Is another liveability possible? Articulating caste and lesbian worldmaking from India

Banerjea, Niharika, Borisa, Dhiren and Chauhan, Urmila (2025) Is another liveability possible? Articulating caste and lesbian worldmaking from India. Sexualities. pp. 1-20. ISSN 1363-4607 (In Press)

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Abstract

In this paper, we use collaborative forms of writing to ask if another liveability is possible. We attempt to articulate caste and lesbian worldmaking in the context of the COVID-19- induced lockdown through a walking interview with Urmila, a Dalit queer labour union organizer. The walking interview with Urmila happened within the conceptual parameters of what we term ‘urgent witnessing’, a methodological stance involving sharing and documentation of upending life circumstances. We try to gesture toward messier modes of learning and representing our lives, challenging through it our obsessions with the neatness of identities, experiences, and categories, often which are confining, limiting, silencing, and denying. Three of us are distinctly placed, enlivened, and produced through diverse histories and precarities of caste, class, and gender. Yet here, together, we attempt to build a lexicon of queer liveability that allows us to breathe. It is only one articulation of the possible politics of liveability, and we do not claim it to be the alternative. Instead, we urge those working with/in lesbian feminist frames to consider this as an invitation to re think/articulate/live. The urgency is also towards centering the questions of caste and class that manufacture and facilitate our queerness by mapping our often diagsnosed impossible cartographies of liveabilities.

Item Type: Article
Keywords: lesbian worldmaking | caste | urgent witnessing | liveability | New Delhi
Subjects: Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Gender Studies
JGU School/Centre: Jindal Global Law School
Depositing User: Mr. Luckey Pathan
Date Deposited: 07 Dec 2025 08:41
Last Modified: 07 Dec 2025 08:41
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607251400627
URI: https://pure.jgu.edu.in/id/eprint/10449

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