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Unnatural intimacies and unnatural bodies: Section 377, homosexuality, and disability

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Abstract

Disability sex studies and queer disability theory have long noted how assumptions of able-bodiedness accompany the imperative to compulsory heteronormativity. Queer identity within such a heterosexist narrative is mediated and enabled through the non-identity of able-bodiedness, or the imagination of heteronormative desire as disembodied. Queer discourse in India has largely been mobilised around the establishment—and eventual withdrawal—of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code 1860 (IPC), which proscribes ‘unnatural’ sex acts. However, the failure to adequately problematise the implicit ableist assumptions that animate the regulation of sexual intimacies invites us to think about the (dis)embodiment of disability within the legal, political, and queer discourse around Section 377, and urges us to try and disentangle from it possibilities to think about the ways in which the disabled body can be imagined within the politics and aesthetics of sexual citizenship. The discursive absence of epistemologies of disability in the legal and queer discourse around Section 377 is therefore constitutive of disabled bodies and disabled sexual practices through a disavowal of what these bodies can do. The eventual revocation of the law by the Supreme Court of India on the basis of arguments pertaining to privacy, sexual identity, and sexual autonomy as conscripted within the promise of adult franchise, points towards liberal humanist notions of universal personhood being rooted in ableist imaginations of corporeal sanctity. This article will try to offer a close reading of the Indian debates on queer sexuality around Section 377 to enable possible ways of locating disabled imaginations of the body in and through the ‘systems of exclusions’ that constitute the word of the law. By engaging with the discourse on Section 377 and how sexual non-normativity is embodied in legal discourse, this article hopes to be able to offer some insight into the poetics and politics of disability, embodied intimacy, and sexual citizenship.

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Notes

  1. Indian Penal Code 1860 s 377.

  2. Navtej Singh Johar & Ors v Union of India (2018) 10 SCC 1.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Suresh Kumar Koushal & Anr v Naz Foundation & Ors (2014) 1 SCC 1.

  5. Ibid. [66].

  6. Ibid. [60, 65].

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid. [64(5)], citing In Re the Special Courts Bill, 1978 (1979) 1 SCC 380 [72(5)].

  10. Ibid. [64(6)], citing In Re the Special Courts Bill, 1978 (1979) 1 SCC 380 [72(6)].

  11. Naz Foundation v Government of NCT of Delhi & Ors (2009) 111 DRJ 1 (DB).

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid. [48].

  15. Navtej Singh Johar & Ors v Union of India (n 2).

  16. See Margrit Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity, and Sexuality (Palgrave Macmillan 2009); Tobin Siebers, ‘A Sexual Culture for Disabled People’ in Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (eds), Sex and Disability (Duke University Press 2012) 37.

  17. Jasbir K Puar, ‘Homonationalism as Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities’ (2013) 4(2) Jindal Global Law Review 23, 24.

  18. Jasbir K Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press 2017) 38.

  19. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (1st edn, SAGE 1993) 145.

  20. David M Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford University Press 1995) 66.

  21. Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor, ‘Examined Life’ (Youtube, 6 October 2010). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0HZaPkF6qE&t=739s. Accessed 22 September 2021.

  22. Ibid. [00:55–01:30].

  23. Ibid. [03:19–03:25].

  24. Suresh Kumar Koushal & Anr v Naz Foundation & Ors (n 4) [59.5], citing Lohana Vasantlal Devchand & Ors v The State (1968) 9 GLR 1052.

  25. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York University Press 2006). See also Riva Lehrer, ‘Golem Girl Gets Lucky’ in McRuer and Mollow (eds), Sex and Disability (n 16) 231.

  26. Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980) 5(4) Signs 631.

  27. McRuer, Crip Theory (n 25) 6–10.

  28. Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (n 26).

  29. McRuer, Crip Theory (n 25).

  30. Alok Gupta, ‘Section 377 and the Dignity of Indian Homosexuals’ (2006) 41(46) Economic & Political Weekly 4815.

  31. Nilika Mehrotra, ‘Negotiating Gender and Disability in Rural Haryana’ (2006) 55(3) Sociological Bulletin 406.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Cindy Rhoades and Philip Browning, ‘Normalization of a Deviant Subculture: Implications of the Movement to Re-socialize Mildly Retarded People’ (1982) 7(1) Mid-American Review of Sociology 139, 143.

  34. Zaid Al Baset, ‘Section 377 and the Myth of Heterosexuality’ (2012) 4(1) Jindal Global Law Review 89, 90.

  35. Oishik Sircar, ‘New Queer Politics in the New India: Notes on Failure and Stuckness in a Negative Moment’ (2017) 11(1) Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left 1.

  36. Naisargi N. Dave, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Duke University Press 2012).

  37. Ibid.

  38. Jyoti Puri, Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India (Duke University Press 2016).

  39. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘Feminist Disability Studies’ (2005) 30(2) Signs 1557.

  40. See Fiona Kumari Campbell, Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness (Palgrave Macmillan 2009); Lee Edelman, No Future; Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press 2004).

  41. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Routledge 1993) 37.

  42. Navtej Singh Johar & Ors v Union of India (n 2) [425], citing Arvind Narrain and Alok Gupta, Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law (Yoda Press 2011).

  43. Ibid.

  44. Ibid.

  45. Ibid. [465].

  46. Ibid.

  47. Ibid. [466], citing David A J Richards, ‘Sexual Autonomy and the Constitutional Right to Privacy: A Case Study in Human Rights and the Unwritten Constitution’ (1979) 30(4) Hastings Law Journal 957, 986.

  48. See Scroll Staff, ‘Section 377 Hearing: Centre Says it does not Contest the Right to Choose a Partner’ (Scroll, 11 July 2018). https://scroll.in/latest/886077/section-377-case-centre-says-it-does-not-contest-the-right-to-choose-a-partner.%20Accessed%2010%20September%202021. Accessed 22 September 2021; ‘“We don’t Want 2 Gay Men Holding Hands Walking on Marine Drive to be Arrested,” Says SC on Section 377’ (Times of India, 11 July 2018). https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/article-377-an-example-of-social-disdain-declaring-it-invalid-will-help-lgbt-community-sc/articleshow/64949972.cms. Accessed 22 September 2021.

  49. Julia Bahner, ‘Cripping Sex Education: Lessons Learned from a Programme Aimed at Young People with Mobility Impairments’ (2018) 18(6) Sex Education 640.

  50. Ibid. 648.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Ibid. 650.

  53. See Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells, and Dominic Davies, The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires (Cassell 1996) 36–39.

  54. Ninni Westgren and Richard Levi, ‘Sexuality After Injury: Interviews with Women After Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury’ (1999) 17(4) Sexuality and Disability 309.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Miriam Kaufman, Cory Silverberg, and Fran Odette, The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability: For All of Us Who Live with Disabilities, Chronic Pain & Illness (Cleis Press 2003) 114.

  57. Siebers, ‘A Sexual Culture for Disabled People’ (n 16) 50.

  58. Pratiksha Baxi, Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India (Oxford University Press 2013).

  59. Ibid.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Ibid. 68–69.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Duke University Press 1993) 10–11.

  64. Tom Shakespeare, ‘What Is a Disabled Person?’ in Melinda Jones and Lee Ann Basser Marks (eds), Disability, Divers-ability and Legal Change (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1999) 28.

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  1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Aishwarya Chandran

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Chandran, A. Unnatural intimacies and unnatural bodies: Section 377, homosexuality, and disability. Jindal Global Law Review 12, 359–370 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41020-021-00150-9

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