Radicalizing Queerness: Addressing Difference and Inequality within the Queer Movement

Every social movement carries within it the seeds of its own internal contradictions. The queer movement in India is no exception. While it has achieved remarkable milestones – from the decriminalization of same-sex relations under Section 377 in 2018 to growing public visibility – a closer look reveals persistent fault lines within the movement itself. Questions of who gets represented, who leads, and whose struggles are centred remain deeply contested. Radicalizing queerness, in this context, means not just challenging the heteronormative mainstream but actively confronting inequality, exclusion, and hierarchy within the movement’s own ranks.

What does it mean to “radicalize” queerness?
The relative invisibility of lesbian issues
Deepa Mehta’s Fire and the first public reckoning
Kothis, hijras, and the politics of representation
Caste and the limits of community solidarity
Class dynamics and movement priorities
Gender identity and heteronormativity: the broader struggle
Toward a more inclusive queer politics

What does it mean to “radicalize” queerness?

The word “queer” carries a long and layered history. Historically, the term meant something strange or eccentric, with pejorative connotations. Its political reclamation turned it into a deliberate rejection of heteronormative social structures – not just an identity label, but a statement of refusal. In India, “queer” came to signify an opposition to the procreative, conjugal, monogamous sexual economy that defines acceptable sexuality in mainstream society.

But radicalizing queerness goes further. It asks the movement to turn its critical lens inward – to examine whether it reproduces the same hierarchies of class, gender, and cultural status that it claims to resist in the broader world. This internal critique is not a sign of weakness; it is, in fact, the movement’s most politically honest work.

The relative invisibility of lesbian issues

One of the most persistent critiques of the queer movement in India concerns the marginalization of lesbian voices and concerns. While gay male sexuality has historically occupied much of the public discourse – partly due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic’s early association with male homosexuality – current studies on queer sexuality predominantly focus on male homosexuality, and lesbian discourse has often found itself on the periphery of gender and queer studies in the South Asian context.

This marginalization is not accidental. It reflects deeper structures of patriarchal power. South Asian lesbians endure numerous and intersecting forms of oppression, including those based on race, caste, class, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic background. Their invisibility is therefore multidimensional – it is not simply a matter of being overlooked, but a product of structural silencing.

Activist Ashwini Sukthankar articulated this clearly, pointing out that invisibility under the law does not make lesbian existence “legal” – on the contrary, it means their existence is rendered more shocking when revealed, and the very laws that seem to ignore them are used to persecute them. Families use legal mechanisms to coerce daughters out of lesbian relationships; employers cite moral clauses to dismiss them; and informal networks use social shame to enforce silence.

This invisibility also operates within the queer movement itself. As one activist from the feminist LBT collective Nazariya noted, it is difficult to find lesbian and bisexual women members in activist spaces because they “don’t look overtly queer” – a reflection of how the movement often defaults to visible gender non-conformity as the marker of queer identity, inadvertently sidelining femme lesbian women. The assumption that all queer women will look a certain way erases a wide range of lived realities.

Deepa Mehta’s Fire and the first public reckoning

The 1996 film Fire by Deepa Mehta is often cited as a turning point. The film is generally recognized as transforming the public debate on sexuality in India by pushing lesbian issues onto the agenda for the first time in the late 1990s. The controversy around it sparked lesbian-centred public protest for the first time. Yet even this visibility came through cinema and controversy – not through structural inclusion within the queer movement’s own organizing spaces.

Kothis, hijras, and the politics of representation

Another significant area of internal tension concerns the representation and leadership of kothis and hijras within the broader queer movement. These are not monolithic categories. Kothis and hijras represent an overlapping spectrum of feminine-identified people usually assigned male at birth, with distinct cultural practices rooted in non-metropolitan, non-elite communities.

The queer movement’s increasing visibility from the 1990s onward brought these communities into its fold – but often on unequal terms. While LGBTQ identities and movements gained visibility in the Indian public sphere and pushed the state toward some degree of rights recognition, these developments resulted in selective and constrained forms of representation and upward mobility for non-elite communities such as kothis and hijras.

Ethnographic research by scholar Aniruddha Dutta demonstrates that non-elite groups like kothis and hijras actually facilitate the transregional expansion of organized queer politics – yet they often remain subordinated through hierarchies of scale and language that contain their communities and discourses as merely “local” or “vernacular.” In other words, their participation is mobilized, but their leadership is constrained.

There are also specific questions about leadership structures. Hijra communities have their own internal hierarchies – the guru-chela (teacher-disciple) system, community elders, and traditional forms of authority that do not map neatly onto democratic NGO-style organizing. When hijra and kothi leaders participate in broader LGBTQ coalitions, tensions arise over whether leadership should follow traditional community structures or conform to institutional norms preferred by urban, educated, middle-class activists. These are not minor procedural disputes – they determine whose knowledge and authority is legitimized and whose is set aside.

Caste and the limits of community solidarity

Caste further complicates the internal dynamics of both hijra and kothi communities. As activist Vidya has pointed out, the occupational choices of Dalit hijras are shaped by caste – and the assumption that hijra communities are insulated from the workings of caste is challenged by the everyday realities that their cultural practices may have a caste logic embedded within them. These intersecting hierarchies mean that even within marginalized communities, some members face deeper structural disadvantages than others.

Class dynamics and movement priorities

Class is perhaps the sharpest dividing line within the Indian queer movement. As scholar Alok Gupta documented in the influential essay “Englishpur ki Kothi: Class Dynamics in the Queer Movement in India,” the movement’s weekly organizational meetings in cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi were largely attended by urban, middle-class gay and bisexual men, held predominantly in English, with discussions centred on experiences of being gay, the social pressure to marry, and navigating workplace and family relationships. This profile effectively excluded working-class kothis and hijras, whose survival concerns – economic precarity, housing, discrimination in public spaces – were of a different and more urgent order.

Campaigns for inclusion in institutions like marriage primarily benefit upper and middle-class cisgender gay men who meet heteronormative standards of wealth, monogamy, domesticity, and consumption. Meanwhile, trans persons, kothis, working-class queers, Dalit queers, and disabled queers – those who face compounded and intersecting forms of oppression – find their specific needs and demands consistently deprioritized.

The pattern extends to the movement’s NGO infrastructure. The intersections of post-colonial ethnicity, gender, social class, and sexuality create a complex context for queer activism in India, where organizations may simultaneously challenge homonormative domination while also becoming “respectable” by conforming to the diversity politics of non-profit donors and institutional funders. In doing so, they can inadvertently exclude more radical, non-elite voices.

Gender identity and heteronormativity: the broader struggle

The queer movement’s challenge to heteronormativity is not merely about decriminalizing same-sex conduct – it is about dismantling a broader system that enforces rigid gender roles, punishes gender non-conformity, and structures social institutions around the heterosexual nuclear family as the only legitimate form of life. A younger generation of queer activists has pushed against India’s patriarchal society by challenging its heteronormativity and binary gender structure, with social media expanding the reach of queer solidarity beyond metropolitan centers.

Yet centering difference requires more than rhetorical inclusion. Elite lesbian and gay activism has largely failed to create space for gender non-conforming queers and has increased the demand for heteronormatively binary gender representations, which harm non-binary people. The movement’s push for legal recognition and state legitimacy – while important – risks reproducing the very normative structures it seeks to challenge if it does not actively work to dismantle them from within.

This is why scholars and activists argue that truly radicalizing queerness means embracing the full diversity of queer life – including its class dimensions, its gendered hierarchies, its caste intersections, and its non-Western vernacular identities. It means refusing to treat lesbian, working-class, kothi, hijra, Dalit, and rural queer voices as secondary or supplementary to a default gay male, urban, English-speaking norm.

Toward a more inclusive queer politics

The internal critique of the queer movement is not defeatist – it is generative. Organizations like Sappho for Equality in Kolkata, which links sexuality to identity and outreach while engaging with feminist movements and the broader cultural life of the city, and groups like LABIA – a Queer Feminist LBT Collective – demonstrate that it is possible to build spaces that name and address gender and class inequalities while sustaining broader coalitions.

Meaningful inclusion requires deliberate structural choices: leadership development for working-class, rural, and gender non-conforming activists; movement spaces conducted in multiple languages, not only English; agendas that prioritize economic rights, housing, and safety alongside legal recognition; and decision-making structures that do not replicate corporate or elite NGO hierarchies.

The queer challenge to heteronormativity is most powerful when it refuses to limit itself to gaining recognition within existing institutions and instead demands the transformation of those institutions themselves. That is what radicalizing queerness truly looks like – not the assimilation of the most privileged into mainstream respectability, but a sustained, collective challenge to the structures that make some lives more precarious than others.

What do you think? If the queer movement reproduces some of the same inequalities – of class, gender, and caste – that it seeks to fight in the wider society, what would it take to genuinely centre the most marginalized voices within the movement? And is legal recognition alone, without economic and social transformation, sufficient to address the layered vulnerabilities that working-class, Dalit, and gender non-conforming queer people face?

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Table of Contents

What does it mean to “radicalize” queerness? 🔗

The relative invisibility of lesbian issues 🔗

Deepa Mehta’s Fire and the first public reckoning 🔗

Kothis, hijras, and the politics of representation 🔗

Caste and the limits of community solidarity 🔗

Class dynamics and movement priorities 🔗

Gender identity and heteronormativity: the broader struggle 🔗

Toward a more inclusive queer politics 🔗