Sexualities on the edge: Identities, politics and transformation

Exhibition Details: Drawing on long-running fieldwork-based research and activism in Bangladesh and collaborative reading of personal archives, this exhibit will seek to showcase the creative ways gender and sexually non-mainstream subjects have negotiated and navigated selves, identities and erotic practices in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Through use of texts, anecdotes, provocations and personal insights, the photos series will bring into view various worldmaking possibilities among the emergent sexual/gender subjects in the context of NGOs and cruising sites in urban Dhaka. At stake here is a tension between erotic proclivities and practices on the one hand and the political imperative to take on an identity label on the other, often expressed in the debates around the meaning of MSM, Kothi and Transgender in the South Asian context. The exhibition will end with a critical examination of the role of identity politics and HIV/AIDS activism in the unfolding queer rights movement in Bangladesh today.