Eat, Prey, Love: Dating white women as an Indian lesbian

Janaye Kirtikar (she/her)

Janaye Kirtikar is a Marathi Indian/Pākehā writer from Pōneke, Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2023, she completed her Master’s thesis on Indian women’s post-Partition literature and the ethics of representing traumatic histories. Janaye has an academic paper published in the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies (NZ), and creative non-fiction published in Pantograph Punch (NZ) and Bad Form (UK). She reads, she writes, and she stares at the ocean.

It was September 2023 that I was in London, two months following a deeply one-sided heartbreak, and found myself on my first ever date with a white woman. Until then I’d chosen to exclude white people from my dating life in the hope that people of colour would treat me with some basic level of respect. In the end it was a woman of colour who hurt me the most. I left the country six weeks later and redownloaded Tinder, ready to face the white frontier.

That first date was its own kind of baptism by fire and this white girl is now referred to amongst my friends as The Zionist. Once we ordered drinks and sat down, she said, “Not to sound ignorant but…why do you have an Australian accent?” Soon it became clear that she had expected an “Indian from India”, not one born and raised in New Zealand. She was also on her first ever date with a Brown woman, and so we briefly talked about the experience we were both having. 

It’s hard, sometimes, to articulate the subtleties of being exotified and Othered, to describe how the energy someone directs towards you can be imbued with it even when only a few marginal things have actually been said. That was the tone I picked up on during our date. But, honestly, she made me laugh and I would’ve hooked up with her that night if I didn’t have my sister’s only house key. Instead, we messaged and flirted and planned to see each other again when I got back from Albania. However, the fall of The Zionist was imminent.

A few days after October 7th I posted something pro-Palestine on my Instagram story. Possibly something about resistance to occupation being justified. She took this as an invitation to change tone, express her uninformed opinion on the unfolding violence and initiate a conversation where she was, frankly, out of her depth. Before getting into this, however, she was first moved to express her white fragility. As a white person, she felt that she’s expected to take a stance on every political issue and that this was a burden to her. By asking me to recognise the difficulty of her situation as Israel began its onslaught on Gaza, she implicitly differentiated between us as the white and the non-white, and effectively ended our romantic dynamic. 

What she sought from me wasn’t a conversation between equals, but a person of colour she could use to alleviate her white guilt. To people like her, the non-white Other inherently occupies the moral high ground which white people must appeal to. The white person receives this ethical stamp of approval and can then comfortably move on with their life, secure in their identity as a POC-verified good person. 

I’ve been used countless times by white people to appease their sense of moral inadequacy, to make them feel okay about not knowing how white supremacy continues to ravage the world. This is something that happens a lot in the west when you’re Brown and political, but these interactions bore me. It’s also just not sexy to pull the ‘I feel bad for being white’ card one date in. I called it off. A few days later she apologised – “Israel is a settler-colonial state” – and for the better part of a year she posted about Palestine every day. I was glad that she had been forced to consider, however briefly, her place in a racialised world after reminding me of mine.

In her essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” (1992), bell hooks argues that “Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (21). The non-white Other offers a “seductive promise” to change the white individual through sex, “to leave behind white ‘innocence’ and enter the world of ‘experience.’”(22, 23). I’ve been aware of the white gaze since childhood, where white adults would openly wonder at my skin colour and express their fascination about mixed-race kids. At some point I realised that through the white gaze, ethnic people are objects to be observed. It’s these experiences that made me wary of being used, in hooks’ words, as an “alternative playground” (23) for white people to experiment, explore and escape from themselves. All in all, my first romantic encounter with a white woman confirmed my suspicions. Before anything else, I would be seen as an Indian woman; the non-white Other who offers moral validation beyond whiteness.

What has surprised me is how being seen as the non-heterosexual Other has begun to similarly influence my life. It’s comparatively new to me, something I’ve mainly experienced in adulthood; I only started dating in my twenties and my friendship circle stayed the same those first years out of high school. Other than straight men who found it difficult to hold a conversation with me, my queerness didn’t really impact my social interactions. After a second puberty in my mid-twenties where I’ve settled into myself and my style more, my queerness has started to affect how I’m perceived. While I’m aware of both overt and insidious forms of homophobia, I wasn’t quite equipped for the varied and creative ways I could be Othered.

At a flat party last year I was quickly identified as the capital ‘L’ Lesbian in the room. Alternatively, according to my friend, “the most fuckable person at the party”. An event full of Brown women, I expected to blend in. However, I quickly realised that my Otherness was still in play, highlighted by my sexuality rather than my ethnicity. I was warned that the woman I was flirting with had a boyfriend and that I was likely going to be mucked around – that she had, in fact, hooked up with a woman when she started seeing him. Another woman locked eyes on me late in the evening and decided to start laying it on thick, drunkenly holding onto me and asking if I wanted to fuck, that she’d never been with a woman before. It was clear that I’d become a kind of beacon for women who wanted me, not for who I am as a person, but for what I offer as a gateway to queerness. Someone to explore themselves with; to validate their sexuality and enter the world of experience. Their pursuit of me was what hooks argues goes beyond sexual interaction and gratification, that “The direct objective was not simply to sexually possess the Other; it was to be changed in some way by the encounter” (24).

Yet what stood out the most occurred at the end of the night. After the one woman had been inappropriate towards me for a while, her friend said to mine, “Janaye’s not going home with her, right?” It suddenly felt as though these people saw me as the predatory lesbian, someone without morals who would get with a drunk, inexperienced girl just because I could. At no point had I reciprocated this person’s behaviour. She was legless and I was basically sober, and there’s nothing cute about being hit on by someone who’s blinking out of time. This didn’t matter to her friends, though. It hurt and angered me that these people I didn’t know, who had at no point expressed concern that their friend was being creepy towards me, assumed I couldn’t be trusted. It was the first time that I’ve personally been painted with the sexually-deviant brush, but the feeling it left me with was uncomfortably familiar. 

The predatory lesbian figure draws from the same well as the angry Brown girl trope; there’s a natural aggressor and a helpless victim. Whether I’m dealing with a white girl crying crocodile tears or an inexperienced queer woman being inappropriate, I’m seen as the only person involved with agency and, therefore, responsible for whatever conflict we’re in. At this party, I was first made into an object of desire and then an object of fear. Both forms of Othering made me feel grubby, like I was a caricature rather than a person.

Being the non-white, non-heterosexual Other filters all interactions within my white heterosexual context. When a white bisexual woman I’ve only ever spoken to once sits on my lap at a party and starts grinding on me, her Brown boyfriend in the next room, what am I if not the Brown Lesbian Other? I’ve not met a person of colour without this sixth sense, developed over a lifetime of noticing sly comments, lingering stares and obsessive interactions. For an Indian girl, there’s a fine line between being exotic and repulsive, and ultimately they function on the same spectrum. So earlier this year, when a queer white woman described sex with me as “sacred”, an alarm bell went off.

At first I thought I was emotionally stunted. I had definitely not been using the word sacred – “awesome”, actually, was my go-to. I could’ve also said hot, fun, special, sexy. But sacred didn’t come to mind. I began to feel weird about it. Then I told my younger sister and she laughed, “You’re like her Hindu goddess.” Before this, I had convinced myself I was being paranoid and sensitive, that it’s just because this woman is a bit of a hippie that she’d used that kind of language. But hearing my sister’s reaction validated the uneasiness that had started to settle in my stomach. 

I was mostly happy to chalk it up as just another intense comment that’s typical of this person, though, because to me our experience together had actually been lovely. I thought we had dealt with each other honestly and knew where we stood. Two people who had a connection that couldn’t be pursued because we lived in different cities, with a hopefulness of seeing each other again someday. But things crashed and burned relatively quickly after that.

To me, “sacred” is the language of the voyeur, not of someone interested in a genuine, flawed connection with another person. She had slept with me soon after breaking up with her boyfriend, and then again days before she began pursuing a guy in her friend group. Once she started seeing her new man I became more of a nuisance than anything. It wasn’t exactly surprising that she’d moved on quickly, but I found it hard to reconcile with what she had said to me about our time together. I began to feel that she had sought me out for a particular purpose, that our fling was in fact her post-breakup search for the “fantasy of Otherness” that hooks also describes as the “fantasy of the primitive”:

It is precisely that longing for the pleasure that has led the white west to sustain a romantic fantasy of the “primitive” and the concrete search for a real primitive paradise, whether that location be a country or a body, a dark continent or dark flesh, perceived as the perfect embodiment of that possibility. (27)

Following a fraught heterosexual breakup, pleasure with the fantasy Other offers the potential to transform the queer white woman. My queer Brown body became a medium through which this woman could cleanse herself of a bad boyfriend before moving on to another. As the weeks and months passed, it became clearer that I functioned primarily as a symbol of the experience I could provide her; to bridge the gap between her boyfriends, and to offer “sensual and spiritual renewal” (26) through our encounter. I embodied the real primitive paradise, an oasis between heterosexual destinations. Once I served my purpose, she didn’t feel the need to treat me with respect, even as a friend.

I’ve found it difficult to accept this conclusion and have had to present the situation to my friends time and again to understand it. I don’t want to think of our time together negatively because it was truly special to me, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. If I decide that she treated me as an experience to be had rather than as a person to connect with, I will then realise what hooks’ describes as the Other’s “over-riding fear” (39), and what was my own apprehension about dating white people in the first place. That is, “that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten”. I don’t know if I’m ready to admit that this is what happened between us. 

Deciding whether or not to publish this essay has posed a moral dilemma. Other than The Zionist, these people are in the same social circles as me and we have many shared friends. In each draft and redraft, I’ve fought the urge to do damage control – She’s thought of highly by her community; She apologised; We’re on good terms; I don’t hold this against her – but it’s not really relevant. The point I’m making isn’t that these people are bad and have committed some unforgivable crime against me. Honestly, I’ve experienced worse. The issue isn’t even that they intended to act badly towards me; it’s that they did so unconsciously. 

Queer people can act in ways which reinscribe society’s racism and homophobia, and white queer people in particular aren’t absolved of the harm they cause by virtue of their proximity to oppression. Each of these women would consider themselves politically aware, many even politically active. Yet in these transactional interactions with me they’ve reinforced the racist, homophobic structures that ultimately marginalise us all. And it does feel transactional – they were mostly interested in what I offered them, how I could resolve a crisis in self and, in the end, it didn’t really matter to them how their actions made me feel. It's this dehumanisation that is at the core of Othering.

These experiences have clearly impacted me but it’s taken writing them down to fully appreciate how much. When I was debriefing a friend about yet another strange interaction I’d had with a white woman, she was insistent that I read “Eating the Other”, sure that I would resonate with hooks’ analysis. I read it and felt an immediate sense of recognition. Years before I was even born, hooks articulated these lived realities into theory. This inspired me to analyse my own life, to make sense of my own experiences and, importantly, to do so without seeking catharsis. 

While this essay isn’t a purely academic exercise, I don’t feel relief in seeing the pattern of my dating life set out in this way. In fact, at times the reality of what I’ve laid out here has weighed on me. What I want from this piece is to evidence my feelings, to understand them more fully, and to speak to an experience I know many queer people of colour share. “Eating the Other” is now a touchstone for me to remember that my queer Brown life is in conversation with others. “Eat, Prey, Love” is my reply. 


Works Cited

hooks, bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and resistance.” Black Looks: Race and Representation, pp. 21–39. South End Press. 1992.

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