Dispatches from a ‘rogue’ ethnographer: exploring homophobia and queer visibility

摘要

In a narrative article that explores her experience as a queer ethnographer in the Indian city of Chennai, Susan Seizer (1995) suggests that the invisibility she faced as a lesbian in a city with no vocabulary for such attachments allowed her to closely consider bonds of pācam or 'affection' between women. My own experience as a queer ethnographer in Chennai eighteen years later was very different. Far from slipping under the radar and being labelled 'chaste' or 'virginal' for being unmarried, I instead faced the daily fear of discovery. I feared being pushed back into the closet as I engaged with institutions and people who now had a vocabulary not only to name homosexuals but also to express homophobia.