Abstract
Srila Roy’s Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India is animated by a core question: ‘Who is the subject of feminist politics?’ (p. 15). To address this, Roy trains a critical and insightful lens on the emergence and transformation of queer and feminist mobilizations in post-liberalized India. The political project of feminism, she argues, is already implicated in intersectional relationships of power, for which reason this book’s analytic focus draws on governmentality in a ‘straightforwardly Foucauldian sense’ to look at ‘how the self is both governed and governs itself’ (p. 8). In doing so, Changing the Subject adeptly traverses analytic, geographic and historical scales, whilst being firmly rooted in the social and empirical context of West Bengal. This is an ambitious move. The clarity with which Roy engages the literature on the Indian Women’s Movement and the NGOization of feminism is certainly envious, though hardly surprising given her substantial contributions to this field. It would not be surprising, for instance, if readers familiar with and inspired by Roy’s scholarship (like this reviewer) find this text to be an apropos bookend to both, a scholar’s oeuvre and a field of scholarship at large.
Changing the Subject has six chapters, the first two of which introduce the book at large, and present the empirical and regional context of Roy’s research. Four empirical chapters deal with the themes of queer and feminist governmentalities. The Introduction situates the book’s main contributions within a broad framework of neoliberalism and governmentality, on the one hand (pp. 5–11), and the historical and contemporary formations of the Indian women’s movement, including feminist, queer and non-governmental mobilizations, on the other (pp. 12–16). Roy frames it thusly: ‘This book locates itself in this struggle of being autonomous and being co-option’ (p. 3)—a tension that is further explored in Chapter 1. The chapter also grounds the book in millennial West Bengal, and Kolkata in particular, where Roy also draws on key scholarship produced in, and on, the region (most notably the works of Raka Ray and Ananya Roy). Chapters 2 and 3 deal with queer governmentality and self-fashioning, where Roy draws on a range of empirical materials—interviews, advertisements and social media posts—to trace how lesbian collectives and queer NGOs emerged in a ‘period in which the very possibility of queer Indian life changed dramatically’ (p. 48). Chapters 4 and 5 are based on participant observation work and deal with feminist governmentality and subaltern self-government, exploring the ‘limits of feminist governmentality … for achieving incommensurate agenda and ends’ (p. 128), like microfinance, consciousness-raising and preventing child marriage. In the Conclusion, Roy turns to care and critique as means to look beyond the constraining imaginaries of both neoliberal and feminist governmentality, arguing that ‘Feminist world-making is a project that requires critique and care in equal measure’ (p. 176).
Chapter 1 continues the book’s central analytic focus, while also introducing the two organizations, Sappho for Equality, a queer feminist NGO that first started as a lesbian collective, and Janam, a grassroots feminist developmentalist NGO. Roy’s focus on these organizations speaks to how the NGOization paradigm, broadly considered, is itself illustrative of neoliberal and feminist governmentality, specifically the entanglements of politics, desire, affect and aesthetics, where marginalized and subaltern agents like ‘sex workers, lesbians, transgender persons, rural women, adolescent girls and feminists’ are simultaneously included and excluded’ (p. 40). Roy is thus interested in exploring these complexities instead of reducing their any one factor. Here, her focus on ‘co-optation’ and ‘intersectionality’ is particularly salient ‘in making clear that the subjects and practices of feminism had never existed outside their messy entanglement with power’ (p. 27).
Chapter 2 looks at how organizations like Sappho move backward and forward between visions of lesbian pasts and queer futures where ‘newer and queer political possibilities … were the source of new governmentalities’ (p. 76). These governmentalities, for instance, materialized in the organization’s engagement with issues like supporting lesbians facing violence, which brought them within the disciplinary fold of the Indian Women’s Movement. This chapter also explores the fissures and frictions in queer mobilizing, particularly tensions and contradictions between urban and rural lesbian women, such as the spectral figure of the grameer meye, the subaltern lesbian of rural Bengal’ (p. 49), hierarchies of caste, class and homonormativity (p. 69) and the exclusion of transgender persons who remained invisible despite playing an important role in queer visibility (p. 73). Chapter 3, in turn, looks at how queer aesthetics and domesticity are entangled with normali-zation and gender conformity—what is described as a ‘new queer domesticity’ (pp. 82–83)—where those who questioned the gender binary were excluded (pp. 84–85). Roy’s participants describe these dynamics through fascinating temporal and spatial lenses, such as coming out, not going back, but also staying in, as well as through aesthetic labour and queer consumption practices (p. 93). One of this chapter’s strongest contributions is the idea of ‘limited intersectionality’ which ‘offered paradoxical queer possibilities, in and against norms’ (p. 100).
In Chapter 4, Roy presents a vivid account of NGO work in Kolkata’s ‘rurban’ peripheries (p. 109). Her empirical accounts deal with the tensions between NGO agendas and subaltern women’s needs and desires. Roy shows how beneficiaries of development work ‘contested the more explicitly punitive stances taken by the NGO in their name’, while they also ‘consented to feminist governmentality’ for reasons including access to credit and solidarity (p. 131). Chapter 5 looks at Janam’s precarious NGO workers who transcended public/private boundaries and were incidentally the subjects who were most changed, ‘with their raised consciousness impacting spaces, relationships, aspirations and intimacies that were not ordinarily imagined as sites of intervention and change’ (p. 133). As in Chapter 3, the focus is on how Janam workers engage in a range of self-governing activities—aesthetic labour, respectability, consumption, and adda [hanging out]—through which they become particular feminist subjects. Yet, the political economy of NGO work produces precarity and uncertainty, where women expressing ‘bitterness at not being adequately paid or properly recognized for it’ (p. 154) and the hierarchy of NGO work reproduces master-slave relationships (p. 155). Roy draws on Berlant’s cruel attachment/optimism to describe the tough choices women NGO workers faced, whether to continue in precarious work or risk going back to conjugal domesticity (pp. 156–57), which they both transcended and transformed.
While reading this book, I often found my reactions veering between affirmation and puzzlement. The former reaction, as I have already mentioned, has to do with how adept Roy is at bringing clarity to the complex and layered histories of women’s, feminist, and queer movements. This is incredibly helpful to scholars who are both familiar and new to this field. In particular, Roy draws on a rich vocabulary that punctuates her sociology, including references to hauntings, ghosts and spectres, and also moving between scales and temporalities where her participants’ stories ‘were many things at once: backward and forward looking; global and highly local and co-opted and autonomous, in ways that opened distinct possibilities for (re) making the self’ (p. 102). However, inasmuch as Roy argues that contemporary queer and feminist organizations are haunted by spectres of ghosts of feminisms past, Changing the Subject, as a text, is perhaps also possessed (if not incapacitated) by the phantoms of neoliberalism and governmentality, not quite exorcizing the analytic grip these ideas have on the overall imagination of the book.
Let me briefly elaborate on this. In the Conclusion, for instance, Roy ends the book on a note of ambivalence (p. 159) and even suggests that ‘Care has been an implicit thread running through this book’ (p. 171). However, when articulations of care clearly show up in Chapter 5, these discussions were framed within the rubric of ‘self-care’, rather than the rich genealogy of feminist care theories, such social reproduction and care ethics. One might even think that the book pivots to care too late, having already ceded much space to governmentality. Instead, I found myself wondering what this book might look like if the analytic focus were inverted: What if, rather than relying on governmentality, one were to use grounded idioms of care and critique to interrogate contemporary formations of feminist, queer and non-governmental mobilizing in neoliberal India? Could we move beyond self-care and engage with what Hillary Haldane (2017a, 2017b), drawing on David Graeber, calls ‘structure care’—where frontline NGO workers articulate a desire for institutional care and support from their employers and states? My impression is purely speculative and in no way undermines this book’s contributions. Instead, this is the lasting—if somewhat wanting—impression that Changing the Subject leaves on me, not in the least because my own applied and anthropological research has looked at the potential of both care and critique in NGO programmes (Chakraborty, 2021). (To be fair, Roy is forthcoming and reflexive about her own limits—both, her ‘limited capacity to effect any real change’ and how ‘NGO workers or activists who take on this responsibility are also more vulnerable for it’ [p. xiv]).
Nevertheless, as someone who has worked on both sides of the NGOization paradigm—within programmes and interventions, while also critically studying them—I do think Changing the Subject has much to offer. It may even be necessary to take the feeling of ambivalence or ambiguity that is quite central in the book as a point of departure and, instead, examine how care and critique animate the struggles of not just development workers but the larger precarious and feminised workforce of care in India. Recent political agitations of aanganwadi [a type of rural mother and childcare centre] workers (in states such as Haryana, Jharkhand and Delhi, for instance) is one such struggle that comes to mind, which also illustrates the idea of ‘structure care’ (Haldane, 2017b). On that note, this book’s themes and empirics—governmentality, NGOization, intersectionality, coercion, care, critique, entanglement and so forth—could be fruitfully read alongside other recent ethnographic and feminist works, such as Roychowdhury (2021) on survivors of domestic violence in West Bengal, Kowalski (2023) on counselling centres in Rajasthan, and Piedalue (2017, 2022) on Muslim women in Hyderabad and Seattle. However, these issues aside, I believe Changing the Subject is a clear and purposeful retelling of feminist and queer movements in India and their intersections with neoliberal reforms, grounded in the nuanced stories of diverse feminist and queer subjects. This book would be a compelling read to both young and experienced scholars in sociology, anthropology, gender studies, feminist and queer studies and South Asian studies.