Cartographies of Friendship, Desire, and Home; Notes on

surviving neoliberal security regimes.

“But perhaps there is some other way to live in such a way that one is neither

fearing death, becoming socially dead from fear of being killed, or becoming violent and

killing others, or subjecting them to live a life of social death predicated upon the fear of literal

death… Surely, some norms will be useful for the building of such a world, but they will be

norms that no one will own, norms that will have to work not through normalization or racial

and ethnic assimilation, but through becoming collective sites of continuous political labor.”

-Judith Butler. The Question of Social Transformation.

“The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against

the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds

merging to form a third country-a border culture.”

-Gloria Anzaladua. Borderlands; La Frontera, The New Mestiza.

In this autobiographical essay I sketch the ways in which

bodies, desires and life of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and

Transgender (LGBT) and HIV positive immigrants are being torn

apart, and reconfigured within global neoliberal security

regimes. I pay keen attention to the practices of community

building within Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender 1

communities in global cities such as Kolkata (India), and New

York (US) along with US rust-belt cities such as Akron, OH. The

article is a cartographic attempt of locating sites within which

the boundaries between ability/disability, perverse/respectable,

legal/illegal, first world/ third world, diseased/ healthy,

living/dead is being reconfigured. The essay journeys through

sites from my life such as hospital rooms, HIV clinics, cramped

apartments, S&M chambers, and dark un-found cruising parks in

hopes of understanding collective claims to life being made by

those marked as in- between figures of life and death within

transnational assemblages of labor, capital, and national

security practices. The article is an attempt at reconstructing

memory by journeying through sensations, which rise through my

body. Images and sensations flashing through my body send

electric like shock waves through my fingers, propelling me to

type words on screen (and paper). First, I turn to feminists of

color in order to situate memory reconstruction as a site for

resisting domination. I shall then narrate fragments from my

past1 pairing them with an elaboration of neoliberalism as form 1 Portions of my recollection was published as a narrative style essay titled “Trans/Nationally Femme: Notes on Neoliberal Economic Regimes, Security

2

of social rationality intimately informing bodily subjectivation.

Following Michele Foucault,2 I argue US neoliberalism operates at

the intersection of body, population, and enterprise in order to

create the figure of the disabled/diseased alien. Immigration

laws operate as the site for framing bodies as diseased,

pathological aliens costing the US government in health care

expenses. Cost-benefit analysis along with health status throws

the bodies of disabled aliens outside the nation-state of the US.

In the final section of the essay I turn to memories of

organizing in post 9/11 New York City as a way of situating

productive uses of power within LGBT and (dis) abled communities.

Abram Anders suggests, disability activism need not attempt

recuperating some authentic subject, rather needs to pay

attention to activist narratives as sites for refashioning power

within and among (dis) abled bodies (Anders, 2013). I bring

States, and My Life as a Brown Immigrant Fag” in Why Are Faggots Afraid of Faggots? Edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Edinburgh, Scotland & Oakland, USA: AK Press. Further, 2 In Society Must Be Defended, Michelle Foucault argues Sexuality is “at the intersection of body and population” (Foucault, 2003: 251-252). Further, in Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault argues the hallmark of American liberalism (in the colonial era) was around the question of freedom of individual from the state.In his later lectures Foucault enumerates American neoliberalism as a form of social rationality, which hinges around competition between individuals (enterprise society), social insecurity, and productivity.

3

together memory, flesh, and theory in order to re-sketch LGBT and

(dis) ability activisms as they interface with US neoliberalism.

Memory as Method

Feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander has written that the

act of recuperating repressed, submerged histories is deeply

significant, because they provide an "antidote to alienation,

separation, and the amnesia that domination produces." They offer

a way of excavating "the costs of collective forgetting so deep

that we have even forgotten that we have forgotten” (Alexander,

2005:14). In her attempts to examine the trans/national

political economy of queer postcolonial sexualities Suparna

Bhaskaran deploys a playful interplay of “memories,

conversations, archives, multiple media, flesh and blood and

imaginary persons” (Bhaskaran, 2004:35). Narrative style

theorizing is perhaps best expressed within the writings of Audre

4

Lorde. Lorde situates her bodily sensations of surviving breast

cancer as a way of knitting a meta-narrative of surviving cancer,

racism, and womanhood in the US (Lorde, 80). Writing about

walking through multiple power positions and with Stage III

Ovarian Cancer, Sheena Malhotra states, “by writing through my

body, I share my personal dance with cancer in order to excavate

important political dialogues in feminist theorizing” (Malhotra,

2009: 115). Malhotra recollects her bodily experiences with post-

surgery and chemotherapy as a way of theorizing the connections

between her body and feminist theory. The disembodied theory for

Malhotra is replete with bodily sensations, and speaks to her

through her “borderlands of health” (Malhotra, 2009; 120). This

essay engages with a range of bodily sensations including pain,

pleasure, the debilitating impact of reduced T-Cell counts such

as pneumonia and peripheral neuropathies. My recollections of

pleasurable sensations generated during my experimentations with

S&M seeks to activate memory, friendship, and fantasy as a way of

binding “intimate sexual gestures to larger sociopolitical

movements through the sexual explorations of power, including

forms of submission” (Rodriguez, 2014: 19). Memory within women

5

of color thinkers emerges as a way of recreating the skin upon

which multiple wrinkles are layered. Skin, flesh, and memory is

recreated through autobiographical story telling in order to

(re)member the various way power not only impinges upon the body,

rather refashions certain bodies as productive, and certain as

(dis)abled, dangerous and disposable.

Following Alexander, Bhaskaran, Lorde, Malhotra, and

Rodriguez I turn to lived memories, bodily sensations, previously

written essays and blogs of mine, Queer and (dis) ability theory

for a playful corroboration of my academic ruminations. The

engagement with theorists remains playful since it is a patchwork

of quotes along with lyrical fragments from my life. The

patchwork hopes to create a disjointed discursive life world

within which the readers are invited to find their own

interpretations of both theory and flesh. This style of work

perhaps will never be considered (and is not intended to be) as

objective, but is rather an attempt to retrace parts of mine and

some of my friend’s bodies, which remain deeply enmeshed within

global assemblages of sex, labor, neoliberal capital, and

national security regimes.6

Neoliberalism’s Significant Others

At the onset, I want to briefly discuss how I am using the

term neoliberalism and why it is central to my argument.

Neoliberalism refers to a set of monetary and trade policies.

These policies even though contested, are associated with “free

market economy” that has dominated western politics and emerging

global markets such as Brazil, India, and China since the early

1980’s (Duggan 2003; Giroux 2008; Richardson 2005; Ong 2006; Oza

2006). Further, Neoliberalism is concerned with defining policies

which impact the personal, sexual, and domestic life, including

welfare reform, education, and recognition of domestic

partnerships (Cehrniavsky 2009; Cooper 2002; Giroux, 2008; Reddy,

2005; Winnubst, 2012). Neoliberal regimes seek to privatize the

social and economic operations of the government by seeking to

protect the individual citizen and the economic market from

excessive interventions of the state. The individual citizen is

granted a set of liberties and responsibilities, and is assumed

to be a self-regulating, enterprising, good citizen subject

(Cherniavsky, 2009; Foucault, 2003; Richardson 2005; Winnubst,

2012). Privately and quasi privately funded social programs such 7

as professional institutions, philanthropic foundations, and

educational establishments help regulate the behaviors of the

citizen, thereby molding them into good, legal citizens.

The US based LGBT rights movement has centralized the right

to same-sex marriage, equal employment opportunity, and equal

treatment in the US military. The rhetoric of state protection

invites the neoliberal state into the lives of LGBT citizens,

calling for a confirmation to neoliberal codes of conduct. This

has been aptly termed by Duggan as “the new homonormativity”

(Duggan, 2003). Central to neoliberalism are policies related to

the flow of corporate capital across international borders

(Harvey, 2005) and yet meticulous management of the movement of

human beings across international borders (Butler & Chakravorty

Spivak 2007; Reddy, 2005). In such a context the bodies of

immigrants are being re-coded as documented/ undocumented,

skilled/unskilled, healthy/diseased, abled/disabled, and

threatening/productive. The apparatus of immigration control

therefore operate as a technology of power, and intimately re-

arrange life and bodies of immigrant communities (Baynton, 2001;

Foucault 2004; Puar, 2007; Reddy, 2005; Richards 2004; Shah, 8

2005). However, the recoding of bodies by immigration regimes is

incomplete. The processes of community building within LGBT and

HIV positive immigrant communities are the breaking points with

neoliberal security regimes. The collective and at times

contested attempts to resist death and being marked as disabled

and diseased are the discontinuous zones of the power- knowledge

nexus of neoliberal regimes.

The beginning, which has no beginning

On May 15th, 2008 in a 4-3 decision, the California Supreme

Court ruled that people have a fundamental “right to marry” the

person of their choice and that gender restrictions violate the

state Constitution's equal protection guarantee. Less publicized

news from the same day reported that Immigration and Customs

Enforcement (ICE) agents raided a well-known French bakery in

San-Diego, and arrested 18 undocumented migrant workers, some of

whom had worked for more than 16 years in the bakery. ICE agents

also raided the homes of workers who were not on the job that

day, including an illegal raid at the University of California at

San Diego graduate students housing. These two pieces of news

9

from the same state and the same day aptly summarize the

inequalities that neatly mark my life. LGBT blogs are inundated

with pictures of happy couples and their wedding cakes, cakes

made with the sweat and toil of hard-working, underpaid laborers.

Laborers who could be LGBT and/or undocumented. As the movement

for sexual and gender revolution is hijacked for a narrow call to

confirm to a capitalist hetero-patriarchal core, the lives and

aspirations of millions of human beings deemed “illegal” or

simply unwanted are torn apart by imperialist regimes across the

globe. While racially and economically privileged LGBT US

citizens are finally assimilating into a US citizens’ rights

framework, and their humanity is being recognized, a whole new

class of non-humans has been created.

I am an English educated, immigrant, brown, HIV positive,

Kinky, femme fag. I have to constantly negotiate my presence in

this country with complex gender, race, class and national border

control regimes. My mobility across state and gender boundaries

is restricted and contested -- the cost of the contestation

evident in my failing mental, physical and financial health. I

have worked as a house cleaner for upper class households in 10

Manhattan, inhaling ammonium and bleach for long hours. I also

worked as a busboy at upscale bistros where I was slapped around

by the gay male clientele, and yet made sure to keep smiling at

my customers, even when they would cross acceptable physical

boundaries, in hopes of a fat tip. I have spent months at a

stretch in bleak hospital rooms with needles and syringes

piercing into arteries and veins in hopes of finding life amidst

excruciating amounts of pain. And, I am not the only one. Our

stories as (dis)abled, diseased, gender-queer, transgender,

faggots and kinksters don’t begin here in the US. We have

histories sometimes rich, sometimes of terror and persecution in

our countries of origin. Our communities of origin abandoned many

of us since we are Namard (not a man in Hindi and Urdu). We come

from countries ravaged by colonization, wars, growing

inequalities in income, and disinvestment in public services and

schools. Globalization has brought structural adjustments to our

countries of origin, and a privatization of essential services.

This has hit the poorest among us especially hard.

My friendship circles across Kolkata, Dhaka, New Delhi,

Colombo, Rawalpindi, Akron, San-Francisco, Lander, Columbus, New-11

York, Johannesburg, Lesotho, Senegal, Rio-De-Janerio, and London

is filled with people who cross diverse borders every day in

search of a place called home. My dearest friend Babu from

Bangladesh has survived life-long torture from both his family

and from society at large due to his feminine presentation and

Christian heritage. He lost his job at a government-sponsored

development program and was unable to find another, since most

folks would not hire someone effeminate. Jobless, he traveled

around Bangladesh with a troupe of Kothis (feminine presenting men

who have sex with other men). They would sing and dance at

wedding ceremonies, living off a meager income of $10-50/ month.

After getting beaten and raped by local hoodlums, he escaped to

the US and started working at Dunkin Donuts, making $4.99 per

hour, way more than he would have earned in Bangladesh. He

continues to live in a makeshift room in a basement in Queens,

and prays that he does not fall sick. He sends about half of his

income back to his sister in Dhaka, hoping one day he can return

to build a house there. In my conversations with him over cell

phones he mentions praying every morning for my failing health.

12

My journey across the globe begins with the immigration

reforms in the 1970s and ‘80s, which brought medical and

engineering professionals from recently decolonized nations of

Asia to the US. Several of my maternal aunts were married off to

professionals migrating to the US in search of a better future.

Most of my childhood winter vacations in India were spent playing

with my cousins from the US -- as we explained to them the

stories of over three million Hindu gods and goddesses, they

shared their Disney View-Master, and Lego toys with us. The dream

of crossing the seven seas and living in the land of Mickey Mouse

was firmly planted in my heart very early in life. Growing up in

an upwardly mobile English-educated family in Calcutta meant that

I had access to the United States Information Services and

British Council libraries, where I would spent countless hours

devouring the Atlantic Quarterly or Signs, learning about the emerging

LGBT and new wave feminist movements. The splashy rainbow flag

images from the Stonewall 20th anniversary inspired some of us to

start the first gay and lesbian support group in Kolkata.

We would spend hours in cruising parks and women’s studies

gatherings doing outreach for support group meetings. Very soon 13

we connected with support groups in local cities and recently

formed LGBT South Asian groups in major cities of the US and UK.

We organized the first International South Asian conference on

“Histories of Alternate Sexualities” in New Delhi in 1993 and in

the following year the first International South Asian conference

of gay men and men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM). Tensions existed

along class and gender lines, and any conversations with Hijras

(often referred to as third-sex-third-gender in South Asian

countries) and Kothis (feminine presenting, non-English speaking

men who desire other men) were barely happening. At support group

meetings, Bengali and Hindi-speaking men and women would often

remain silenced. Our publications had to be trilingual to reflect

the complex linguistic contexts of India. At the core of these

tensions was our own internalized classism and phobia of Hijras and

Kothis3

3 I am referring here to a vast body of literature, which indicates the class,regional, and linguistic divisions within men-who-have-sex-with-men, gay identified men, and gender variant male bodied people who articulate their lives and desires through terms such as Hijra and Kothi. For a detailed discussionaround these conflicts refer to Cohen, L.2005. “The Kothi Wars: AIDS, Cosmopolitansim and the Morality of Classification” in Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective eds Vincanne Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg. Specific to West Bengal, the work of Aniruddha Dutta enumerates regional, class, and linguistic divisions among English speaking gay men and men living in urban peripheries who identify as Kothis.

14

The key organizers of these fledgling LGBT support groups

were all upper-middle class English-educated men and women. We

were well-trained, respectable Indian citizens. The feminine

voices and flamboyant mannerisms of the non-English speaking

Kothis were too disruptive for us. I would be polite and smile as

I met Kothis in cruising parks and I would hand them flyers for

the support group, yet secretly I hoped they would never show up

at meetings. In the parks, they would walk in small groups, wear

facial make up, and speak in street Bengali, all of which was

alien to me. Their loud mannerisms and shabby clothing seemed

very alien from my English-speaking, denim-sporting,

globetrotting “gay” world. Yet when I was harassed by cops at

the parks, it was Kothis who came to my defense. One such incident

happened on a dark winter evening. I was caught carrying condoms

in my bag by the local police, who would haunt the cruising

joints in hopes of extracting money from “cocksucking Kothis.” The

two cops threatened to arrest me for distributing “profane

materials.” I was nervous, and yet kept talking to them in

English and broken Bengali, telling them that I worked for family

planning programs. The cops laughed loudly at all my pleas. Three

15

of the Kothis came running, yelling and clapping loudly, cursing

the hell out of the cops. A small crowd gathered, and ultimately

the cops left. As I began to mingle more with the Kothis I began

to face my own inner prejudices and fears. I learnt that loud

mannerisms, claps, and street-smartness were their way of

surviving the dark realities of working class femme men in

Kolkata. I went on to build friendships with several of them.

Often we would sit on a park bench and giggle over how we would

love to be the wives of hot butch men. With increased visibility

came increased backlash. Several of us were beaten up,

blackmailed and harassed. I was attacked several times while

doing HIV outreach at public parks and toilets. As some of us

became publicly visible, our English-educated friends started to

avoid us. Fear of bringing shame to their families by being

visible with disgraceful figures lay at the core of these

avoidances. In the wake of constant verbal and physical assault,

the dream of Mickey and Minnie became more of a practical and

family mediated exit to the land of the Stonewall riots.

Queer and Brown in the Midwest

16

In summer of 1996 I arrived at the Cleveland Hopkins airport

with two suitcases packed with my favorite clothing. My well-

built, basketball-playing cousin came to help me with my luggage,

as my aunt waited outside in her Jaguar. I recently went back to

the picture my aunt snapped on my first evening in her house: my

hair is long and curly and I’m wearing a tie-dye shirt, obviously

femme next to my buff male cousins. All of us look awkward next

to each other. The awkwardness in that picture continued to frame

my next few years in the perfect white suburbs of Akron. I felt

like an uprooted tree, cut off from my friends in India, not

knowing how to drive, taking long bus rides to go to school.

Very quickly I found the cruising spots on campus. Back then

cruising went on pretty heavily at a few of the men’s toilets.

You needed to make foot gestures from underneath the flimsy walls

to pick up the guy next to you. I was surprised at the number of

men who kept rejecting me, once they came around the doors and

saw me up close. I guess being brown and having a medium sized

penis did not take you that far in the white, blonde-dominated

meat markets of the Midwest.

17

In summer of 1997 I met Kurt at one of the toilets. He was

big-dicked, tall, and broad-shouldered, with sandy blonde hair

and green eyes. He was the Superman I was told I could meet in

the US. “I would love to tie you up and fuck you," he said. "I

am not sure about that," I replied. I don’t know why I said that.

I always held fantasies of getting tied, always enjoyed reading

the daddy-boy sex scenes in porn magazines. But I repressed those

fantasies, thinking them to be "sick and perverted." But here was

an open invitation from a gorgeous man to enact those scenes. I

experimented once, twice, and decided to stick with him. We

enacted countless scenes over the next three years.

I was the brown slave boy. I would stand in his dungeon,

tied to a cross -- unable to move, every part of my body

restrained -- as he would softly fondle me. Those were such

intense scenes, all my thoughts focused on him, every single

touch giving me the goose bumps. His dark green sparkling eyes

looking directly into my eyes, making me feel as though he was

reading everything that was tucked away in the corner of my

heart. He would play with my hair, saying how much he loved my

18

dark black shiny hair. I remember distinctly feeling his warm

fingers stroking back and forth. The intensity was overpowering.

Our entire Master/slave relationship revolved around race-

based role plays. He would pick me up from the school library,

and we would fuck for hours. Some days he would be the white

master raping my brown hole, and other days the white leather

daddy punishing me for being a dirty brown fag. Most of our role

plays were supposedly negotiated, but as a lonely fag newly

arrived in the Midwest I went along with whatever he proposed.

Kurt was the hot white Superman that I had dreamt about. I would

do anything to keep having sex with him. Our relationship never

evolved beyond sexual buddies, and this began to disturb me. I

would spend long sleepless nights wondering if I was merely his

Asian sex slave. I ran into him at a local bar, and he refused

to acknowledge me! Back then, I was scared to confront him with

this incident. Years later, when I did confront him, he awkwardly

replied, “I don’t know why I did it! I am sorry!” Deep in my

heart, however, I knew that while he enjoyed sex with me and

several other Asian men, he wanted to fit in with his white upper

class gay neighbors by dating another rich white boy. 19

For those of us whose stories will never be told

“So after the first seizure of power over the body in an

individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not

individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at

man-as-body but man-as-species.”

-Michel Foucault. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures At The College De France

1975-1976: 243.

I left the unbearable whiteness of Akron, Ohio in January

2000 for the Big Apple, in search of a South Asian/people of

color progressive queer community and a career in nonprofit

management. Little had I anticipated that, a year and seven

months later, one of the most definitive events of American

society was about to hit me and my home. “Debanuj, wake up, the

twin towers have been bombed!” David’s voice yelled on the

answering machine. I turned on the TV and the first thing that

went through my mind was, “My green card application is fucked!”

I desperately tried to call my work (an environmental canvassing

agency) and went over how much I would receive in my next two

paychecks, because there was no way that, as a brown gender-queer

20

fag, I would be knocking on doors in Long Island right after

9/11.

In the days that followed we went back to being a one income

household. David worked for his father’s construction company

during the day and as a go-go dancer at night. I sat at home,

cleaning and cooking, frantically begging friends to give me

consulting gigs under the table. We were running out of food.

Babu, my friend from Bangladesh, got us a ten-pound bag of rice

from his church. I started to help him on his asylum application.

He was starting to feel unsafe working at Dunkin Donuts. Back in

those days, there were a lot of community dinners at friends’

houses. We would huddle in people’s cramped Manhattan apartments,

and silently eat. Yet soon these parties became rowdy with music

and robust with our zeal to survive and thrive amidst growing

violence and xenophobia. Since David, a Mexican immigrant, was

very active in the Latina/o LGBT community, and I was involved

with the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association, our house soon

became a venue to build cross-racial bridges. On David’s birthday

that October, my South Asian friends brought flyers for a teach-

21

in on Afghanistan, and folks talked about how we were all

oppressed in this system!

Our efforts to build cross-ethnic alliances were fraught

with challenges. Most of David’s friends were working income

Spanish-speaking Mexican queer men and a few women, while most of

my friends were English-speaking middle class South Asians. Let’s

just say there was a communication gap between us that had to be

filled with rounds of tequila shots and food fights. Some of my

closest friends would privately ask me: “How can you hang out

with those illiterate Mexicans?” Very soon I would fall off the

good books of the socialite South Asian queers, owing to my

“wayward ways.”

Post 9/11 was marked by an overwhelming culture of fear. I

was attacked by a group of young men (they were a mixed racial

group), and beaten up in an empty subway station. I was lucky

that a few people came running down the stairs and I got away

with a couple of punches and a twisted ankle. My attackers yelled

at me, “terrorist fag go back to your country!” In the first week

of that October after 9/11, eight queer-transgender South Asians

22

were physically attacked across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

South Asian drag queens saw a marked drop in attendance at clubs

across New York City. One renowned South Asian female-identified

DJ summed it up aptly, “People are afraid to be around brown

people.” Policing in its multiple forms is so common in the lives

of (dis) abled communities, queer and transgender people of color

that we learn to normalize it. In his seminal work on the

management of spoiled identities Erving Goffman elaborates that

stigmatized individuals face a constant tension upon entering

mixed social situations. The individual gets so used to this

tension, that they start responding by “defensive cowering”

(Goffman, 1963: 17). Such defensive cowering is not new to me. I

learned how to walk fast in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, since

there were always cop cars roaming. I also changed my style of

dress -- instead of wearing skirts with denims; I started to wear

traditional male clothing, hoping to avoid ruthless comments from

the streets. I knew I could not rely on the police for any

safety, or to address any violence done to me, in fact, they

might cause me more harm.

23

One of my friends who lived with his partner in Kew Gardens,

Queens called me and was shocked to have received a notice from

immigration authorities in the name of his lover (a gay

undocumented man from Pakistan), saying that he was to be

deported to Pakistan due to a visa overstay. He could hardly do

anything to prevent his lover’s deportation, since he also had

just applied for political asylum in the US. We found a pro-bono

attorney and were able to get “withholding of removal,” which

allowed him to live and work in the US; today he is still unable

to leave the US borders. Several of my Pakistani and Bangladeshi

friends had to go and register, since special registration was

passed. Men who had grown to live their lives as women felt to

dress and behave “manly” when they went to register.

Needless to say, all of this put a heavy toll on our

physical and mental health. I fell into depression. We got used

to eating one heavy meal a day. Often we would pull in cash

between three or four households and hold joint dinners. Soon

tensions emerged in the community, and most of us just stuck to

work and home. We were even scared to talk about immigration or

9/11 over the phone. The culture of fear and terror seeped into 24

our efforts at community-building. Many of the Hindu middle class

members of the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association would warn

me not to hang out with my Muslim friends. The nationalist

divisions between Hindu Indians and Muslim Pakistanis reared its

ugly head. Many of my Hindu, Indian upper class friends would

avoid their Pakistani friends, and often in all-Indian settings

you would hear someone alluding to all Muslims as gun-toting,

backward folks. I would be warned by my fellow Hindu Indians,

“You know they are all being watched! Don’t go to their homes;

you will be on the FBI list!” As I look back to the dim days

after 9/11, all I can think of was how paranoid and fearful we

were of everyone, including our best friends. All kinds of spying

scenarios would go through my mind. I would wake up in the middle

of the night thinking that the FBI had busted open my doors. All

this is not to suggest that our problems started after 9/11.

Prior to 9/11, fears and tensions about immigrants and queers

existed in the communities we lived in. Detention was still high

in working income communities, and transgender folks were facing

harassment, often rape, in detention centers. The NYPD had a

heavy presence in neighborhoods such as Bed-Stuy, Harlem,

25

Washington Heights, and Jackson Heights. The strategy was to nab

immigrants on all kinds of misdemeanors and get them into the

database. 9/11 gave the police and immigration authorities a

reason to do everything overtly in the name of fighting

“terrorism.”

Cultures of Pain, Cultures of Contestation:

The fear and confusion which ensued post 9/11, got

complicated with my HIV status. As I began to organize, build

collective power within LGBT immigrant communities, my body began

to internally decompose. In the summer of 2003 I was diagnosed

as living with AIDS. This diagnosis came within a few days of my

immigration application being granted by the United States

Citizenship and Information Services (USCIS). The United States

has denied the entry of HIV+ people for both short term travel

and immigration since 1987. This exclusionary practice follows a

long history of excluding immigrants into the United States on

public health grounds (Baynton, 2001; Luibheid, 2002; Zolberg

26

2006). Since the 1890’s the US Congress empowered the federal

government to turn back those with loathsome or dangerous

contagious diseases (Fairchild, 2004). Douglas Baynton argues

“One of the fundamental imperatives in the initial formation of

American immigration policy at the end of the 19th century was

the exclusion of disabled people. Beyond the targeting of

disabled people, the concept of disability was instrumental in

crafting the image of the undesirable immigrant" (Baynton, 2001:

45). The rational for such exclusions ostensibly being two fold;

i) protecting the public health of US citizenry and ii) Reducing

the burden on health care expenses of the US government.  The

intersections of racism, abelism, xenophobia and public health

becomes evident when these bans are contextualized within the

demographic profiles of generations of incoming immigrants and

those who are excluded (Fairchild, 2004; Gardner, 2005; Lee and

Young, 2010).

In the early 1990’s during the Haitian Refugee crisis, all

Haitian detainees at Guantanamo were forcibly tested for HIV, and

those found positive were detained in Guantanamo under un-

27

hygienic conditions. The Haitian Centers Council successfully

fought a case for the release of the terminally ill detainees.

The entire situation created a renewed fear of “diseased

foreigners”, and prompted Congress to consider legislation that

legally deemed HIV+ persons as “inadmissible”.  Review of the

congressional hearing proceedings reveals deployment of

xenophobic, HIV phobic and homophobic remarks by those in support

of the ban (Fairchild, 2004). A large coalition of medical, legal

and LGBT rights organizations opposed the ban, but in wake of

virulent AIDS phobia and stigma of the early 1990’s, and fear of

a flurry of HIV+ immigrants driving up health care costs in the

US, the ban was adopted (Luibheid, 2002; Fairchild, 2004).  The

ban disproportionately impacted immigrants of color, since

majority of recent immigrants to the US are from Latin America,

Caribbeans, Asia and Africa. It can also be argued that the ban

like other bans in the past is deeply rooted in scientific

racism, xenophobia and homophobia (Ordover, 2003 & 2012).

 Efforts to remove the HIV ban have largely been organized

by HIV/AIDS, LGBT rights and some immigrant rights organizations.

28

In 1990, several medical, Gay and Lesbian and Immigrant

organizations such as Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the American

Medical Association lobbied the Health and Human Services (HHS)

to remove HIV from its list of  inadmissible diseases. As the HHS

was preparing recommendations, the then Republican dominated

Congress pushed through a bill that eventually made it a law to

ban HIV+ individuals from entering the country. Since then,

extensive on the ground organizing has been conducted by grass-

roots immigrant organizations, who worked to push policy

organizations to bring the removal of the ban back as an agenda

item, to their work. In May of 2006 the “Lift the Bar Coalition”

was formed, lead by Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Queers for Economic

Justice, The Audre Lorde Project, Immigration Equality, HIV/AIDS

organizations such as African AIDS Services, AIDS Lesotho and

AIDS Action along with immigrant rights organizations such as the

National Immigrant Justice Center. On July 2008, after years of

significant on the ground organizing, and lobbying “Lift the Bar

Coalition” was successful in removing the HIV ban language from

the “Immigration and Nationality Act”.

29

As the New Voices fellow (2006-2008) I was one of the lead

community organizers around the initiatives to "Lift the Ban”.

Publicly my body was mapped as that of an Immigration and

Education Policy Expert, whereas privately I was intimately

aware that any inkling of my health status would have me labeled

as "diseased, public burden.” I recall organizing community

forums, frantic negotiations and coalition meetings. Throughout

this process I remained “in the closet” about my HIV status, and

yet every cell within my body wanted to announce loudly my own

health status, and the ways I have had to hide in fear. The pain

of hiding underground, days of unemployment, hunger, and fear of

accessing treatment leading me to near death would flash across

my mind. I wondered where I would turn for the wasted seven years

of my life. Will the judge or the Senator be able to understand

the lost wages, aspirations, depression and most of all the

psychological violence of being separated from my beloved

parents? I knew that my life and story was not the only one,

there were several HIV positive immigrants silently waiting for

some form of relief, as they continued to work hard, and pay

taxes. Justice for me lay in the removal of the US HIV Ban, and

30

continuing to channel my pain, and anger towards global regimes

of security which relegated differently abled bodies to die

privately and shamefully. There were days when my frail body,

dressed in suits would march into law-makers offices speaking in

policy slang. I learnt to calculate the cost of treating an HIV

positive person, and comparing these prices with the cost of

compulsory testing/deporting HIV positive immigrants. The Urban

Planning tools associated with my dreary days at the University

of Akron came handy. The application of the cost-benefit grid

seemed like a tactical strategy during 2006-2007 to get the

attention of lawmakers. Ruth Colker describes similar

negotiations while narrating the legislative history of the

American with Disabilities Act (ADA) (Colker, 2005). Colker

enumerates that the passage of the ADA was largely predicated

upon arguing for the rights of disabled people, along with

negotiating the price of accommodating disabled especially those

living with AIDS in employment sectors such as food handling

(Colker, 2005: 55). Colker narrates that there seemed to be

confusion in the US Congress around the nature of HIV as an

infection during the 1989 debates over the ADA. Several members

31

of the congress were unsure if HIV was a contagious or infectious

disease (Colker, 2005:56). The confusion over the nature of HIV

framed and at times withheld the passage of the ADA. The debates

over those living with HIV/AIDS and the costs incurred in

treating these bodies therefore remain central to debates around

HIV, disability, and immigration. These debates predicate the

life of those living with AIDS, and at times relegate us to die

painfully in private and shame.

Feminist and poet of color Audre Lorde, speaks about pain

eloquently in her book “The Cancer Journals.” Pain for her (and

several disability theorists) is an area of experience where

language fails (Scarry, 85; Lorde, 80). Lorde conceives of

physical pain as “sheer power” (Audre Lorde, 80). The sheer pain

of needles and syringes piercing into my arteries and veins, and

a battered immune system circulated (and continue to circulate)

throughout my body. My struggles with AIDS reached its peak in

the summer of 2003. My T-Cell counts had dropped to a mere 50. I

was diagnosed with PCP and Kaposis Sarcoma. During my prolonged

hospital stay I was surrounded by an amazing care giving posse.

32

One of my friends gifted me with the collected poems of Audre

Lorde. Much like Lorde, I decided not to romanticize the physical

pain, and sense of loss that had gripped me, instead I decided to

channel my pain into creative power for ushering justice. Justice

for me is when every immigrant will be imagined as a human being

with dreams, aspirations and emotions. Justice will shine when

all LGBT people, people with all kinds of (dis)abilities will be

able to live life free of shame, with un-restricted mobility

across global borders, and with access to universal health care.

And, for each of these to happen we need to go beyond our focus

on public policies, we need to expand our work to incorporate

strategies that fundamentally alter power relations in society.

Connecting the dots: What do neoliberalism and security states have to do with

faggots?

“American neo-liberalism still involves, in fact, the

generalization of the economic forms of the market. It involves

generalizing it through the social body and including the whole of the

social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary

exchanges.”

33

-Michel Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures At The College De France. 1978-

1979: 243.

Sometimes I am read as respectable, upper-class, English

educated, sometimes as the brown, perverted, diseased other and

sometimes as underemployed household help. In slowly waking up to

these multiple mappings I have had to travel to my inner phobias

of other gay /queer/gender-queer/ transgender, diseased and

(dis)abled people. The pain of loving a hot white stud in the

Midwest who used me sexually while rejecting me emotionally

served as a jolting reminder of my place in the race-class

hierarchies of gay/queer men’s communities in the US. In a

twisted tale of global migration I went from being on the top of

the hierarchy in India to somewhere near the bottom in the US. I

began to debunk my own internalized hierarchies by constantly

challenging myself to love Babu and David during those dark days

of post 9/11. Honestly a large part of it was prompted by my own

survival needs. Yet in attempting to survive I was reminded

survival is never a singular journey. Individuals can make it on

their own, and those of us who succeed need to move on, leaving

behind unsuccessful individuals. This idea is at the heart of

34

neoliberal social ethics. Human relationships, like the economic

market, are left to laws of competition and individual gain. For

those of us who find ourselves in the lower rungs of the racial-

sexual-economic ladder, such notions are dangerous. As evident

from my stories both in India and in New York, our survival and

thriving is predicated upon our community’s survival. Every time

I have attempted to make it on my own, I have found myself

isolated, hopeless and often at the mercy of underpaid and

overworked social workers. Healing and collective resistance

occurs only within the context of community formation (Lorde,

80).

Journeys of LGBT and HIV positive immigrants across

national borders in search of sexual and economic opportunities

are not singular journeys. We follow a global chain of movement

across borders. Stories and images of sexual and economic freedom

circulating through the fast globalizing family networks and

media circuits pull us to this very core of neoliberal

capitalism. A set of hierarchies reduces us to nude

housecleaners, go-go-dancers, nannies, food servers,

diseased/(dis) abled and figures of death/terror. We are 35

overwhelmed by financial stress and physical pain. Immigration

regimes mark us as either “documented” or “undocumented,” “highly

skilled” or “unskilled.” These markings manipulate our abilities

to negotiate the price of our labor, often resulting in

competitions among friends.

Are we weak and silent victims living in shade and in need

of super-(wo)man like saviors? Or are we strong resilient

communities? To answer this question I invite everyone to imagine

these two paradigms not in contrast with each other, but rather

on parallel (and at times intersecting) paths. We spend countless

hours calculating the complex equations of immigration attorneys,

international phone calls, medical bills, and rising food prices.

Sometimes the losses far outweigh the gains, and then there are

times when our tired brown bodies wrapped around shinning red,

pink and gold colors march down Fifth Avenue or Market Street

celebrating all things queerly brown, and the very fact that we

continue to survive, thrive, and cook cheap curried meals for

each other. And, in our survival small victories are gained

against all-encompassing global security and economic regimes

that would rather see us decompose and die. Our survival leads 36

us back into newer systems of power, one which is created through

our encounter with global regimes of capital, national security,

and labor.

The encounter between regimes of national security,

immigration regulations and bodies of LGBT/HIV positive

immigrants occur in the interstitial shadow spaces4 between

nation-states, ability and (dis) ability, perversity and

respectability. Interstices following Deleuze are neither the

beginning, nor the end rather the middle (milieu), and the space

of revolt against the imaginary origin, center, and boundary

(Deleuze, 1988: 123). Just as the grass has no one root, central

part, or limits to its growth, to find oneself in the

interstitial shadow spaces is to find oneself in the middle of

4 I borrow the term “interstitial shadow space” from Juanna Maria Rodrguez. For Rodriguez, the figure of the queer asylum seeker occupies the interstitialshadow space between nation-states. Rodriguez urges for theorizing from the ethical standpoint of the queer asylum seeker, keeping in mind the subjects precarious location between different nation states, immigration laws, and interlocutors such as human rights activists. In my work I draw upon spatial thinkers such as Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos while theorizing “interstices” from a material perspective. In his theorizing of spatial justice and lawscape, Philippopulos-Mihalopoulos ascertains interstices as theinterval between bodies where speed is generated towards “mad becomings” (Philippopulos-Mihalopoulos, 2013). Interstitial shadow spaces between nation-states come to represent the interval between multiple bodies in my narration.Disease, pain and pleasure operate as modalities of power propelling bodies onemergent planes in spaces such as hospital rooms, S& M chambers, and across sovereign borders towards multiple becomings.

37

multiple worlds. Multiplicities, which trouble originary ideas

about ability, home, and productive body. Through out this essay

I have been attempting to sketch diagrams of my body, sensations,

and relations as they multiply through my journeys. There is

nothing authentic about my recollections. Rather, sensations

flowing through my body and are refashioned as multiplicities, an

intimate cartography, mapped through words. I am marked as an

immigrant of color bearing the monstrous capacity to spread the

HIV virus; and at times as English educated potentially

productive person caught in-between native and foreign lands.

These multiple mappings allow for potential contestations and

continuous collective political labor. The perversity of my

diseased, disabled body, and the assemblages I journey, propel

the multiplicities of what Robert McRuer terms, “a will to remake

the world, given the ways in which injustice, oppression, and

hierarchy are built (sometimes quite literally) into the

structures of contemporary society" (McRuer, 2012). According to

Robert McRuer, “increasingly, the disability movement or

disability studies emphasize recognition within the terms of

dominant norms and assimilation into the mainstream, rather than

38

fundamental changes to society. The good disabled subject is

similarly the one most distanced from queerness (that is, the

unruly kind of queerness that cannot so easily be domesticated)”

(McRuer, 2012). The task for the “emerge-agency” of disability

studies is to question the medicalized gaze and the formation of

hegemonic body during states of emergency (Bruggemann, Chrisman &

Lupo, 2005). The formation of a productive, healthy body remains

central to a post 9/11 US nationalist project (Bruggemann,

Chrisman & Lupo, 2005; Puar, 2007). (Re) membering multiple

interstices, (instead of a singular center-margin) troubles

neoliberal normalization and allows for a dislocation of

neoliberalism’s en-abling power-knowledge nexus. My rotting T-

Cells give way to a different cell division count regulated

through multiple drug cocktails. My decaying body is medically

regenerated. The bio-medical regeneration of (my) cellular

protein is unable to fully erase memories of pleasure, pain,

ecstasy felt through multiple friendships, similarly neo-

liberalisms en-abling subjectivation remains incomplete within

un-mappable sites wherein bodies deemed as (dis)abled monsters

39

refuse to “let die.” Refusal occasions the emerge-agency of a

kind of will, which holds potentials for cripping neo-liberalism.

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