t come back.” He ultimately decided, “it
doesn’t matter if I create a webpage, or an event, if the community as a whole is not a supportive
space, people aren’t going to want to come into it.” He pushed for a training of the SALGA board
to make the organization trans-inclusive, but he felt too much pressure to do this work alone, and
eventually stepped down from the position. Dhaval’s experiences as a transgender-identifying
individual are not unique; Kiran, a genderqueer-identified interlocutor, cited “gender issues” for the
organization in many conversations.
SALGA’s problematic interactions with transgender-identified South Asians are not specific
to the organization either. Linguistic anthropologist David Valentine has written at length about the
category of “transgender” and its use in a variety of institutional contexts. Speaking specifically to his
own interlocutors, primarily lower-class transgender women of color, he explains that although
“transgender” is used as a collective umbrella term for a variety of gender non-conforming or
variant identities, its use in institutions can be limiting. Describing the work of social service agencies
targeting HIV-positive and LGBTQ populations, he says that the employment of “transgender… in
institutionalized contexts cannot account for the experiences of most socially vulnerable gendervariant people.”6 In particular, he notes that the labor of scholars, activists, social service providers,
legislators, and others in producing accounts of difference and their intersections that may in fact
“erase the complexity of those differences.”7 Valentine is particularly interested in the way the
language of “transgender” is employed by these actors as well as transgender-identified or otherwise
gender non-conforming individuals, and how the term has emerged, “both as a movement and as an
identity category – primarily from within a framework established by a racialized and class-inflected
gay and lesbian – and, latterly, queer – activism and scholarship.”8 The emergence of “transgender”
as an identity category and its use in social movements are relevant to Dhaval’s experiences of
burnout and to SALGA’s unintentional exclusions. The category of “transgender” occupies a
particularly racialized and classed position within social service rhetoric as well as within LGBTQ
activism and scholarship, and this is reflected in Dhaval’s difficulty organizing around the category.
Another significant area of exclusion for SALGA was around class. One of my interlocutors,
Divya, spoke openly about her own struggles with homelessness after facing rejection from her
parents after what she describes as a “pretty horrible” coming out experience. Divya, no longer
living in New York City, remembers vividly her lack of financial support when she first moved to
the City. She described herself as “stuck” in an abusive relationship with an older woman at the
time, one that isolated her from her friends. She explains, “Many times when we would get into a
fight, I would have to spend the night in homeless shelters, in subways, on a bench… I didn’t have
any friends, I couldn’t call my parents.” These experiences set Divya apart form most of my
David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 14.
Ibid, 18.
8 Ibid, 60
6
7
interlocutors, despite high rates of homelessness among LGBT youth and LGBT people of color in
New York City.9 The lack of stories in my ethnographic fieldwork about these kinds of experiences
reflects the privileges within much of SALGA’s population, and raises questions of whether SALGA
was equipped to handle these types of issues. In our conversation, Divya said, “I wasn’t going to go
to SALGA because they’re… without any real solutions to any real problems. If SALGA really was a
support organization, I would have felt comfortable to go to them, but I didn’t.” Divya, like Dhaval,
did not feel comfortable going to SALGA for help with what she calls “real problems.”
My two interlocutors’ experiences reflect the experiences of exclusion for two particularly
important categories of experience and identity within SALGA: class and gender identity. My
undergraduate thesis connected these forms of exclusion to the lack of funding for the organization:
SALGA was funded primarily through grants and donations, and parties (which usually asked for up
to $20 donations) provided the main source of fundraising for the organization. These limitations
disallowed SALGA from pursuing political events that stepped outside of this support group and
party framework. The board members, primarily volunteers, generally came from flexible
professional occupations that allowed them to dedicate time for the organization. These factors led
to SALGA’s limitations and exclusions of such marginalized populations as working-class and
transgender-identified South Asians.
For my graduate research, however, I am interested in expanding these questions to think
more broadly about how transgender studies and political economy frameworks (which pay close
attention to class dynamics and ideologies) are important sites around which to center my work. My
initial fieldwork reveals that these populations reveal significant insights into the intersections of
political economy, gender, sexuality, race, and class that are vital for understanding South Asian
queer subjectivity and activism in the diaspora. Within LGBT scholarship and activism, class and
The Ali Forney Center reports that at least 40% of the 500,000 homeless youth in NYC are LGBT-identified
(aliforneycenter.org).
9
gender identity, as well as the intersection between these two, are largely ignored and under-funded,
particularly for communities of color. By centralizing ethnographic research with transgender and
working-class South Asians involved in South Asian queer community-based organizations like
SALGA, I hope to speak to larger gendered, classed, and racialized ideologies that cause what Divya
calls “real problems,” and shape the institutions interacting with South Asian queer and transgender
diasporic subjects.