Cruising higher educational spaces in India: Northeastern students' stories of racialization, sexualization, and resistance

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Examining the power of protest against sexual, racial and political violence

Proposal

This paper presents how Northeastern students embody their everyday living as a form of resistance to challenge the subjectivity imposed by the intersection of colonialism, race, and gender in Indian universities North East refers to a borderland region in India that has a long geo-political history shaped by the international borders and ethno-cultural diversity of the region but fueled by the heavy militarization, human rights violation, and state sponsored sexual violence (Kakoty, 2019). In this context, the term Northeastern (NE) evolved as a racialized category to identify the racial distinctiveness of the region’s population and a marker of its geo-politics.
Northeastern students experience a range of barriers within HEIs, these barriers are in the form of racial violence or sexual stereotyping (Bora, 2019; Rai, 2021). In 2020, during the initial days of Covid outbreak, 22 cases of racial harassment, discrimination, and motivated attacks on Northeastern students were recorded (Karmakar, 2020), parallel to hate crimes against Asian communities in the United States. Similarly, scholars have also highlighted a range of sexual harassment on Northeastern women because they are labeled as sexually available and exotic (Bora, 2019; McDuie-Ra, 2013a, 2013b; Rai, 2021; Wouters & Subba, 2013). The scholarship in the North East is limited but growing, one of the limitations of this scholarship is a lack of intersectional framework to understand the experiences of NE students. Especially, the intersection of racialized sexualization is not extended to the experiences of Northeastern men. This paper engages with these gaps and presents how students resist these intersectional power structures in their everyday life.
This paper draws from ethnographically informed in-depth narrative inquiry and field observations of Northeastern men (3 identified as bisexual and 1 as pansexual). The aim of this inquiry was to answer-how does race, gender, sexuality affect their experiences at the university and how do they resist such categorization? Using a thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2017) approach, this paper presents three broader themes to this inquiry.1) Narrating the power structures- This theme presents how narrating their experiences of classroom and university campus helps Northeastern men connect their lives with the intersecting power structures. Such forms of visibilizing the self and the structure are a form of resistance and power to highlight the synchronized role of social structures (Ewick & Silbey, 2003). 2) Using the master’s tool to dismantle the master’s house- This theme presents how Northeastern men are engaging with their imposed categorization by the social structures to reclaim the discourse about their identity. 3) Looking out for each other- This theme presents how NE students engage with their individual experiences of racialization and sexualization as a responsibility to safeguard the broader Northeastern community. This paper helps us engage with the idea of resistance in the small actions of our everyday life that helps reclaim our narrative and center the power within an individual.

Author

• Sheetal Digari, University of Minnesota