Muted Queerscapes
Intersectional Resistance Queering of Workplace Law Using Poetry
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14296/ac.v7i1.5843Abstract
This article interrogates the dissonance between India’s post-377 legal promises and the lived realities of queer-trans communities navigating casteist, ableist workplaces. Through 27 participatory poetry workshops (2020–2022) in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Visakhapatnam, West Bengal, and Wayanad, disabled, and able-bodied, Dalit-Bahujan, Adivasi trans participants redrafted the Transgender Persons Act 2019 and Industrial Disputes Act 1947 via erasure poetry, body-mapping, and crowdsourced protest verse. Framed by Akhil Kang’s critique of Savarna queer movements (2021), Gee Semmalar’s trans labour praxis (2020) and Sudipta Das’s Cripping the Margins (2022), this work positions poetry as “jurisdictional counterpractice”—a neurodiverse, caste-conscious challenge to legal and corporate “inclusion”. Case studies from Sayantan Datta’s workplace audits, the Centre for Law and Policy Research’s intersectionality report (Kothari & Ors 2022), and the Queer Tech Workers’ Demand Charter (2022) reveal how poetic subversion queers judgments like Navtej Johar (2018) and Dr Malabika Bhattacharjee (2020), centring disabled, Dalit-Bahujan futurities beyond pink capitalism.
Keywords: poetic resistance; caste; disability; neurodiversity; POSH Act; Navtej Johar.
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