The Sex of History, or Object/Matters

Abstract

Abstract The mandate to think of Stonewall as a global historical event within South Asia necessitates a difficult act of translation. Was my goal as a historian of sexuality and South Asia to decentre the primacy of Stonewall with local historical events of import? Or was it more epistemological, to address instead the question of why historical causality and memorialization works differently within the fabular geography that is South Asia? In other words, did the history of the Stonewall riots create more of a political demand on subaltern collectivities to ‘produce’ their own seismic historical event, or did it foreground even further the epistemological divide between the West and the Rest? This brief essay is a meditation on these questions and more.