Glimpse into the Stories of Queer Events: Community making with Care, Companionship, and Joy

My paper will focus on the significance of queer events in Bangladesh and West Bengal in terms of their ability to transfer knowledge through community organizing. In the process, community members come together, navigate different spaces, advocate, and network with allies, local and international resource holders.

Many of these organising started as a drop-in centre for HIV/AIDS prevention programme or in a Hijra Dera where Kothi and Hijra community members could come together and perform. While organising the events, community members explore relationships and emotional labour that exist as a form of care and conflict, grounded broadly in themes of transferring knowledge from one to another. Through many of these activities they try to fit in to the existing social structure of power where heterosexuality gets a privileged status.

To examine, a qualitative inquiry will be used to study different LGBTQ organizations and their events in Bangladesh and West Bengal. When heteronormative practices are dominant in the context, LGBTQ organizations challenge that and simultaneously get dependent on donors, and other allies. This is often problematic as welfare programs over resources especially to poor, are thus enabled to make undesirable choices.

In this paper, I would like to map how these queer events are shaping the movement. My observations will cover organizations that are not only located in the metropolitan cities but also in the district level and how they assure their access to the resources for these events.