Lockdown-scapes: Queer felt lifeworlds with art-based ethnography

This essay presents a collaboratively curated art-based ethnographic reflection of ‘lockdown-scapes’. The artworks shared depict the peripheralised lifeworlds of queerness and Brahminical patriarchal structures against the backdrop of the COVID-19 lockdown in select locations in India. We creatively mobilise temporal queer lifeworlds residing in marginalised but resilient geographies of the neighbourhood, prison, street and dairy farm. We highlight how art and dialogue can converge to create queer lifeworlds. Our collaborative dialogue across differential intergenerational precarities, dominant advantages and carceralities is situated within the messy boundaries of visual imaging and ethnographic methods. This essay interrupts the boundaries of what are considered respectable and normative methods of anthropological research. Our aim is to amplify creative processes of queer worldmaking that centre art and affect in everyday survival.