Abstract
“Student housing” rarely figures in the contemporary urban Indian public imagination because of a deeply rooted cis-heteronormative conflation of marriage, housing, and permanence. What does it mean for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ+) identifying postsecondary students to belong in an everyday trans-/homonegative society compounded with increasingly unaffordable and inadequate urban housing market? I attend to this question through empirical case studies of on- and off-campus geographies of student housing at North Campus, DU, Delhi and Deonar Campus, TISS, Mumbai — two higher education institutional (HEI) campuses known for their radical student-led gender-based housing activism. Gender, however, cannot be activated in isolation, as it intersects with a range of identity axes such as class, caste, region, religion, and (rarely specified) sexuality which then gets consolidated into a monolithic foundation for a normative domestic blueprint. I argue, this normative domestic blueprint gets magnified and projected beyond familial homes, onto all student spaces including university campuses and student housing through a process I have called, “cisheteronormative familification” that leads to “queer domicide” — i.e., the destruction of non-normative homes. In contrast, student housing acts as crucial “counter-sites” — heterotopia — that opens the space for enacting queerness and transness as a blueprint for alternative living. I employ my transdisciplinary professional training in geography, visual art, and architecture to develop a “trans imaging” technique to first, see-through and spatio-visually counter the queer domicide, and second, offer lessons from student housing to reimagine non-normative homes.

About the Speaker
Chan Arun-Pina earned their PhD in Critical Human Geography at York University, Toronto, Canada. Their dissertation, “Trans Imaging on Non-Normative Homes: The Critical Geographies of Higher Education LGBTQ+ Student Housing in Delhi and Mumbai, India” provides a spatio-visual critique of cisheteronormative architecture and planning of higher education institutional (HEI) campuses as well as on- and off-campus student housing typologies. They are currently Post-Doctoral Visiting Scholar at the CITY Institute, York University working on a transnational dialogue thinking alongside the city campuses in Delhi and Toronto.