Voguing in Bangalore: Desire, Blackness, and Femininity in Globalized India

One night, at a gay party in Bangalore, Andy calls out, “Look what I learned.” He sidles downward with his back pressed against the bar until he is on his haunches. He bends his elbows at his chest, and fans his hands in front of his face. He walks on his haunches toward the crowd and dramatically spins to a standing position. He catwalks to the left, then to the right, clearing space for himself and his extended, angular arm movements. After a minute of dips, twirls, runway walks, arm work, and duckwalks, he announces to the circle around him: “It’s a gay black dance. I learned it from YouTube.” Andy’s voguing took me by surprise; I had never seen such an expert performance of black queer femininity at these weekly parties. When non-Indian femme movements erupt on the dancefloor, ¹ they look more like Taylor Swift’s dance in “Shake It Off” than like the controlled pops of Nikki Minaj’s hips, the slow winds of Rihanna’s ass, or the squatted extensions of black ball queens. Andy regularly brings all these repertoires to gay Bangalore party nights. On the one hand, his introduction of black queer femininities to the gay Indian party are exceptional, as black performance and black bodies are widely deemed threatening to various kinds of Indian respectabilities, and black femininities do not have as much erotic or cultural currency in gay Indian spaces. On the other hand, his desire for black men, which motivates his cultural appropriations, taps into mainstream and commercial visions of black masculinity. Though his voguing on that particular night was a surprise, the erotic, political, and economic routes by which it arrives are firmly institutionalized.

Andy’s improvised interviews and performances provide a small but unique and complex archive with which to think about how black genders circulate in India. In this essay, I show how his preference for black masculine male partners upholds his own contested femininity, scripts black bodies into the fabric of quotidian India, and renders black femmes invisible. Andy is one of few interlocutors within my broader ethnographic research on gay nightlife in Bangalore who dove deeply into how race bears on gender and pleasure in queer communities. Our conversations make clear that race is a necessary category of cultural analysis (alongside caste, colonialism, region, religion) in India, and Andy’s narrative requires us to think about racial intimacies in the subcontinent beyond a brown-white hetero-colonial binary. In his narration, blackness and black folk occupy intimate space in his life. Unlike widely circulating stereotypes of Africans in India as sex workers and drug dealers, Andy casts black people as lovers, spiritual folk, workers, artists, students, and tourists. ² And while his interpretations of blackness sometimes hinge on racist discourses, he helps me consider circulations of black gender in India, material qualities of African migrants’ lives, changing Indian genders and sexualities, and interracial desire in shifting global economies.

The first time I met Andy at a gay party, I was arrested by his dancing. His shoulder-length hair flared as he twirled and abhinayaed to “Munni Badnaam.” He kept one hand on the shoulder of a friend who became a masculine fulcrum to his own feminine flair. Whipping around an axis, he set into motion even the smallest end of fabric on his person. I immediately invited him to perform at Bangalore’s queer pride, his first public performance “in the community.” ³ Andy and I became friends and enjoyed several animated interviews between 2011 and 2012 at coffee shops in Bangalore’s city center. At this time, Andy, a gay Tamil Christian, was in his mid-twenties, lived with his biological family, and worked on and off for business process outsourcing companies – a booming industry that is growing new Indian middle classes. He meets the objects of his affection easily, as he lives in a neighborhood with a substantial African community. ⁴

Bangalore has long been an education capital within India, and English-language instruction at substantially cheaper rates than in the United States and Europe makes it an attractive destination for college students from the Global South. ⁵ Under India’s rise as a technology research capital, Bangalore earned the moniker “Silicon Valley of India,” making it an amenable learning environment for international students. ⁶ While African migrations to India (primarily forced migration by enslavement) are documented prior to the tenth century, ⁷ contemporary political economic changes, including Indian scholarships for African students, have encouraged educational migration from across Africa to India. ⁸ These shifting global dynamics ask us to rethink the power structures that inform interracial desire. As an intellectual project, this kind of study has been repeatedly oriented in relation to white bodies as metonyms and beneficiaries of Euro-Western coloniality. India’s rise on the global stage redirects migrations, rendering black African migrants precarious subjects in its national borders while actively normalizing upper-caste, fair-skinned, Hindu, heterosexual subjects as most desirable to the state.

Though Andy is neither Hindu nor fair-skinned nor heterosexual, he enjoys the everyday privileges that come with being seen as of the nation. In many urban areas, black folks are repeatedly denied housing; extorted by their colleges; subject to public verbal, physical, and sexual violence; assumed to be oversexed or prostitutes; depicted through racist stereotypes in Indian media; and disallowed from commercial establishments. ⁹ In our interviews, Andy notes that his black boyfriends face difficulties securing housing and emotional care in ways that he has not. However, as I discuss below, the Indian home does not guarantee safety for gender non-conforming folks such as Andy. Andy’s desire for black men leads him to adopt black femininities in order to appear more attractive to them. In addition to Indian femininities like eyeliner, hijra claps, classical dance forms, and Bollywood gestures, black femininity offers Andy an alternative to the hegemony of respectable white gay muscular masculinity that has come to dominate India’s middle class gay scene. ¹⁰

How do we account for structural hierarchies – changing economies, routes of migration, and class positions – when desire and appropriation are not routed through white bodies? How does the appropriation of blackness allow for the performance of alternative affects and emotions in India when whiteness is so globally ascendant under neoliberal capitalism? I do not suggest that black femininity is an antidote to global white masculinity. Indeed, there have been many productive and/or essentialist (re)turns to Indian aesthetics, ideologies, and affects in response to globalization and colonization. Instead, I am interested in the subaltern resources that can be shared between marginal black and brown subjects so that they may become legible to each other and foster intimacies where there have been centuries-long sociopolitical cleavages. ¹¹

Black-brown intimacies must be understood through enduring colonial discourses (namely historic constructions of black hypermasculinity now perpetuated through public media), as well as through new structures and conduits of power in global politics (namely shifting systems of gender and sexuality in gay India, online representations, new routes of migration between India and Africa, and India’s rise as a global leader in education and outsourced labor). In addition to Andy’s theorizations, antiblackness in India must also be situated in relations to India’s own xenophobic, colorist, classist, and casteist regimes that render dark skinned people and immigrants abject and undesirable. In light of these systemic and social inequalities, I also rely on Andy’s theorizations of desire, race, gender, and performance as one (complex) example of how intimacy can help us imagine blackness and black people as part of the quotidian fabric of global India. ¹²

“I’m Gay, too, but My Features, My Style, [Are] Different from Yours”: Situating Indian Middle-Class Queer Femininities

Andy is a thoughtful theorist of gender and sexuality, and deeply aware of the ways that his own gender and desires are informed by social and political hierarchies. His narratives about childhood, entering gay environments, and dating men make his male femininity possible and pleasurable, but also in flux and contested. ¹³ As a preteen, dance training made Andy too effeminate for others, including his father, an “army guy”:

My foundation was on classical dance … Bharatanatyam and Kathakali, your body tends to change, your walk changes, your eye action changes, your ‘and action changes, you’re complete transformed … so in my school time when I start walking down the corridors, my ass start shaking, my ‘and goes, my eyeballs start rolling all over … even my teacher was like … you shouldn’t be acting like a girl, you need to act like a boy … my father took me to a psychiatrist when I was 11 years old to find out what’s wrong with me … I know that my feminine in me, it’s from the time I was born.

Andy points to the medical, familial, military, and educational institutions that disciplined his gender identity and performance. ¹⁴ Not conforming to the expectations of masculinity also brought on ridicule, shame, and depression: “People tell me ‘you’re a gay, you’re an ‘ijra.’ I also tried to commit suicide because of my sexuality, I hated myself for who I am.”

In his mid-teens, Andy met Mo, a Sudanese student in Bangalore, when cruising in a park; they fooled around that day and fast became lovers. Mo eventually pressured Andy to engage in receptive anal sex for the first time, yet Andy did not immediately think of himself as a “bottom.” Andy’s introduction to the “gay world,” i.e., virtual and physical spaces that facilitate romance and sex between men, gave him new epistemic scripts (and hierarchies) of sex, gender, and sexuality: “I didn’t realize that I was [a] bottom at that point […] I was literally new to the gay world at that time. I didn’t know what is versatile, top, bottom, queen, drag queen, transgender, CD, gay, straight, bi, blah.” Andy eventually came to self-identify as a bottom, or receptive partner, but this sexual appetite and identity was produced in discourse through exposure to gay world jargon as well in intimate encounters with Mo.

Andy also notes that there are hierarchies to various designations in the “marketplace of gay desire” that privilege normative masculinities, ¹⁵ but also that performing masculinity is a means of self-preservation in a homophobic and transphobic public sphere:

When I went to Chin Lungs [a bar] for the first time I was straight, I was acting very straight, because I was scared, people see me acting queeny they may come and tell something bad to me, they may harm me … people over there thought I’m straight guy. And yeah, they like pulling me out for a dance and I did a straight dance. After going to Chin Lung for two three visits they caught me at a gay party, I was with all my Beyoncé style, and they’re like, “You bitch!”

While dating Charles, a black South African, Andy again found himself subject to norms of masculinity:

Charles said, “You know what? I’m gay, I love men. If I like a guy who’s effeminate, rather I can go have sex with a girl.” But my prospect [perspective] is: “you’re gay, you like another man okay, I’m gay too, but my features, my style, is different from yours” … I gave up on all my feminine stuff. Matter of fact, all my friends said … “you’re becoming so manly.”

Andy’s rebuttal to Charles, that there can be diversity in the category of “man” or “guy,” is a radical claiming of male femininity. Though he worries about his friends now finding him too masculine, he uses the interview to reclaim and assert his femininity to me now that he is no longer with Charles: “That’s why I put [on] my kaajal [eyeliner] and everything and sit here!” ¹⁶

Andy’s entrance into a discursive gay world that structures particular modes of gender, desire, and selfhood recalls what Joseph Massad (drawing on Michel Foucault) calls “an incitement to discourse.” ¹⁷ In Massad’s critique of “the Gay International,” he raises concerns over the hegemony of global gay human rights agendas – manifesting in India as paternalistic websites, pride marches, and the massive HIV-AIDS NGO industrial complex – that disseminate gender and sexual epistemes, categories, and language that potentially flatten local or individualized gender-sexuality paradigms to privilege modern Western epistemologies that actively differentiate sex, gender, and sexuality. ¹⁸ Indigenous sex-gender-sexuality matrices in India accommodate male-assigned persons with feminine subjectivities in categories such as hijras and kothis. ¹⁹ A common thread in Indian sexuality studies is the assertion that hijra and kothi are particularly classed sex-gender categories, and that “gay” is an English-language category for middle and upper classes to name a desire between men whose gender correlates with their sex. ²⁰ This epistemic differentiation in academic, activist, and social circles obscures male femininity in middle- and upper-class gay spaces, and I believe flattens gay identity. Moreover, the increasing dominance of white, male, muscular, masculine bodies in Indian gay media and community spaces makes femininity a less viable or legible gender for middle-class men to inhabit and cultivate. ²¹ This conundrum leaves middle-class, English-speaking gay folks such as Andy, whose subjectivity and self-narration revolves around being feminine, on the margins of a global identity category that is meant to include him. One way Andy escapes the bind of sameness that a global gay identity requires is to render black men in India a permanently masculine other.

“He Used to Call Me ‘Baby Bitch'”: Desiring Blackness, Securing Femininity

In all his narrations about love and sex, Andy positions himself as a feminine partner. For example, when Charles removes an Africa-shaped pendant he is wearing and garlands Andy, Andy interprets the necklace as a mangalsutra, a common Hindu token of wifely devotion. In explaining his preference for black men, Andy resorts to generalizations about their masculinity and chauvinism: “When you say, ‘Why am I into African?’ they are the people who know how to take care of a girl. Yeah, I’ve seen it. I kind of sometimes wonder maybe because my first boyfriend was an African too? So I can’t imagine myself with Indian. I don’t mind for a friend or single date. If I want to settle in my life I want to settle with an African,” he says. “They are the people who know how to take care of a girl” is a multivalent expression that positions black men as exquisite and generous lovers, but also those who observe hierarchical gender binaries that require men to care for women. In addition, Andy offers his first boyfriend as an intimate origin story that explains his desires.

Andy’s stories imbue his Sudanese and South African boyfriends with deep subjectivity; they are complex lovers who, like him, are caught in global labor, knowledge, and gender dynamics that facilitate and trouble their intimacies. While online journalism about black life in India documents the systemic and social violence against black people, few critics discuss African migrants as vibrant and creative subjects, and often fail to even mention the activist work of the Association for African Students in India, which documents and lobbies against antiblack violence. ²² One important exception worth noting is the photography of Mahesh Shantaram that poses African students and workers in their quotidian milieus in India with the explicit purpose of capturing their resilience in a hostile country. ²³ Andy, too, offers an exceptional documentation, scripting his friends into the quotidian landscape of a xenophobic nation while also building more intimate portraits of them. Yes, he uses stereotypes of black masculinity to prop up his contested femininity, but he is original in his representation of black friends and lovers as playful, needy, possessive, lonely, passionate, jealous, attentive, complicated subjects. Andy’s interviews are a small contribution to the paltry archives of black life in Bangalore, illuminating some of the ways queer black genders circulate in India.

Andy relies on bodily traits to authenticate blackness. ²⁴ Andy didn’t know that Charles, with whom he shared a serious relationship, was black upon first meeting him. Only when Charles’s “curly hair and Nelson Mandela head” were not hidden by a hat was Andy was truly enamored. Andy also tells me: “I love the anaconda, that’s why I love Africans!” Andy’s obsession with his partner’s penis size is a bold assertion of his bottomhood, a sexual subjecthood that is often dismissed in relation to tophood. ²⁵ But his expectation – not unique to him – that black men have big dicks is a vestige of colonial fearmongering that positioned black people as biologically hypermasculine sexual threats. ²⁶ Andy revels in the danger he associates with blackness. While he lay naked with Charles in a friend’s bed, the friend lifted the sheet to catch a glimpse of Charles’s (presumably big) penis. Charles’s angry and possessive reaction frightened the horny friend, which made Andy feel secure: “He used to be so protective.” Such performances of aggression, which recall colonial images of black threat, bring Andy genuine pleasure.

Queer femmes such as Andy often value feeling protected, as a result of moving through the world in a gender-nonconforming body that is repeatedly harassed and disciplined. ²⁷ This is not to say that femmes cannot protect themselves or that masculine partners derive their value only as protectors; as I show below, Andy uses snaps and claps to feel safer in public, as well as labors to support his lovers. It is, however, a challenge to reconcile, on the one hand, the public risks of being femme and desiring a masculine partner as a protector with, on the other hand, acknowledgement of the global violences that target racialized masculine bodies (e.g., black, Muslim, Sikh) because they are associated with aggression and danger. ²⁸ For Andy, pleasure and safety as a femme relies on entrenched tropes of black masculinity. To acknowledge that gender and racial hierarchy inform desire is not to deromanticize love as a paradigm of mutuality and equity; investigating these hierarchies is necessary in sustainable intimate lives. ²⁹ Knowing and inhabiting racial hierarchy might be a way to make pleasure in our intimate lives, as several black queer theorists, such as Robert Reid-Pharr, Darieck Scott, and Gary Fisher, argue. ³⁰ It’s worth stating that even Indianness in India has erotic value, though it goes unmarked; intra-racial desire is further marked by matrices of caste, class, religion, and skin color, as well as by appropriate performances of Indianness and state-sanctioned modes of inhabiting gender. ³¹

Where white bodies are centered in the marketing of Bangalore’s gay parties and become the center of attention when they enter a gay space, black people rarely show up in Bangalore’s gay subcultures. Black bodies are iteratively rendered undesirable in Indian public discourse, often through egregious verbal, physical, and sexual violence. In 2011, during the period I conducted fieldwork on nightlife, Bangalore pubs barred entry to Africans, claiming them to be violent nuisances. ³² More recently, police targeted African communities in efforts to deport immigrants who overstayed visas. ³³ In September 2014, three students from Gabon and Burkina Faso were mobbed and beaten in a Delhi metro station; ³⁴ in February of 2016, a Tanzanian woman was stripped and paraded naked in Bangalore in retribution for a car collision involving a Sudanese person to whom she had no relation; and in March 2017 in Noida, Nigerian men were falsely accused of kidnapping and cannibalism. ³⁵ In films, black folks are rarely offered speaking roles despite the boom in films set in the diaspora; when they do appear, they are bouncers, thugs, mammies, and regrettable hookups. ³⁶ In the Tamil blockbuster Robot, the music video “Kilimanjaro“ conflates Indian indigenous people, indigenous people in the Americas, and Africans as primitive and “closer to nature.” ³⁷ Clicking lyrics, “tribal” costumes, and “war paint” makeup in blockbusters such as Robot and Bahubali invoke “Africa” alongside Adivasis (indigenous Indian populations), reminding us that blackness becomes spectacular in India not only as a vestige of white colonial racisms, but also because of continuing prejudices against institutionally marginalized, dark-skinned, nonurban Indians. Such representational discourses manifest in the everyday; for example, a black professor in New Delhi describes being more of a spectacle at the Lucknow Zoo than the giraffes. ³⁸

Andy’s desire for “the acaconda” buys into mainstream and long-standing stereotypes of black masculinity as dangerous, animalistic, and irrational. His pursuit of black masculine men does not automatically secure his own femininity; as mentioned earlier, Charles’s desire for a masculine partner pressured Andy to alter his gender performance, to be “a guy.” Such contradictions in Andy’s theorizations disassemble the generalizations he makes about black men even as he makes them. Also, while he revels in the safety of these men’s arms, he acknowledges the precarity in which they live: both Mo and Charles were international students, Charles could not return home for his mother’s funeral because of visa and money issues, and Mo was thrown out of his apartment for specious reasons. Furthermore, Andy’s reliance on his partners for care is not one-directional; he is invested in their well-being, and addresses their unique marginalities not only through affective support, but also by using his more privileged position to secure a new apartment for Mo. ³⁹

In front of his African friends, Charles would invite Andy to sit on his lap or fondly call him “baby bitch”; Andy’s inclusion of these scenes of sociality among Charles and his friends allows us a glimpse into their spaces of pleasure and community, and dispels, at least for the group in question, assumptions about African homophobia. Some black lovers asked Andy to set up their straight friends who couldn’t find girlfriends with his gay friends. Others have asked if he knows any Indian women they could date. When Andy sets his fuck buddies up with women, they introduce him to other black men he can fuck. His affairs have expiration dates: Mo left and returned to the Sudan to get married, and Charles was forced to leave when his student visa ran out. Additionally, Andy is a placeholder for some black men who prefer dating and having sex with Indian women, but sleep with him in the meantime.

The intimacy between Andy and his lovers emerge from the interstices of new and old routes of capital and culture – from transatlantic slavery that renders black bodies hypersexual, to India’s lucrative export of higher education that attracts African students to Bangalore. To imagine intimacies between black and brown, we must contemplate not only the discourses that enable their legibility to each other as cultural and erotic subjects, but also the histories and political economies that enable proximity between them. Moreover, even though colonial racial and sexual fictions enable the intimacy between Andy and his lovers, this does not discount the intimate labor they performed to care for each other and to survive and find pleasure in India.

“It’s a Black Gay Dance! I Learned It from YouTube”: Performing Black Femininity, Disappearing Black Femmes

When Andy learned that I worked in performance, he asked me to workshop a script he was developing about four gay friends in the big city encountering homophobia, breakups, and trysts. “Your script reminds me of this show, Noah’s Arc.” Andy shrieks, “Girl! That’s exactly what this is based on! The Africans in that show are so hot.” Through unofficial streaming services, Andy indulges in Logo TV’s novel, diverse, and sexy representations of black gay men as they deal with various kinds of stigma – representations not found in the episodes of Will and Grace, The New Normal, or Modern Family screened on Indian cable television. Via online sources such as torrent websites and YouTube, Andy is exposed to black gay subcultures, primarily African American ones. He puts to use this cultural capital to make himself legible and desirable to black men.

Strangely, Andy chronically conflates Africans (primarily undergraduate and graduate students living in India) with African Americans (usually tourists or temporary workers), calling them all “Africans.” Also, while African education migrants are the dominant black populations in the city, Andy rehearses African American performance styles such as vogue and snaps to make himself sexier to the men in which he is interested. This exposes the hegemonic ways that U.S. cultural forms come to stand in as global currency, obscuring the specificities of Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Latinx expressive cultures. Yet Andy’s narrations also reveal unlikely interfaces of cultural transfer that are not Hollywood, Bollywood, or Tollywood: he learned to vogue via butch queens on YouTube, and rehearsed dances with his childhood church congregation run by an African pastor.

While some U.S. black masculinities, disseminated by commercial hip-hop, have cultural currency and performative value in India, seen for example in Bollywood collaborations with Snoop Dogg, black femininities do not. ⁴⁰ The circulation of queer(er) visions of blackness through high-profile shows like Empire, Rupaul’s Drag Race, and Orange Is the New Black has made “shade,” “girlfriend,” “fierce,” and “werk!” more common among my Bangalorean friends. But this does not hold true for more gestural and embodied languages. Vishal, a brilliant dancer I performed with in Bangalore, struggled to choreograph Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” because black feminine gestures, while visible through mediated venues, are not rehearsed into a global Indian habitus. Vishal tells me:

The mannerisms, the body language, that was something that really challenged me … it belongs to being really cool and the sudden U.S. thingy, the booty dancing culture … seeing it and experiencing it first hand is really different. … I’ve seen some television series, I’m not being racist, the black woman thingy that they do, trying to be able to tap into that: talk to the finger, talk to the nose, hands on the waist things, very intricate things.

Vishal, a fast learner, had difficulty entering this foreign embodiment for the first time. Andy, on the other hand, through rehearsal at home and on the dance floor, has adopted gestures and comportments that signify black femininity. Andy’s online immersion and quotidian indulgence in black femininities are set into motion by his particularly situated and earnest desire for black men, and not simply a cosmopolitan pursuit of fierceness, an appropriative practice for which white gay men are often critiqued. ⁴¹ For the most part, Andy performs these gestures and dances to impress the objects of his affection, though they have also become part of his everyday habitus.

The limited circulation of these repertoires in India suggests that they do not always land in the way Andy would like. When Andy first met Charles on Church Street, he approached him, and “said, ‘Hi! I’m Andy.’ And I tried to impress him doing the Z style, you know the ‘Girl!’ doing the Z thing and all.” ⁴² Here, Andy uses Z-snaps out of context: not to read, but to make legible his femininity to a black man. On another occasion, Andy uses snaps to read an Indian woman who is staring at him and making homophobic comments on the metro. These snaps fail to perform out of context, and so he borrows the open-palm clap that hijras use to call out phobic interactions. ⁴³ This localized gesture finally puts the woman in her place and she turns away from him. Andy’s use of snaps and the thikri clap, even when they fail, demonstrate his awareness of performative femininity. Feminine gestures can be deployed to make oneself a more attractive partner within gendered libidinal economies, and also are effective critical and protective tools. ⁴⁴ It is necessary to recover and name the critical potential of feminine performances because weakness and passivity are so ubiquitously ascribed to femmes.

Andy points to an unexpected site of intimate transfer between black and brown that is under-researched: Christian missions. Prior to meeting Mo and Charles, Andy attributes his affinity for and proximity to blackness to his early exposure to African dance: “Many African pastors used to come there [his childhood church], you know wherever I go I used to get lucky, I used to see my people … they used to teach us some African dance as well. Not the Z thing and that shit, just a normal dance.” In adulthood, he is given an opportunity to return to these dance memories:

[The] first time I went to African night [at a bar], I was not able to control myself, because the songs were just shaking your booties. I just got off shaking my booties, all the girls gave an awesome reaction. One Ugandan girl just came, and she was dancing like a man, and I was shaking my ass on her pussy … when I went this Sunday, all the African guys turned towards me and they’re like looking and smiling.

Andy positions African bar nights as spaces where he can perform black femininities – his “booty dance” – safely, sexually, and in context. Where the Brahmanical classical dances he trained in have carefully excised highly sexualized hip displays, African parties allow him to return to other intimate and less sanitized choreographies from his childhood. Also, these spaces of pleasure and community-making go unmentioned in journalistic documentation of African lives in India, and Andy marks them as erotic spaces of gender play.

Unlike other queer feminine dancers in my fieldsites who draw inspiration from French dancer Yanis Marshall or Ukrainian boy-band Kazaky, Andy announces the black gay origins of the dance he appropriates. While voguing enjoys a vibrant international life, particularly in Russia and Japan, it has little cache in India. Andy’s turn to voguing as a way to stage a queer femininity might conjure possibilities of Afro-Asian exchange. Voguing, which emerged from working-class black and Latinx urban communities in New York, was disseminated widely by Madonna’s “Vogue” and the infamous 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. In the film, orientalia like Japanese figurines, martial arts, Korean buchaechum dance fans, pharonic busts, and Ganesh statues are used to achieve “O.P.U.L.E.N.C.E.” through the director’s camerawork and the ways that her interlocutors stage and style their bodies and homes. Andy’s performances of a black gay dance, and specifically his elision of Madonna’s vogue, exhibit an intimate multidirectional Afro-Asian borrowing of spectacular exhibitions of femininity that do not rely strictly on notions of white glamour. Andy’s rehearsal of voguing, a dance with a resistant and complicated internal logic, recalibrates his dance topography to conform to the competitive ciphers of ball culture instead of clumpy nightclub arrangements. ⁴⁵ It gives him the tools to literally make space for and spectacularize his feminine body in a club that privileges grounded electronic dance beats and close-knit dancing. In my own experience at a voguing workshop in Chicago, the instructor complimented my hand and armwork by attributing it to my “classical Indian dance training.” Though I had no such training, these essentialist lenses through which we make each other legible cultivate Afro-Asian intimacy where it has not been allowed to exist. Unlike Livingston’s entry and exit from black communities, or Madonna’s cultural theft, Andy’s appropriations still imagine a black queer spectator. ⁴⁶

However, his performance of black femininities along with his rhetoric around black masculinity sometimes obscures black femmes. Andy is particularly disdainful of “lesbians,” a term he uses to mean femmes who are attracted to femmes or bottoms who desire bottoms; he often dismisses my femme flirtations by saying, “Girl, I’m not a lesbian!” ⁴⁷ In persistently positioning black men as the masculine sexual counterpart to his femininity, and in ridiculing femme-femme desire, he eschews black men’s possible femininity and bottomhood, even while borrowing from (virtual) black femmes. When Andy showed me a video on his cell phone of him fiercely dancing at a house party to Beyoncé, I asked how long he had watched and rehearsed her moves. He responded, “I’ve never watched the songs. When I do watch them, I realize I’ve already done the dance like the video.” Such statements mitigate the creative labor of black femmes who inspire and shape Andy’s style. Where hip-hop masculinities can, in India, still invoke the black communities and artists that originated them, Andy’s appropriations of black femininity are not bound to black bodies as tightly; as such, black femmes are easily rendered invisible. ⁴⁸

When black bodies are overdetermined as hypermasculine, how do we conceive of black femmes in India? Various systems collude to make them invisible, including failure to credit their labor; predominance of white music, imagery, and aesthetics in queer Indian spaces; ascendancy of masculinity as a respectable performance of gayness among black, white, and Indian folks; lack of diverse representations of blackness in commercial media; systemic violence and unchecked precarity of African folks in India under new migration patterns; and the persistence of colonial and local antiblack racisms. But the luscious writings of blogger and poet Joshua Muyiwa, the banging improvised choreographies of Timothy Wilson, Diepiriye’s confident gaze into Sunil Gupta’s camera, the modelesque poses of stylist Jason Campbell in front of the Taj Mahal, and Helen’s immaculate styling in Mahesh Shantaram’s photograph suggest that black queer femmes do find pleasure and make space for their bodies in a phobic climate. ⁴⁹ Additionally, as Andy’s voguing suggests, looking for the borrowings between brown and black femmes, from gestures to accessories, reveals intimate crossings – even if their bodies do not meet – that enable sisterhood between femmes. And finally, Andy’s vision of black men as intimate partners, his active pursuit of them, and his time in their company offers an alternative way to see Africans in India, positioning them as more whole subjects who make community, share resources (including lovers), dance, fuck, and find pleasure in a precarious racial climate.

1. I have written elsewh”rformative possibilities of Indian femininities in these club spaces: Kareem Khubchandani, “Snakes on the Dance Floor: Bollywood, Gesture, and Gender,” The Velvet Light Trap 77 (2016).[↑]
2. I use “black” here to refer to people of African descent, although it is also used by some people to refer to dark-skinned Indians. Based on E. Patrick Johnson’s theorizations in Appropriating Blackness, I understand “blackness” as the set of symbols, aesthetics, repertoires, gestures, visual tropes, and styles that are associated with black bodies, although not necessarily produced or embodied by all black people. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).[↑]
3. On patronage and informal contracts between ethnographer and interlocutors, see Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 7.[↑]
4. Securing housing in Bangalore is generally a daunting task for unmarried middle-class individuals; antiblack racism makes this an even greater challenge, and students in Bangalore rely on word of mouth to find apartments. As such, they often live in proximity to each other.[↑]
5. James Heitzman, Network City: Planning the Information Society in Bangalore (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 45; “African Students Favor India over U.S. and Europe,” DNA India, May 2, 2010, http://www.dnaindia.com/academy/report-african-students-favour-india-over-europe-and-us-1378211.[↑]
6. See Heitzman, Network City.[↑]
7. Manish Karmwar, “African Diaspora in India,” Diaspora Studies 3, 1 (2010).[↑]
8. After Asia, Africa is the second-highest importer of education from India. Shailendra Kumar, “India’s Trade in Higher Education,” Higher Education 70 (2015): 457; “Indian Government Scholarship Scheme for Africans,” Advance-Africa.com, http://www.advance-africa.com/Indian-Government-Scholarship-Scheme-for-Africans.html; Sanusha Naidu, “India’s Growing African Strategy,” Review of African Political Economy 35 (2008).[↑]
9. Darshana Mitra, “After Bengaluru, It’s Time to Re-examine Racism: It’s Not Just Slurs and Attacks,” Firstpost, February 5, 2016, http://www.firstpost.com/india/after-bengaluru-its-time-to-re-examine-racism-hint-its-not-just-slurs-and-attacks-2613428.html; Joshua Muyiwa, “People Like Him Do Drugs, Have a High Sex-Drive…,” Scroll.in, February 5, 2016, http://scroll.in/article/803079/people-like-him-do-drugs-have-a-high-sex-drive-a-nigerian-indian-takes-an-auto-ride-in-bangalore; “India Mob Strips Tanzanian Student in Bangalore,” BBC, February 3, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35483893. [↑]
10. I detail how whiteness, muscularity, and masculinity are privileged at gay Bangalore parties in Kareem Khubchandani, “Cruising the Ephemeral Archives of Bangalore’s Gay Nightlife,” in Queering Digital India: Activisms, Intimacies, Subjectivities, ed. Rohit Dasgupta and Debanuj DasGupta (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).[↑]
11. I discuss the multidirectional appropriations of black and brown masculinities in Kareem Khubchandani, “Terrifying Performances: Black-Brown-Queer Borrowings in Loins of Punjab Presents,” Journal of Asian American Studies 19, 3 (2016). These cleavages affect the proximity between black and brown in the city; Indian classmates won’t sit close to African students, and some African students never enter an Indian home. Sibi Arasu, “The Colour of My Skin,” Hindu-Business Line, February 1, 2014, http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/cover/the-colour-of-my-skin/article5635153.ece; Aletta Andre, “Being African in India: ‘We Are Seen as Demons,'” Al Jazeera, June 25, 2016, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/06/african-india-demons-160620101135164.html.[↑]
12. Gunasena and Tinsley suggest that in U.S. black appropriations of Indianness, such as Beyoncé’s performance in “Hymn for the Weekend,” we have a chance to interrogate biases against black feminine bodies in India and to remember black femmes into the visual and affective economies of India. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsely and Natassja Omidina Gunasena, “Beyoncé as a Bollywood Star Is Not Cultural Appropriation,” Time.com, February 2, 2016, http://time.com/4203112/beyonce-cultural-appropriation.[↑]
13. Carlos DeCena demonstrates that interviews are important theoretical documents to understand how bodily practices and knowledge are made and produced. Carlos Decena, “Eso se nota: Scenes from Queer Childhoods,” in Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).[↑]
14. On the ways medical institutions regulate gender particularly through narrative see Dean Spade, “Mutilating Gender,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker (New York: Routledge, 2006). For an India-specific study on how gender and sexuality are managed through medical institutions, see Vinay Chandran and Arvind Narrain, Nothing to Fix: Medicalisation of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2015).[↑]
15. Dwight McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York: New York University, 2005), 88; Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 46.[↑]
16. We can understand interviews as “definitional ceremonies” where interlocutors make their subjectivities through performance and enunciations just as they do in their everyday lives. Bearing witness to these pronouncements and performances becomes an ethical imperative for the researcher. Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days: Culture and Community among Elderly Jews in an American Ghetto (New York: Meridiank 1994); Gloria González-Lopez, “Ethnographic Lessons: Researching Incest in Mexican Families,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 39 (2010).[↑]
17. Joseph Massad, “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14 (2002).[↑]
18. On PlanetRomeo.com’s paternalism, see Vikram Johri, “From Earth to Planet Romeo,” Business Standard, January 1, 2013. On fluctuating sex/gender categories in India, see Lawrence Cohen, “The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism & the Morality of Classification,” in Sex in Development, ed. Vincanne Adams and Stacey Leigh Pigg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Aniruddha Dutta, “An Epistemology of Collusions: Hijras, Kothis, and the Historical (Dis)Continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India,” Gender and History 24 (2012).[↑]
19. These identities have genealogies in precolonial South Asian history, but are also in flux and distinctly modern; they shift registers as they interface critically with contemporary politics of caste, class, human rights discourse, and technology. Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).[↑]
20. Alok Gupta, “Englishpur Ki Kothi,” in Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, ed. Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005). [↑]
21. On the masculinization of gay identity, particularly in a post-HIV context, see Martin Levine and Michael Kimmel, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Stephen Amico, “‘I Want Muscles’: House Music, Homosexuality, and Masculine Signification,” Popular Music 20 (2001).[↑]
22. Tinsely argues that to see black people, and black trans women in particular, only as victims of violence further secures their marginality, and that images of black trans women finding pleasure matter. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsely, “Let’s Celebrate Black Trans Women’s Lives, Not Deaths,” Advocate, October 27, 2015, http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/10/27/lets-celebrate-black-trans-womens-lives-not-deaths. Interestingly, news coverage of Sidi communities, African migrants that have lived in India for hundreds of years, tend to capture their cultural practices, where documentation of more recent African migrants only documents their victimhood. “Being Black in India,” BBC, April 14, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36040567; “India’s Africans Keeping Ancient Customs Alive,” Japan Times, May 31, 2013, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/05/31/asia-pacific/offbeat-asia-pacific/indias-africans-keeping-ancient-customs-alive/. [↑]
23. Divya Guha, “In These Portraits, an Unflattering Picture of India,” Wire, June 5, 2017, https://thewire.in/143807/portraits-africans-unflattering-picture-india-mahesh-shantaram/.[↑]
24. Darieck Scott reminds us, following Frantz Fanon, that racist discourse conspires so that “the black man is his body, is the body, is the excess of meaning associated with the body, above all the sexuality of the body.” Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 142.[↑]
25. Tan Hoang Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).[↑]
26. Scott Poulson-Bryant, Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (New York: Doubleday, 2005); Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man: Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).[↑]
27. In making this claim, I draw from Darnell Moore’s commentary on desiring black masculinity as a black man in the United States. Darnell Moore, “It’s All Complicated, or Maybe Not: Loving as a Black Gay Man,” Gawker, June 26, 2014, http://gawker.com/its-all-complicated-or-maybe-not-loving-as-a-black-ga-1596023791.[↑]
28. Kokumo, “Black* Transwoman to Black Cis/Transman: An Open Letter/Poem for Trayvon and the Rest of Us,” Black Girl Dangerous, July 2013, http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/07/2013714black-transwoman-to-black-cistransman-an-open-letterpoem-for-trayvon-and-the-rest-of-us.[↑]
29. McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch, 101.[↑]
30. Robert Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Gary Fisher and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher, Series Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Scott, Extravagant Abjection. [↑]
31. Manolo Guzman reminds us that “intraracial erotic relations are, no matter how unremarkable, also racially marked.” Manolo Guzmán, Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities (New York: Routledge, 2006), 26. Recent conversations about caste hierarchy and gay desire have been raised in discussions about a gay matrimonial that specified “caste no bar (though Iyer preferred).” Rituparna Chatterjee, “Caste Preference Nearly Ruins India’s First Gay ‘Groom Wanted’ Ad,” HuffPost India, May 19, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/05/19/gay-groom-wanted_n_7311940.html.[↑]
32. Govind Ravindran, “Bangalore: Pubs Bar Entry of Africans,” India Today, May 31, 2011, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/video/bangalore-pubs-bar-entry-of-africans/1/139924.html.[↑]
33. Hemanth Kashyap, “Cops Begin Op to Track down Illegal Africans,” Bangalore Mirror, March 15, 2015, http://www.bangaloremirror.com/bangalore/crime/Cops-begin-op-to-track-down-illegal-Africans/articleshow/46568545.cms.[↑]
34. There are several online accounts of this incident; cited here is an article that centers the voices of the survivors of this incident. Tarique Anwar, “Delhi’s Everyday Racism: African Students Recount Lynch Mob Attack in Metro,” Firstpost India, October 2, 2014, http://www.firstpost.com/living/delhis-everyday-racism-african-students-recount-lynch-mob-attack-metro-1739881.html.[↑]
35. Shashank Bengali, “Cannibalism, Prostitution, and Other Racist Myths that Confront African Students Studying in India,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/world/africa/la-fg-india-africans-20170423-story.html.[↑]
36. In My Name Is Khan (2010), Karan Johar’s depiction of a black woman relies on highly unnuanced citations of the mammy figure. Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion (2008) follows a model’s rise and fall in the Mumbai fashion industry; her lowest low is a drunken one-night stand with a black man.[↑]
37. On civilization and the black body, see Bederman, Manliness & Civilization; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).[↑]
38. Diepiriye Kuku, “India Is Racist, and Happy About It,” Outlook India, June 29, 2009, http://www.outlookindia.com/article/india-is-racist-and-happy-about-it/250317.[↑]
39. Jane Ward thinks through the gendered and hierarchical nature of material, social, and affective labor in queer and trans relationships/desire, and very briefly acknowledges the ways that race further complicates who takes on what kinds of labor. Jane Ward, “Gender Labor: Transmen, Femmes, and the Collective Work of Transgression,” Sexualities 13, 2 (2010).[↑]
40. I am not suggesting hip-hop is by default masculine, but rather that hip-hop masculinities have wider circulation and legibility in India.[↑]
41. Sierra Mannie, “Dear White Gay Men,” DM Online, July 8, 2014, http://thedmonline.com/dear-white-gays/.[↑]
42. E. Patrick Johnson offers an itinerary of black femme practices of snapping as a “reading” practice used to keep others in check. E. Patrick Johnson, “Snap! Culture: A Different Kind of ‘Reading,'” Text & Performance Quarterly 15 (1995).[↑]
43. Aniruddha Dutta, “Claiming Citizenship, Contesting Civility: The Institutional LGBT Movement and the Regulation of Gender/Sexual Dissidence in West Bengal, India,” Jindal Global Law Review 4 (2012): 127.[↑]
44. In her Venezuela-based ethnography, Marcia Ochoa studies the agential deployment of femininity by cis and trans women alike without regarding either as exceptional. Marcia Ochoa, Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 5.[↑]
45. On the opaque logics of voguing, see Tavia Nyong’o, “After the Ball,” Bully Bloggers, July 8, 2015, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2015/07/08/after-the-ball/. On the unique topographies of black balls, see Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2013), 148.[↑]
46. bell hooks makes an important critique of cultural appropriation in Paris Is Burning, although hooks’s argument does not consider queer femininities and instead focuses on male appropriations of femininity from women. bell hooks, “Is Paris Burning?” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End Press: Boston, 1992).[↑]
47. Gayatri Gopinath and Juana María Rodriguez remind us that desire between femmes is repeatedly rendered impossible. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 154; Juana Maria Rodriguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 117.[↑]
48. Indeed, as Kara Keeling shows in her filmic study, black queer femininity remains spectral, while legitimating and making palatable queer black masculinities. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).[↑]
49. Joshua Muyiwa, “Joshua Muyiwa: Poetry Reading,” Cellar Door, March 21, 2010, https://indian2006.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/joshua-muyiwa-poetry-reading/; Lfrd India, “Urbanation Dance Project 2 Showcase,” YouTube, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14sMHDEFv00; Sunil Gupta, “Diepiriye in Mr. Malhotra’s Party,” http://www.sunilgupta.net/mr-malhotras-party.html; Jason Campbell, “Taj Mahal at Sunrise,” Instagram post, April 19, 2016, https://www.instagram.com/p/BEYaop8tmp-/; Guha, “In These Portraits of Africans, an Unflattering Picture of India.”[↑]