Chasing Queer Utopia: Affective (Im)possibilities of a Lesbian Future in Suniti Namjoshi and K. Vaishali’s Life Writings

Discourse on queer women in India has gained momentum in recent years, making lesbians a political, cultural, and literary subject. Life writings of such subjects imagine and embody possible queer futures within cultural productions, functioning as “utopian performativity.” In this study, the work of India’s foremost “out” lesbian writer, Suniti Namjoshi, Goja: An Autobiographical Myth (2000), is analyzed in parallel with K. Vaishali’s Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India (2023), exploring the envisioning of a future for South Asian lesbians beyond present limitations and how utopian thoughts guide their lives. Informed by José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of queer utopia as a horizon of possibility, this article addresses the tensions hindering a queer utopia “here” in India, as well as the “impossibility” of imagining it elsewhere, while highlighting the turn toward memoir writing as a utopian strategy to understand lesbian subjectivities in India.