Clara added the final touches to our makeup, took a swig of the cheap whiskey lying by the sink, and we were ready to go. I had blue mascara and pink eye-shadow on, Clara was a purple-goddess with purple lips, eyes and hair, and Dick had smudged black shadowy eyes to match the leather skirt and goth look. “Three minutes to the bus” said someone smart enough to check Google map directions, and we ran down to the corner, to catch seats at the back where we could continue to swig our bottle of whiskey. Reaching at midnight, the line at the door was already considerably long, but then this was one of the most hyped parties in Berlin, famous through its internationally followed Instagram page featuring sex-positive photography. Though, to say that this was a sex-positive party would be a bit of an euphemism, ticket prices went down 2 euros for semi-naked entrants, and 2 euros further for those who enter completely unclothed. 

Luckily the line moved fast and after getting an instruction on consent from the butch femme at the door we were ushered into a large hall at the bottom of a three-storey building. We jostled to find some space amongst the crowd of eager bodies, shedding their outdoor clothes to get ready to party. Leather, net, glitter, thongs, jockstraps and other slinky pieces swam around us, with the high temperatures in the venue encouraging people to lose their clothes, and their inhibitions. I stripped down to my black underwear, put on a faux leather corset, and I was ready to experience the fantasies of Pornceptual. 

We climbed three floors up the East-Berlin ex-factory building – now converted to a cultural center – to reach the main party area. Three dance floors, two dark rooms, and multiple little nooks and corners provided enough room to keep moving about looking for friends, lovers, and new adventures. Bodies of all shapes and sizes were in attendance, often close-to completely nude, most white, though with a non-negligible percentage of black and coloured party people. In these circumstances, the transparency of nudity and the temporary suspension of biology, made gender and sexuality largely opaque. In the throbbing space of the dance floor, one could no longer assume identity through the sparse clothes or accessories of one’s dance partner. Within the multiple variances in expression, it felt rather futile to try and classify anyone as male or on-the-masculine-side-of-the-spectrum, breaking my usual means of seeking partners in queer spaces. In the middle of the night I found Dick taking a pause in one of the quieter areas, and joined them for a breather. We spoke about how liberating it was for both of us to enter spaces where we didn’t have to conform to either ends of the gender-binary, and how so often the idea of a linear spectrum across the binary was limiting. We bonded over acts of playing as different shades of grey at different moments and with different people, but also at the same time how this fluidity makes these interactions so much more complex. To understand and negotiate desire without easy classifications of identities:without the demarcation of spaces where straight or gay people congregate. Maybe one just has to ask, or go ahead and express. We were speaking generally, but also of each other, of prodding the moment for potential. Moritz ruptured the moment, finding us just then in our corner. The conversation shifted and unfortunately I didn’t see Dick again that night, or the rest of my six-week stay in Berlin.

We’ve certainly made progress beyond the framing of gender a two-pole back and white binary, and a sizable chunk of people will agree (at least theoretically) that gender can take on a number of shades on the spectrum of grey between these binaries. However, this still feels too limited, too monochrome to encompass the variety of hues that I have felt and seen people express around me. The structured categories of male and female, and the space they create between them are just not enough to hold the pluralities of beingness that inhabits our bodies. Thinking further about this constraint, and the idea of grey, I landed upon an article that speaks about the history of Payne’s Grey. The colour was invented and named after watercolour artist William Payne, who came up with the formula in the early 1800s. The interesting part is that this colour contains no black. It is instead a combination of lake, raw sienna and indigo resulting in a shade that appears both dark-blue and grey depending on its surrounding context. (N.M.D) Thinking back at shade cards, grey sections contain a multitude of swatches that are much more than a pure mixture of black and white, tints of blue and green, and, purple and brown. Consider then a monochromatic line going from white to black expanding into a plane holding these multiple shades of grey, continuing to blend and saturate until they are flashes of a bright colour. This spectrum of colour, which manifests a multidimensional space instead of a linearity may be a better model to understand our own and other people’s expression of gender. 

As I traverse queer spaces now, and gradually even in spaces not designated as queer, I attempt to hold this expanded multi-dimensional model of gender for myself and others. The multiple possible positions that one can hold complicate the chances of guessing to the extent that one sees the futility in trying. This multi-gendered mode of moving through the world, however, presents different kinds of challenges; foremost amongst them is a new kind of labour of interacting with another being without the primary default classifications of gender that our minds are so used to falling back to. The absence of easy gender classifications also can nullify boxes of sexual orientation, leaving one without the expected signposts to navigate romantic and sexual liaisons. What we require, and I am keenly interested to follow in developing, is an evolved lexicon of getting to know each other without the processes of easy categorization. An important part of our Will, will be the formation of a syntax that has different foundational blocks than the binary of gender as we know it today.

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I travelled directly from Berlin to Mexico City, and while CDMX (as the city is branded) is nothing like the German Capital, it is  much more reminiscent of Indian megacities Mumbai and New Delhi. Seeing people jostle for every inch of space on the sidewalk (point to note: yes they do have sidewalks everywhere unlike our cities), experiencing sweaty bodies pressed together on public transport made me feel just like home. Something about my skin colour and appearance also made Mexicans assume I was at home, with strangers and new acquaintances assuming a fluency of Spanish. One delightful lady, whom I danced the Cumbia with insisted to my friends, that I must actually be from the state of Veracruz. This repeated conflation of identity, presumably based primarily on my brownness, sowed the seed for this thinking on the possibilities of transnational solidarities that could grow from such cultural adjacencies.

José Esteban Muñoz, speaking at Duke University about The Brown Commons through Wu Tsang’s film Wildness, recalls the time when Tsang mentioned the term brown on an online forum to describe what was happening in the [silver platter], which lead to them being criticized in the comments sections. Tsang was sarcastically asked, “If Asian was Brown now?” Muñoz goes on to say, “In my deployment of the term, Asian can be potentially just that. Not in a way that inhibits us from thinking of a critical Asianness or even Yellowness, but Brownness that is co-presence with other modes of difference, a choreography of singularities that touch, in contact, but do not meld. Brownness is not meant to do anything but co-exist with Blackness, Asianness, Indigeneity, and other terms that have manifest descriptive force to render particularities of various modes of striving in the world. Brownness is larger than US Latino centric renderings and offerings. Latino lives are one portal into this atonement of Brownness in the world that I’m calling for. Brownness is certainly larger than the sets of experience and the pluralities of Latin American immigrants and their experience in the United States illustrate. Brownness is not an easy path, it is most certainly a contested debate and a productive one.” (Muñoz) 

Muñoz seeds his notion of brownness through the Latin American experience, but immigrants with a South-Asian heritage also use the term as a form of self-identification. As Anouck Carsignol notes in 2014, “[the] label ‘Brown’, re-appeared recently in North America in a new, positive context. […] the idea of ‘Browness’ can also be perceived as the promotion of ethnic and cultural hybridity,—a way to escape the traditional white or black dichotomy in North America, an alternative to cultural homogeneity and racial purity.” (Carsignol) Others like Simran Randhawa and Danielle Sandhu have publicly used the term brown to describe themselves from their locations in UK and Canada respectively. Toronto-based author Kamal Al-Solaylee went even forward with his book ‘Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (To Everyone)’ opened up this classification and looked at brown people all over, from Muslims in France to domestic workers in Hong Kong.

And while these formulations already start to define a fascinating transnational space, they are all created in response to whiteness. As a brown person having had some amazing encounters in another brown country at the opposite end of the globe, I am eager to have more conversations that are not mediated by our colonizers. To modify Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s famous question, “Can the subaltern speak to each other?” (Spivak) Expanding this idea of brown that has grown out of anti-racial movements in North America and Europe, and has come to hold important de-colonial thinking, to also include the sharing of practices of negotiating our complex possitionalities within our own regions. Multi-layered patterns of immigration and invasion across Latin America and South Asia have left large parts of our societies holding positions of power that make us oppressors and oppressed simultaneously in overlapping global and regional contexts. Scholar Susana Vargas Cervantes throws light on this phenomena in Latin America, through her work on pigmentocracy, a system of discrimination based on skin tone that grew out of Hispanic segregations. She writes, “Within this system, skin tones are perceived based on social and cultural interventions and at once linked to a certain socioeconomic level. In that system as well, class and skin tone, though they are not identical, work as self-reproducing and inter-dependent power apparatuses. I therefore argue that, in Mexico at least, it is impossible to speak of social class without simultaneously speaking of skin tonalities and how its structure constitutes a pigmentocratic ‘system’.” (Cervantes) With little extrapolation one can see the adjacencies between pigmentocracy in Mexico and Caste-based and indigenous discrimination in India. Both systems create hierarchies of resources and access that get passed down through familial lineages, one more flexible through intermarriage and one made extremely rigid over centuries of oppression. A history of the colonization of Mexico might in fact gives us some cues to the original textures of the current caste social order in South Asia, but that is a longer thesis for another time. What I am interested in at this moment is the inner work of plotting ourselves on these scales, that intersects in intricate ways with forms of gender, class, locational, lingual and other privileges, and recognizing our modes of practice that can both utilize and positively mobilize these privileges. To ask such a question, currently, on many minds in India, how does one negotiate the support of Palestine’s bid for freedom while simultaneously grappling with the Indian state’s actions in Kashmir?

As we move towards more nuanced discourses of identity politics, seeing the tints of colour amongst the spectrum of grey, we must find ways to hold pluralisms, contradictions, and multiple adjacencies together, in ourselves and for others. The negotiation of this process cannot happen only in response to whiteness, but rather between the groups that the colonial project has consistently labelled ‘the other’. By building upon Muñoz’s formulation of Brownness as a ‘choreography of singularities that touch…but do not meld’ (Muñoz) we might be able to fashion a ensemble that sows fresh seeds of transnationalism in soils of ancestral knowledge, with the hope of navigating complex questions through a kinship of adjacencies.