Urban upheavals as practices of new sexual ethics: “Kiss of Love” movement in India

ABSTRACT The paper probes the historical and cultural-utopian rationale behind the wide acceptability of “Kiss of Love” (KoL) movement in India that sprang up during 2015 and assesses its theoretical significance as a heterotopic social movement. Heterotopia embodies tensions between place and non-place in public spaces. In the Indian context, streets have been places of extreme social segregation in terms of caste, gender and sexuality. Heterotopia does not mark “liberation” or “confinement,” but produces sites porous with openings so that the possibilities of alternate lives remain open. In this reconstitution of public spaces for resistance, “a passion for improvisation” articulates acts of resistance in the mediated environments of post-civil society social movements that remain absorbent, always in flux, always contested and never predetermined.