Queering Resistance, Queering Research: In Search of a Queer Decolonial Feminist Understanding of Adivasi Indigeneity

In this paper, I place both the methodological and epistemological realms of my doctoral research with the Adivasis (indigenous peoples) of Attappady, Kerala under a queer decolonial feminist lens in order to better understand the nature of contemporary Adivasi indigeneity and indigenous resistance. Given Kerala’s unique position within India as a communist state, often acting in the interest of global capitalism by implementing neoliberal policies and steering state-led development plans, its Adivasis are already queer in their relationship to the state as “non-modern others.” In order to understand the often contradictory and complex relationship of the Adivasi with the communist-neoliberal state, beyond being the “marginal other,” I mobilize a queer decolonial feminist framework through a process I term queering. I use queering to critically examine and analyze contemporary indigeneity and indigenous resistance in two stages. Firstly, through a broad analysis of the coloniality of development and its material effects on Adivasi lands resulting in land struggles. Secondly, through a narrower focus on gender and sexuality to show how queering is also useful in understanding the operation of particular modalities of power. In doing so, I argue that queering reveals the latent structural complexities of Adivasi indigeneity by drawing causal links between systematic processes of land loss and land alienation, material livelihood, and structural changes in various domains, including gender, sexuality, spirituality, and health. I also argue that emergent and existing modalities of Adivasi resistance, despite the forms they take, are in fact epistemological and ontological acts of decolonial resistance against the combined coloniality of capitalism, development, and modernity on their ancestral lands.