Introduction

Abstract

A colleague and friend in graduate school, a feminist philosopher, once jokingly pointed out the reason why she thought I ended up in graduate school, in a Cultural Anthropology program, in the United States. Her diagnosis: “to basically escape compulsory heterosexuality in India,” appeared to be too neat, narrow, inadequate, and somewhat arrogant, but also fairly close. As a foreign student (both as an undergraduate and a graduate student) from the geographic Third World I had clearly benefited materially, politically, and culturally from having the opportunity to separate myself from my “home” communities in India and travel half way across the world to the geographic North with scholarships to ostensibly earn a practical and technologically superior education. My chosen detour into Cultural Anthropology and Feminist Studies, at a nonelite university in graduate school, was taking me toward somewhat of a different trajectory. As a feminist, queer, nonimmigrant (who began to long for U.S. immigrant status), with socioeconomic privilege, and a recently marked woman of color in the United States, I began to contend with an increasingly tenuous economic future, the political economy of U.S. academia, an uncertain “home” in the United States, and a growing interest in studying a questionable project as a cultural critic.

“Aren’t you in graduate school to escape compulsory heterosexuality in India?”

“Aren’t you going to do field-work in India?”

“Will you ever go back to India?”