In this essay, we join Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) and Eve Tuck’s (2009) call to decolonize and de-center “damage-centered” research, embedded in settler/colonial ways of knowing. We attend to the ethical responsibility and intimate relationalities that this contemporary moment requires of us as privileged feminist, queer, global south, and South Asian scholars. We introduce yaariyan, baithak, and gupshup to theorize queer feminist care in/as research practices. As ethics of care, compassion, and collectivity, these practices enable us to study and share knowledges together. Building on transnational feminist and queer scholarship (Chowdhury and Philipose 2016; Banerjea et al. 2017), we argue that responsible knowledges mean thinking about methods as relational rather than transactional and relationality as activated and not automatic. We explore how gupshup and baithak provide methodologies of co-production of knowledge, inclusion, accountability, sharing, and reflection. This work must be located in different frameworks of home, diaspora, and language. Pakistan, we contend, is always already a transnational space in which gender and sexuality have been categorized (to deadly consequences) but not contained as words which denote experiences, identities, practices, desires, and histories. It is these words that we reach for in and through our friendship as a condition of possibility of a different kind of knowledge-making.
There are few sartorial ensembles as heavily signified as masculine as a suit. This article focuses on the suit within queer fashion digital cultures and spaces to explore how butch of colour digital fashion suits up to offer us different ways to think about masculinity. Intervening in the erasure of women of colour in histories of fashion – including menswear – and histories of sexuality – butch, dapper, tomboy, dandy – I argue that butch digital fashion works as a site and composition of flesh, fabric and feeling that reworks masculinity as a project of embodiment. I look at three interwoven dimensions of butch digital fashion – aesthetic process, texture as feeling and spatial imaginations – attending to the themes of fantasy, desire and pleasure. I situate butch within and between fashion studies and media studies to offer butch as a relation, practice, orientation and site of embodiment to think about being and becoming, about the body politics of space and feeling, as matters of race, sexuality, class and gender – and the materialities of race, sexuality, class and gender, mediated by the global, and as the global by the digital. Digital butch fashion is, at once, a visual culture, a creative visual space, a resource of queer fantasy and an aesthetic process. It is messy, tense and fraught with the politics of race, colonialism and class, yet at the same time, dense with possibility, pleasure and eroticism. Butch of colour fashion offers frames and forms for rethinking and remaking masculinity as a sign of a body, as a category of personhood, as a set of practices and feelings made coherent by processes of embodiment.
The terms “desi” and “butch” are difficult to define separately but open up new possibilities for thinking sexuality and borders when located next to each other on the page. “Desi” can mean people from South Asia, and gestures toward land as home. “Butch” can mean queer masculinity, female masculinity, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual women’s subcultures. This article uses autoethnography to experiment with desi and butch next to one another to think about what desi queer and trans masculine genealogies and experiences might tell us about transnational logics of sexuality, space, home, and body. The article thinks through desi, butch, and desi butch as potential analytics of sexuality, movement, masculinity, intimacy, and desire, and attends to the work of the risks and costs of these shared terms. What does desi butch do to spatial modes of intimacy, alienation, care, fragmentation, and genealogy, in multiple vocabularies of land and home? The author asks after the complicated affects, temporalities, and desires signaled by desi butch as a category that troubles and has trouble with heteronormative border regimes and futurities across geohistories of North America and South Asia. This includes questions of translation, embodiment, and citizenship. Attending to their own desires, orientations, and experiences, the author asks what forms, spaces, and practices of care and collectivity are made possible through desi butch as negotiations of borders, and experiences of melancholy and alienation produced by different lines.
Netflix’s Queer Eye (2018–present) is often criticized for reinforcing neo-liberal American fantasies of transformation of the self that distract from urgent transformations of economic, political and social worlds. Nonetheless, I use paratextual and textual analyses to argue that the verbal and physical intimacies between the Fab Five are rare in American popular culture, and offer us reworked embodiments of American manhood. It is through these intimacies that the Fab Five enable us to think through the following questions. What does it mean to be a man in contemporary American popular culture? What does it mean to be a man with other men? What does intimacy between men look like?
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