Such a cornucopia of race, class and gender moments in this beautiful city. My African-American, genderqueer partner, M’Bwende’s race is at times a connector to folks here – ‘Ah, you are African?’ Or – ‘You look Indian!’ And, ‘Indian, Indian?’ And my whiteness is a magnet around being obviously Western, and accordingly, possessed of out-of-scale resources in the midst of poverty.
On my end, around negotiating for motorized or occasionally bicycle rickshaw, I pay the Western fare without negotiation. I understand that the rate I am quoted is two or three times the local rate and my take is: of course it is. My salary is perhaps fifty to a hundred times higher than anyone’s annual income that I come across here daily, so what is my complaint? How dare I negotiate with someone who is on the disastrous end of surviving the monumental inequities of North/South global economics every day? I’m not going to do it. M’B has a harder time getting her head around this, as someone who has survived a lifetime of US cabbies refusing to pick her up, overcharging her, or discharging her abruptly based on race and gender. At one point a tuk-tuk driver dumps us summarily halfway to our destination after overcharging us. I just get out of the cab and start looking for another. She is outraged. She engages the driver. As we move on, I say, you know, you can get angry at him, but I just can’t. I have no ground to stand on whatsoever.
And in many ways, the engagement around cabs is eerily similar to our US situation. When I leave the hotel every morning, a group of rickshaw drivers instantly recognizes me and engages. When she leaves the hotel without me, no one notices her or offers. Whiteness, as always, is the magnet for help, service, and consideration.
In terms of gender, M’B has been almost universally ‘Sir’d since our arrival. I’ve had a couple of different sets of anxieties and places of relief around that. First, it’s taken me a minute to shift from the gender place I operate from on-campus and in the Kalamazoo community, which is to make her gender visible as a way of placing queerness into very anti-queer/non-queer community/spaces. So, if I say ‘she’ while our daughter Ella calls her Daddy at the coffee shop/lecture/local event, I am doing it in a context where I’ve assessed the relative physical threat to her and to all of us as minimal and opted for authenticity in the moment. She is Ella’s Daddy, and everyone around us can just have whatever moment they need to have about how that gendered reality sits with them.
Here, we were in a boat going up the Ganges our first evening, having a lively discussion with our guide, who has been calling her ‘sir’ the entire time we negotiated the boat arrangement and at some point I just say ‘she’ in the middle of all that and I can see her swing her attention toward me, like, are you really here? Get here. And I did, but this is a moment I have been having more and more lately -- gender slip: Get here. What context are we in? How are you sitting in your gender conforming space of privilege and not seeing the difficulty/danger you are placing me in? I have always drawn on the ah-ha moment I had reading Leslie Feinberg back in the early 90s, when s/he wrote that his/her gender is contextual – this is exactly how I’ve experienced M’Bs gender in our life together: she here, he there. And now that we are in this new context, I’m slow on the uptake, perhaps dangerously slow.
The place of relief I’ve felt has been around walking in the street late at night with him. During my visit last year, I was here with the wonderful Margaret Weidenhoft of K’s Center for International Programs, and we are both very light skinned redheads, which is a ridiculous rarity in Varanasi. Walking around the packed lanes late at night, we were a magnet for curiosity and merchants of every stripe – two white Western women unaccompanied by men. I felt daunted by how often we were approached for cabs or other kinds of sales; it was hard to have a conversation, and to be consistently polite and firm about our disinterest in buying anything. By contrast, one night, M’B and I walked about 3 kilometers back to Assi from the North Chaulk merchant district and I felt such relief to be walking with a brown man by my side. People still clocked me, but didn’t approach. We enjoyed taking in all the incredible sights and smells and movements together. We took our time in the lessening heat of the day; it was one of the pure pleasures of our trip. In the US, I have on occasion felt this kind of increased mobility with him in DC and Philly’s Black neighborhoods, but only by day. At night, I am worried about the police threatening/intervening in his movements, about how any passing person on the street is perceiving her gender, and how these interactions might evolve in an instant into threats or violence. I think the sense of space and relief -- as a couple -- that I had on the streets of Chaulk and Assi may have been a first in our 7+ years together.
All of this, of course, is taking place as we mount Kahani – the play devised by light-skinned, Western, (largely) gender-conforming students at Kalamazoo College on the tensions of gender and class in India! My head is spinning. I know it will take me many months to sift through all of the layers of race, gender, class and culture that I’ve been coursing through in my time here; I’m truly grateful for it.
Jaime Grant
On my end, around negotiating for motorized or occasionally bicycle rickshaw, I pay the Western fare without negotiation. I understand that the rate I am quoted is two or three times the local rate and my take is: of course it is. My salary is perhaps fifty to a hundred times higher than anyone’s annual income that I come across here daily, so what is my complaint? How dare I negotiate with someone who is on the disastrous end of surviving the monumental inequities of North/South global economics every day? I’m not going to do it. M’B has a harder time getting her head around this, as someone who has survived a lifetime of US cabbies refusing to pick her up, overcharging her, or discharging her abruptly based on race and gender. At one point a tuk-tuk driver dumps us summarily halfway to our destination after overcharging us. I just get out of the cab and start looking for another. She is outraged. She engages the driver. As we move on, I say, you know, you can get angry at him, but I just can’t. I have no ground to stand on whatsoever.
And in many ways, the engagement around cabs is eerily similar to our US situation. When I leave the hotel every morning, a group of rickshaw drivers instantly recognizes me and engages. When she leaves the hotel without me, no one notices her or offers. Whiteness, as always, is the magnet for help, service, and consideration.
In terms of gender, M’B has been almost universally ‘Sir’d since our arrival. I’ve had a couple of different sets of anxieties and places of relief around that. First, it’s taken me a minute to shift from the gender place I operate from on-campus and in the Kalamazoo community, which is to make her gender visible as a way of placing queerness into very anti-queer/non-queer community/spaces. So, if I say ‘she’ while our daughter Ella calls her Daddy at the coffee shop/lecture/local event, I am doing it in a context where I’ve assessed the relative physical threat to her and to all of us as minimal and opted for authenticity in the moment. She is Ella’s Daddy, and everyone around us can just have whatever moment they need to have about how that gendered reality sits with them.
Here, we were in a boat going up the Ganges our first evening, having a lively discussion with our guide, who has been calling her ‘sir’ the entire time we negotiated the boat arrangement and at some point I just say ‘she’ in the middle of all that and I can see her swing her attention toward me, like, are you really here? Get here. And I did, but this is a moment I have been having more and more lately -- gender slip: Get here. What context are we in? How are you sitting in your gender conforming space of privilege and not seeing the difficulty/danger you are placing me in? I have always drawn on the ah-ha moment I had reading Leslie Feinberg back in the early 90s, when s/he wrote that his/her gender is contextual – this is exactly how I’ve experienced M’Bs gender in our life together: she here, he there. And now that we are in this new context, I’m slow on the uptake, perhaps dangerously slow.
The place of relief I’ve felt has been around walking in the street late at night with him. During my visit last year, I was here with the wonderful Margaret Weidenhoft of K’s Center for International Programs, and we are both very light skinned redheads, which is a ridiculous rarity in Varanasi. Walking around the packed lanes late at night, we were a magnet for curiosity and merchants of every stripe – two white Western women unaccompanied by men. I felt daunted by how often we were approached for cabs or other kinds of sales; it was hard to have a conversation, and to be consistently polite and firm about our disinterest in buying anything. By contrast, one night, M’B and I walked about 3 kilometers back to Assi from the North Chaulk merchant district and I felt such relief to be walking with a brown man by my side. People still clocked me, but didn’t approach. We enjoyed taking in all the incredible sights and smells and movements together. We took our time in the lessening heat of the day; it was one of the pure pleasures of our trip. In the US, I have on occasion felt this kind of increased mobility with him in DC and Philly’s Black neighborhoods, but only by day. At night, I am worried about the police threatening/intervening in his movements, about how any passing person on the street is perceiving her gender, and how these interactions might evolve in an instant into threats or violence. I think the sense of space and relief -- as a couple -- that I had on the streets of Chaulk and Assi may have been a first in our 7+ years together.
All of this, of course, is taking place as we mount Kahani – the play devised by light-skinned, Western, (largely) gender-conforming students at Kalamazoo College on the tensions of gender and class in India! My head is spinning. I know it will take me many months to sift through all of the layers of race, gender, class and culture that I’ve been coursing through in my time here; I’m truly grateful for it.
Jaime Grant
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