Shehla Rashid Shora / Queering Student Politics

 

There are three issues at the heart of ‘Queering student politics’ – the question of representation of women and queer persons, the queering of the discourse, and the queering of the style of politics. Representation remains an issue even in the most progressive of campuses: JNU students elected a female President for the first time in five years in 2017. When the most urgent question is to defeat the regressive right-wing, finer issues of inclusion suffer a major setback. In order to queer the discourse, one of the foremost challenges is to build genuine solidarities among Muslims and sexual minorities: the nature of repression of both religious minorities as well as sexual minorities is the same wherein both are targeted on the basis of identity, the choice of how to live (e.g., beef and same-sex relations), and who they love and marry (e.g., Love Jihad and marriage inequality).

As for the style of politics, people today rally behind student leaders who are aggressively taking on the right-wing. People relate to those who they feel reflect their anger in language and semantics. But women, disabled, and queer people may find themselves out of place with this aggressive, masculine style of politics. While the right-wing student groups employ tropes derived from names of Hindu goddesses (Bharat Mata, Maa Durga ka apmaan, Maa Bhawani) and have the discursive capacity to project menstruating women, the disabled (Divyang), and transgendered – all as objects of worship, the left does not have equivalent devices. How do we then queer politics in general, and student politics in particular? How do we then rally women for a discourse that is genuinely emancipatory but whose style may put them off?

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