Touch Me, Ghent

The exhibition Touch Me forms part of my doctoral research project, Fashionable and Transgressive: The Effects of Queer Style on Masculinities in Contemporary Indian Fashion. It is a collection of moments and reflections from my ethnographic fieldwork in India in 2019 - 2024. The exhibition explores the textures of touching in relation to gender embodiment and body awareness in Indian men's fashion. Touching is an attempt to reach out and to understand other people: it effectively transforms people into textured objects. Understanding textures allows us to visualize the particularity of queer embodiment in fashion.

To investigate whether specific fashion styles can be used to portray and express queer masculinity in Indian fashion, I conceived of symbolic groups of queer subjects – kothi, panthi, gender nonbinary and neo-royal queer men – each of whom reveal distinct queer sensibilities different from hegemonic masculinity practices. Drawing upon the material collected on the men and building on ethnographic fieldwork, I performed an act of curation through the lens of fashion and produced photographic images that access queer “tastes.” A crucial segment of my research was devoted to four cases of fashion photography production. Each case was a collaborative and tender attempt to examine the formation of queer masculinity in independent fashion photography. The titles Hyderabad, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai indicate the place of the photoshoot, and the different practices and communities of fashion professionals open to experimenting with affective scenes. These case studies were collective efforts to expand thinking beyond the categories of MSM, TG and CD by making a space for the appearance of gender and sex-atypical identities in independent fashion photography.

The exhibition invites you to imagine how queer aesthetic practices and visual gender performances may change conventional perceptions of manliness in India.

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