Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes how middle class queer young people in Delhi negotiate the stigmatized status of their sexuality against a host of pressures, hopes, and desires about their future.

Paper long abstract:

For young middle class queer people living in Delhi, family relations are rife with ambiguities and ambivalent dispositions which reflect the shifting tensions between desires and obligations that inform urban middle class life in India; by focusing on ambiguity and precariousness as analytical entry points, I show how ideas about sexual recognition are being continuously negotiated against desires for acceptance in a context of contrasting moral values that give meaning to the daily life of the young people in my study.

Drawing from fieldwork material collected in Delhi in 2012, in this paper I focus on two interconnected axes that regulate the ways in which acceptance and recognition can be obtained within the space of the family: career achievements and marriage. I show how young people's queer sexuality potentially disrupts the life trajectory and the future imagined and actively supported by parents for their children, and focus on the hesitant and ambiguous ways in which young queers try to maintain a balance between familial bonds and sexual subjectivity. While the family is constructed as the most intimately powerful agent of identity recognition, young queers try in various ways to balance the recognition they receive as children with the recognition they desire as queer subjects, so that rather than breaking all the rules (and breaking the family unit), queer sexuality could find a space within the normative order regulating the family, an order that is not only structured by heteronormativity, but also by reciprocal dynamics.