About

This doctoral project theorises ‘Cleaving’ as an original queer aesthetic concept and critical performance methodology that emerges at the intersections of caste, gender, and sexuality in India. Through detailed performance analyses of Sharanya Ramprakash & Aravani Art Project’s 'Nava' (2019), Mandeep Raikhy’s 'Queen Size' (2016) & 'Hallucinations of an Artifact' (2023), Diya Naidu’s 'Red Dress Waali Ladki' (2020), and the Urban Folk Project’s 'Yellamma and Other Stories' (2016) as case studies, I aim to investigate how these contemporary dance, theatre and sonic folk-art performances fracture and reform sensory aesthetics of normative, conformist, caste embodiments and linguistic expressions. 'Cleaving' may manifest through the ocular, haptic and sonic registers in these performances, such as the dramaturgical disruption of the darsanic gaze (sacred vision), regulating touchable and untouchable bodies, mirroring the gaze within museum spaces; or the sonic potentials of the hijra’s (ethnic transfemmes) clap on stage; or as other dramaturgical methods. By examining these disruptive possibilities nestled in the act of ‘Cleaving’, this thesis argues for ‘Cleaving’ as a queer sensory aesthetic and a disjuncture from normative performance aesthetics and sociality. 

An original contribution to the fields of Dance, Theatre, Performance Studies; Gender Studies and South Asian Studies, this project foregrounds the sensory experience of queer aesthetics through ‘Cleaving’ conformist aesthetics. In my past work (2021, 2023), ‘Cleaving’ operated as an act of 'splitting' from conformities of an aesthetics of touch and contact, which I now aim to deepen as an analysis of 'suspension', privileging queer instability and fluidity. Through aesthetic re-entries into legal debates, ‘Cleaving’ transcends violent legal and institutional foreclosures that have constrained queer identities and non-conforming expressions, mobilizing transformative shifts for artists, audiences and society at large. Conceptualizing anti-caste, queer futures through dance and performance practice, ‘Cleaving’ actively engages with the embodied politics of touch, care, resistance, and solidarity.