Queer Constitutional Imaginations in India

By Shivani Mamgain · 2026 · 8 min read

The relationship between law and intimacy in India is structured through
a tension between constitutional promises and social realities…

Queer legal theory offers a way of reading law not as a fixed system, but as
a field of negotiation shaped by power, identity, and lived experience…

Law and Intimacy

The regulation of family and relationships in India demonstrates how deeply
law is entangled with normative expectations…

Law does not merely regulate intimacy; it produces it.

This insight allows us to move beyond a rights-based framework and instead
examine how law structures the very possibility of relationships…

*This essay draws from ongoing doctoral research on queer kinship and law in India.