Quiet Queerness in Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing

This thesis argues that quiet queerness is a productive and resistant rather than a passive form of queerness. To establish the theoretical framework for quiet queerness, the thesis builds upon Jack Halberstam’s concept of “shadow feminism” (124) that they articulated in their book, The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Halberstam outlines different characteristics of shadow feminism, such as “negation”, “refusal” and “passivity” (124). Halberstam’s explication of shadow feminism as grounded on “negation”, undoing, unbecoming and passivity is particularly useful to elaborate on the concept of quiet queerness. Much like Halberstam’s contention that shadow feminism is the opposite of a liberal activist feminism of doing, quiet queerness suggests a departure from the dominant global, liberal rights-based discourse on queer progress which plots progress as occurring on a linear path. One example is the way marriage equality is usually assumed to be the next step after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India. By positing quiet queerness as resistant, this thesis disrupts such dominant and linear ways of thinking about queer ways of being. The thesis develops the concept of quiet queerness by examining unobtrusive depictions of queer ways of being expressed by women characters in five contemporary Indian novels published between 2000 and 2015. The five primary texts are Talking of Muskaan (2014) by Himanjali Sankar, Babyji (2005) by Abha Dawesar, Amruta Patil’s 2008 debut graphic novel, Kari; two literary fiction texts: Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman (2003) and Geetanjali Shree’s The Roof Beneath Their Feet (2013). All texts are written in English, apart from Shree’s novel, which is translated into English from Hindi by Rahul Soni. Each chapter of the thesis focuses on one primary text. In each chapter, I excavate different registers of quiet queerness that are undergirded by a distinct mode of shadow feminism.