Chapter Four The Spring That Flowers between Women

Abstract

It is not without certain trepidation that I write what has been difficult to withhold. I have known the tyranny of heteronormativity, yet a compulsion pushes me to defend a space that refutes labeling—a universal naming. This chapter alludes to two equally pertinent positions. The first part foregrounds simultaneously contesting and competing, age-old sociocultural practices of female bonding existent in parts of the northern region of the subcontinent of south Asia. The second part of the chapter engages with the entire discourse on labeling and naming, the universalization of conceptual and practiced categories of women’s relationships with women.