The Glass Closet: queer students’ experiences on Indian higher-ed campuses

The Glass Closet – clear, painted, transparent, translucent, opaque even, sometimes offering a mirror of distortions, sometimes one of clarity, refracting, or creating chiarscuros of rainbows or endless shades of grey – is an attempt to bring together some everyday stories of queer experiences on campuses in India.

This blog has emerged as a part of a research project titled, “An exploratory study of discriminations based on non-normative genders and sexualities” which is located in The Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, TISS, Mumbai. In this project research, while we want to create documentation on discriminations faced by individuals on the basis of non-normative gender or sexuality in different areas, we also want to understand the meanings of discriminations and non-normativities as reflected in our everyday.

One of our aims is to find different ways of talking about the experiences of being in higher education, and not just within the language that the university pushes us all to aspire to. To this end we organised two writing workshops, one in Kolkata and another in Bombay, with 14 students from campuses in Bombay, Bangalore, Kolkata, Bhuveneshwar, Banaras and Guwahati. These discussions and writings from the workshops enabled us to form a loose collective with several students, placed in different University campuses across the country to share their writings and give and receive feedback from each other and the facilitator. This blog is the collective effort of that group.

The title of the blog too came out from this process.

We are aware that our stories are perhaps a small insignificant slice of the wide range of experiences that many are living. Thus we would like to open this blog to invite submissions from other “queer” identified students to write about their stories and experiences of their lives within campuses of higher education. If you would like to submit your stories kindly write in to us at theglassclosetblog@gmail.com.

Do follow the blog on https://theglassclosetsblog.wordpress.com