Redefining Queerscapes through Poetry - MHI

ISSUE NO. 6 OCTOBER

THE MARIWALA HEALTH INITIATIVE JOURNAL

Re-Vision

Contesting Global Mental Health

World Mental Health Day, Medicalised Mental Health Awareness, and Psychiatric Subjectivation

Authoritarian Neoliberal Regimes and Global Mental Health

Enough Politeness: Decolonising Mental Health in a Society Oblivious to Its Colonial Wounds

Work with Us, Not against Us

Context

Mental Health in the Time of Genocide

Reshaping Narratives: Reproductive Justice among Women in Kashmir

Mental Health and Marginalisation

Warriors Within: Decoding the Paradox of Strength and Vulnerability among the Naga Tribe

Redefining Queerscapes through Poetry

The Impact of AFSPA on the Mental Health of the Naga People

Engage

Collective Healing and Trauma-Informed Approaches for the Mental Health of Survivors of Trafficking

Assessing the Effectiveness of the Mental Health Equity Global Agenda for Low- and Middle-Income Countries 

Fostering Mental Healthcare in a Postcolonial Continent with Digital Medicine

Tackling Mental Health Inequalities for Roma Communities in the UK

Behind Bars

CONTEXT

10

ADVOCACY

Redefining Queerscapes through Poetry

Drawing Attention to Art-Based Community
Healing Approaches and Chronicling Housing,
Healthcare, and Workplace Violations of Queer-Trans Communities in India

Raju Behara

AUTHOR

Studio Ping Pong

illustrator

author’s bio

Raju Behara

Raju Behara (she/they) is a peer support provider and an independent researcher, with a master’s in Pharmacology and Health Policy. They work on evidence-based legal and policy research on mental health and directly engage with communities. Through Piravi Art Community, they have been advocating for a community-based model of mental healthcare using poetry, art, and storytelling.

illustrator’s bio

Amreeta Banerjee

Alice A. Barwa completed her MA in Education from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Univerity, Delhi (AUD), in 2022, and is from the Oraon Adivasi community, a native of Chhotanagpur Plateau, Chhattisgarh. She has been an advocate for Adivasi rights and voices as a member of an Adivasi youth collective @TheAdivasiPost, and has been an Adivasi youth representative at UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021. Her research interests include education, culture, sociology, and linguistics.

The Absence of Queer Contexts in Global Health

Global health’s frequent overlooking of queer people’s experience is particularly striking given its vision of ‘including the excluded’ and the significant intersection of transnational health issues with LGBTQI+ populations. These communities face disproportionate health issues, including higher rates of communicable and non-communicable diseases, compared to cisgender, heterosexual individuals. Moreover, health outcomes within LGBTQI+ populations vary substantially; yet they are often grouped together indiscriminately in analyses. 

Many projects spearheaded by the queer community seek to address this gap, particularly in global mental health. They use poetry and art in community spaces and expressive arts psychotherapy (EAP) in queering and decolonising safe spaces, among others. But EAP projects are also often critiqued for not addressing the socio-legal origins of marginalisations and the ramifications of restricted access to advocacy and legal support. Addressing these structural issues through art has been explored by many marginalised communities. Conducting EAP through a socio-legal lens would lend unique perspectives to decolonise global mental health.

This paper presents one such initiative. The Queer Judgments Project (QJP) challenges the articulations in legal judgments regarding sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). Its primary aim is to re-envision, rewrite, and reinterpret judgments addressing SOGIESC issues from queer and complementary perspectives globally.

Art-Based Community Healing

My work with QJP focuses on the Section 377 litigation, through which the colonial-era law that criminalised same-sex relationships was struck down in 2018. I document the missing social histories of LGBTQI+ communities – such as housing, workplace, and healthcare violations – from the litigation and examine the impact of legal decisions on the mental health of LGBTQI+ individuals and movements. 

The strand of the QJP project I focus on, Redefining Queerscapes, portrays these stories through art forms that are easily disseminated. One dimension of it is pilot poetry workshops at queer-trans spaces across India. These workshops, which started in 2019, explore poetry and art to address discrimination in workplace, healthcare, and housing, aiming to rewrite the concept of safe spaces. Inspired by projects like the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project (SFJP) and Danish Sheikh’s Love and Reparation, our Queerscapes work draws on regional folk art and encourages workshop participants to reinterpret law through blackout or erasure poetry. Participants black out portions of a written/typed text to create poetry with the remaining words, providing a visual representation of the Section 377 litigation from the subjects’ perspective, following Linda Mulcahy’s approach.

Redefining Queerscapes also included an ethnographic study through interviews and workshops in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka to document overlooked social histories of workplace and healthcare harassment. This revealed prevalent issues in trans and non-binary healthcare experiences, including the invisibilisation of their journeys, consistent misgendering, and inappropriate assignments to gender-mismatched wards. Respondents expressed that healthcare settings often led to a profound detachment from their gender identity. When the findings are observed in correlation with data presented from the TransCare project – a collaborative effort hosted at NGO Sangath – it can be noted that many Indian medical practitioners still lack meaningful connections with the queer-trans communities they aim to serve.

Challenging Epistemic Norms: Addressing Hetero-Cis-Normativity

When presented with different texts on violence in healthcare, participants engaged with ideas of empowering themselves and scripted ideal ‘safe’ healthcare experiences, which have been systemically denied. These experiences echoed broader struggles within global health, which often operate from an epistemic position of hetero-cis-normativity.

In this blackout poem (Figure 1), addressed to the Mental Health Department, Abigail Silversmith asserts their lived experiences.

Figure 2. Blackout poem from Namma Pride

Trans activist and healthcare practitioner Aqsa Shaikh has been highlighting the problematic quest for the ‘normal body’ in medical science, emphasising the exclusionary nature that hinders correct healthcare access for marginalised groups. She challenges medical students to encounter cadavers of trans individuals or of those with disabilities.      

During our poetry workshops in 2021, we examined first-hand narratives of what accessing gender-affirming healthcare meant. Participants often touched upon their definitions of freedom and what it meant to be free, considering their historical relationship with oppressive laws like Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 and the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871; the latter particularly targeted and ostracised Hijra communities from their birth. The poets shared that poems written under oppressive State regimes resonated closely with their exercises.

Mental Health as a Justice Issue

The criminalisation of queer-trans individuals over decades has limited their access to infrastructure, of all kinds, but especially of healthcare. Deepa Pawar of Anubhuti Trust points out the impact that access to rights can have on the mental health of a community and frames this as ‘mental justice’. According to Pawar, mental justice places emphasis on community healing and on enabling access to rights in a dignified, non-discriminatory manner.

The historical oppression of trans communities, initiated by the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871, involves economic, social, physical, and political exploitation, coupled with mental suppression to debilitate them over time. Oppression erodes communities’ mental resilience and coerces them into accepting the discrimination and violence against them. Modern Indian trans communities, criminalised for dissent, have endured over 150 years of severe mental injustice, including forced migration, arbitrary arrests, and restricted access to essential services like HIV treatment. 

Various mental healthcare models target these challenges, including collaborative care models, community-based approaches, and culturally sensitive interventions. Recognising historical traumas, adopting inclusive mental healthcare models, and embracing intergenerational wisdom are crucial for holistic well-being. Samah Jabr’s question, ‘What is sick, the context or the person?’ prompts reflection on the West-developed tools for mental health. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) remains lacking in conviction in this regard. Their International Classification of Diseases listed being transgender as a mental disorder until 2019. Only in 2013 did WHO produce its first ever report on the health of LGBTQI+ people, but there are currently no studies funded by WHO on the intersection of caste, class, disability, and queerness. Within this vulnerable geopolitical context, the use of progressive, affirmative healthcare guidelines is a radical act of resistance against a colonial, archaic, and anti-LGBTQI+ agenda. We locate our work within these acts of decolonial resistance.  

Reimagining Global Health

The Yogyakarta Principles, a document on human rights with respect to sexuality and gender, calls for competently trained healthcare providers for the proper application of international human rights laws addressing gender and sexuality. Healthcare facilities around the world must strive to be the safe spaces that LGBTQI+ people desperately need. This endeavour will align with the third goal of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which is to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. We need to reflect with urgency on how State actors, legislators, and policymakers propagate narrow views of the queer-trans community. It is important to observe how this vicarious violent viewing of queer-trans communities’ ongoing wounds and trauma keeps perpetuating a Western worldview, thereby overlooking caste violence and able-bodied Savarna gaze. 

We need to look at art-based therapy through a lens that defies our colonisers’ rulebook. In the workshops, Queerscapes relied on Indian queer-trans artists and narratives. We encouraged participants to use Telugu, Urdu, Tamil, and Bengali to decolonise language and challenge colonially inherited laws and trauma.

It is important to chronicle movements, wounds, and healing not as individuals but as a collective queer community. As we remember Aarvey, Pranjal, and the queer-trans lives lost in the past few years, we need to look at introducing such frameworks in schools. Decolonisation of global health has to go beyond cosmetic changes and become a radical transformation, especially for those of us in the Global South.

Cite this Article View all References

references

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  • Weise, Jessica. ‘Queering the Classroom: Emancipating Knowledge(s) Through (Found) Poetry.’ Teaching and Learning for Social Justice and Equity in Higher Education, edited by L. Parson and C.C. Ozaki, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88608-0_12.
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