Navigating Queer Subjectivities: Identity Negotiation and Spatial Constraints Among Sexual Minority Women in Kerala, India

Psychological theories often conceptualise identity as a coherent, interiorised essence, a framing that constrains the fluid and relational experiences of sexual minority individuals. In caste-structured contexts like India, identity emerges from continual negotiation across caste, class, gender and religion rather than interior coherence. Drawing on queer phenomenology and critical intersectionality within an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study examines the experiences of sexual minority women in Kerala as they negotiate their identities through sociospatial regulation. Semistructured interviews revealed identity negotiation as a constant interplay of disorientation, reorientation and subversion articulated through three major themes: (a) spatially induced dilemma, which includes dilemmas about self-expression, dissonance in corporeal schema and out-of-sync temporality; (b) navigating spatial constraints, marked by layered and anticipatory shame, religious and ideological tensions, disembodiment shaped by structurally embedded shame materialising as internalised homonegativity, contested queer authenticity and affective negotiations around normativity; (c) embodied everyday acts of subjective subversion, involving flexible reorientations, agentic reworkings of failure and reimagined futures beyond dominant hetero-coherent narratives. By foregrounding nonlinearity and situated subjective subversion, this study critiques essentialist psychological models and emphasises the precarious, situated practices of queer becoming.