Queering “Lesbian” and “Writing”: Facing the Mirror as “Arche-Writing” of Indian Queer Women

Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India (1999), edited by Ashwini Sukthankar, anthologizes short personal writing and fictional pieces, memoirs, poems, essays, letters and more, all produced by Indian women-loving-women (WLW) (an umbrella term for women with queer sexualities and romantic interests in women). The back cover of the book is blazoned with the quote: “A groundbreaking book where lesbians found their voice for the first time.” Even more than twenty years after its publication, there is not much scholarship on this book despite it being one of the first few publications to assert and embody the existence of a community of Indian queer women. This paper intends to explore how this collection uses (lesbian) “writing” as a representative strategy to address the limits of the universalized paradigm of “lesbian” desires. To this end, the paper will employ the Derridean concept of “arche-writing” and argue that this anthology becomes an arche-writing of Indian female queer subjects who speak/write/narrate in both homodiegetic (first-person) and heterodiegetic (third- person) narratives. Citing some of these pieces from this anthology, the paper will argue that “lesbian writing” is not merely a collection of literal writings but a concept of writing that directly embodies the material existence, experiences, voices, desires and bodies of WLW of India. This paper will also argue that through queering or deconstructing the notion of writing as fixed, the anthology destabilizes and queers the fixed understanding of the subjectivities of queer women and lesbians.