Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

Brian Horton Published in Academic Journal, Sexualities

November 3, 2017

Anthropology PhD candidate, Brian Horton's article, What's so 'queer' about coming out? Silent queers and theorizing kinship agonistically in Mumbai, was recently published in the academic journal, Sexualities.

Abstract:
What kinds of creative potential exist in silence – in not coming out? This ethnographic study takes the strategic silences that queer persons in Mumbai deploy regarding ‘coming out’ as productive for theorizing the connections between kinship and queerness. While some strands of queer critique conceptualize the relationship between kinship and queerness antagonistically, the author deploys the concept of agonistic intimacy outlined in Singh’s Poverty and the Quest for Life (2015) to consider how queers might inhabit heterosexual kinship networks through the interplay of con-testation and submission. Silence, then, need not signal the image of the transnational queer in need of saving, but a mode of negotiating desires for respectability and queerness.

Read the full article