Is another liveability possible? Articulating caste and lesbian worldmaking from India

In this paper, we use collaborative forms of writing to ask if another liveability is possible. We attempt to articulate caste and lesbian worldmaking in the context of the COVID-19-induced lockdown through a walking interview with Urmila, a Dalit queer labour union organizer. The walking interview with Urmila happened within the conceptual parameters of what we term ‘urgent witnessing’, a methodological stance involving sharing and documentation of upending life circumstances. We try to gesture toward messier modes of learning and representing our lives, challenging through it our obsessions with the neatness of identities, experiences, and categories, often which are confining, limiting, silencing, and denying. Three of us are distinctly placed, enlivened, and produced through diverse histories and precarities of caste, class, and gender. Yet here, together, we attempt to build a lexicon of queer liveability that allows us to breathe. It is only one articulation of the possible politics of liveability, and we do not claim it to be the alternative. Instead, we urge those working with/in lesbian feminist frames to consider this as an invitation to re think/articulate/live. The urgency is also towards centering the questions of caste and class that manufacture and facilitate our queerness by mapping our often diagsnosed impossible cartographies of liveabilities.