Paper Short Abstract:

Through an ethnographic account of a pan-India conference for queer mobilization, this paper analyzes how queer/trans practices of joyful intimacy disrupt hegemonic state narratives of failure and foreclosed futurity.

Paper Abstract:

This paper provides an ethnographic interpretation of conversations and proceedings at a pan-India conference for queer mobilization held in Hyderabad in December 2022. Over the course of the two-day event, representatives from each Indian state discussed the status of queer/trans activism across the country, revealing widespread state failures to implement government schemes and legal provisions supporting queer and trans welfare. Despite such official conditions of “crisis,” the two-day event was animated by affects of joyful, celebratory fun. As participants gathered for post-conference performances, dancing and fabulating along with drag kings and queens, they engaged in a politics of pleasure that did not require state legitimation.

This paper examines such affective communing as a practice of mazaa, a Hindi-Urdu term for sensuous, fun, playful pleasure. I propose that queer/trans mazaa may be understood as a political practice oriented toward experiential indeterminacy in the face of hegemonic disavowal, operating as an expression of and conduit for the subversive capacities of joyful intimacy. Juxtaposing formal conference commentary with event affects, I analyze how this space of queer/trans communing became a site of insurgent solidarity and strength for a political movement officially marked by failure. In doing so, I suggest that the sociality of queer mobilizing may occasionally supersede the capacities of formal state recognition to foster lived experiences of queer liberation. While broader conditions of foreclosure engendered this site of collectivization, participants' practices of sociality belied state-led trajectories of hopeless futurity to foster a regenerative, pleasureful celebration of queer/trans abundance.