We are a group of four persons, assigned female at birth, identifying as queer and non-binary, residing in India. We ruminate about the need and politics of queer nurturing. Drawing from our own and our friends’ fragmented life histories, we wonder about the elements of nurturing, such as intergenerational allyship, friendship and kinship, that shape our present. Our rumination and writing are collaborative. We have received formal academic training methods and methodologies in our disciplinary backgrounds and identify as academic activists. Because of this combination, our writing evades formalism, with the intention of being accessible to both non-academics and our students. In a larger global dialogical space, this will be categorised as ‘knowledge production from the Global South’, a somewhat overused phrase perhaps that hides more than it clarifies. Other than our geographical location, the phrase fails to highlight that we are also bearers of caste-class privileges. So, instead of conceptually positioning ourselves as (uninterrogated) figures from the Global South, we reframe ourselves as dialogists to exchange thoughts about queer nurturing. We hope that this will help sustain transnational dialogues when conversations fail and authoritarian regimes flourish. We met via Google Meet video chats, discussed and then went back to writing. Nurturing is central to our lives and movements, which is absent from a popular dictionary definition. We are queer folks embroiled in turbulent political moments that translate to violent casteist and classist affronts on the ground. Therefore, we look to the promise of nurturing as we almost break when we break each other’s fall. This promise is manifested in our connections to each other, i.e. the authors. Nurturing is all we have against violent encounters, institutional backlashes and dying elders. Nurturing, while interactional and requiring individual attention, will be viable if it is informed by radical compassion and bound by the constitutional imagination of the social. It is urgent to recapitulate feminist and queer histories of nurturing and situate our political position today. It is perhaps the experiential and epistemological basis of feminist and queer politics, where nurturance finds political meaning.
Banerjea et al. (Thu,) studied this question.