Queer Bollywood
Gopinath, Gayatri. "Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema."
Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade. Ed. Andrew Grossman. Binghamton:
Harrington Park Press, 2000. 283-297.
Gayatri Gopinath takes on Bollywood with a queering gaze in this work from Queer Asian Cinema. In this particular passage, Gopinath analyzes the hirja character and its stereotypical attributes. Her two main points are that the effeminate gay male character is coded as foreign and Western, and that the gay character can only exist in mainstream cinema within these stereotypes. However, independent films may provide an alternative.
Kapur, Ratna. "Postcolonial Erotic Disruptions: Legal Narratives Of Culture, Sex, And Nation In India." Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 10.2 (31 March 2001). [Gender Watch] 27 January 2002.
In many Women Make Movies films about gay identity and culture (for example, Khush), society and homosexuality are opposed, even to the point of gay and lesbian people finding their culture and their homosexuality internally at odds.
Kotz says of Abigal Child's films:
By closing on such a "corrupt" lesbian image, one not "free," but completely embedded in histories of oppression and resistance, Mayhem implicitly questions the production of sexual identities that are "stable, natural, and good" -- as well as questioning the privileged position of a feminist "critique" which seeks to authorize it sown status as rational analysis, somehow outside such histories of distortion, entrapment, and desire. In contrast, it presents a kind of alternate map through its idiosyncratically assembled film history, offering a proliferation of sexual identities, pleasures, and dangers. It's a strategy that locates lesbian desire within the romantic and voyeuristic interplays of cinematic representation, rather than claiming to articulate a new, distinct language or an autonomously defined lesbian sexuality. As such, it refuses to isolate or compartmentalize lesbian desire; it positions it as always already a part of these systems of desire, deviant and subversive, to be sure, but not separate.
This passage offers many questions: those stated explicitly -- Who was this meant for? Who is the intended audience? Who is turned on? What
Nguyen, Mimi. "Why Queer Theory?". Worse Than Queer.
As a theorist, cultural critic and zine writer, Mimi Nguyen lives theory. Her autobiographical piece "Why Queer Theory?" explains her need for and love of queer theory.
...But again, I don't mind the instability, that gap of disidentification, and I like to make queer theory work for me. Such that I came here a refugee and had to be "naturalized," there is something incomplete about my interpellation as "U.S. citizen," suggesting the impossibility of fully belonging to the nation as well as the impossibility of totally disidentifying with it. (It is, after all, through the disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms of the U.S. nation-state that I am here.) Moreover, it seems I make a bad (diasporic) daughter as well; "unnatural" because of my bi-queerness, my penchant for loud punk music and supposedly "Western" feminist politics. The notion of performativity makes all the difference. In suggesting that there is no "essence" to the self, only acts whose repetition constitute an identity to be duly attached, queer theory's given me the tools to examine the violence of these other kinds of normativity that concern me. For example: those that define both nations and diasporas as given communities tied by the concepts of "blood" and "kinship;" and how patriotisms and claims to citizenship (to any nation, queer, diasporic or otherwise backed by state apparatus) are always repetitive performative acts that, as such, consolidate the logic (and law) of nationalism.
And while the so-far universal subject of queer epistemes is whiter, richer and, uh, more male than I might like, I'd like to queer that particular norm. (I'm a different kind of queer.) It's impossible, after all, to imagine that "queer" only skews gender and sexuality, and not race or class or nation, as if we might line up our social categories like cans in a cupboard, as if they weren't just intersecting but mutually constituitive. To hark back to my p-rock days when a lipstick-smudged Kathleen Hanna clambered on stage, "We've got to show them we're worse than queer."'
Following a discussion of the absence of gay male film-makers/presence behind the camera in Sylvie Gilbert's selection/ collection of films entitled "Much Sense: Erotics and Life."
….Whatever the reason, women artists' appropriation of sexual imagery, their use of the body as a blank screen and malleable clay, is a political ultimatum that the powers that be understood all too well. This body on which we carve our revolt and register every sensation, this body from which we squeeze every drop of pleasure and pain and reach out every gesture of community and autonomy, this body is a battleground-not only against the virus but also against censorship, conformity, and control. In the province of the hypperreal and the all too Real Women, our bodies are not metaphors. (243-245)
Here, Waugh highlights myriad complexities, questions and concerns regarding sexuality, gender, representation, audience, inclusion, body, and politics (just to name a few) that seem to surface frequently within the more specific framework of WMM films and our discussions of them. In the first segment, he respectfully but pressingly brings up unendingly touchy questions: how do we negotiate the space between "the urgent priority of focusing on the women's voices and images reshaping the vocabularies of bodies and sexualities" and the work many people view as just-as-urgent, of breaking down essentialist notions of gender (especially with regard to biology)? Just what difference does gender make when approaching filmmaking/identity/representation/exploration and is that difference same-enough, so to speak, to justify the formulation of communities which can be exclusionary? Where is the balance between healing, powerful space and exclusionary, oppressive space? When the defining lines are drawn by gender, what happens when - as in Much Sense - women make films representing male homoerotic experience? Waugh seems to see no problem with this but - on the contrary - with the strict confines under which such a film is received/read. The example of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is a good one, and extends just as well to WMM. And while MWMF was made to confront these questions head-on and render a decision, WMM is in quite another situation. As the greater organization whose primary criteria for eligibility is being female, it represents a concrete symbol of the debates Waugh touches on above (with the interesting difference that the MWMF's gender restrictions extended to audience and WMM's applies strictly to the artists). As an umbrella group for a larger community of artists, however, WMM films are not limited in subject matter and are free to use the power (money, distribution, name value, etc.) afforded by WMM association to explore these very issues. In the second segment, Waugh comes back around to his initial point, offering the body itself as a means through which to mediate these debates and both "take our power back" and fight constricting, damaging biological essentializations of gender/experience. The body (and filming/representation thereof) not as metaphor but actuality, bringing the invisible to the visible, the place where these questions duke it out, come together, and find expression in real life. Again, several WMM films take this focus of the body. (KH)
Despite the prevalence of the hirja character as the primary marker of sexual otherness, there are other characterizations of explicit sexual deviance in popular film. One such characterization becomes apparent in the 1991 film Mast Kalandar, starring Anupam Kher as an effeminate homosexual named Pinkoo. Pinkoo's flamboyant effeminacy is meant to provide comic relief, while his pink Mohawk and penchant for speaking English mark him as respectively foreign and upper-class. This characterization of male homosexuality as now not simply as a hijra identification but as foreign and alien clearly resonates with conventional framings of sexuality within nationalist discourses. In a sense, the Pinkoo character makes clear the ways in which male same-sex desire, when it is consolidated into an identity in popular film, can exist only on the level of stereotype....While the codes and conventions of popular cinema do open up the possibility for the emergence of same-sex eroticism, it is often achieved at the expense of the effeminate male or masculine female character. Given the limits of popular Indian cinema in enabling queer pleasure, desire and fantasy, it is no surprise that queer South Asian diasporic film and videomakers in the 1990s have both drawn on and decontextualized the conventions of popular Indian cinema in their work. For instance, Pratibha Parmar's 1991 Khush, which documents an emerging diasporic South Asian queer movement, intercuts talking heads interviews with fantasy sequences of two women, clad in Bollywood-inspired finery, watching old Hindi movie extravaganzas while stroking each other's hair (295-6).
In the scene quoted from Khush, Pratibha Parmar mingles together images of Bollywood with queer images. While these two women from the "fantasy sequence" are wearing "Bollywood-inspired finery" and watching movies in Hindi, they don't seem to fit into the stereotype for lesbian characters. Only the stroking of hair marks them as lesbian; otherwise, their actions (or non-action) are not essentially "lesbian." Are these the presumed-straight female characters in mainstream films whose queer subtext must be searched for? Are they queer viewers who must negotiate realms of sexuality in Hindi films? How does their queer performance construct and inform their societal/filmic performance (as either consumers or producers of Hindi films), and vice versa? Is this fantasy sequence of the independent film an answer to the problem of stereotyping in mainstream films, or is it also problematic?
Culture and Sexuality
Cultural essentialism (a stagnant, exclusive understanding of culture) is being deployed by those in a position of power and dominance to legitimate dominant sexual ideology. It is used to delegitimize those who are trying to challenge dominant sexual ideology and cultural authenticity. Cultural essentialism weaves a cultural tale based on a notion of oneness, of one culture that is fixed and timeless.... The theme of contagion and contamination is constantly invoked.... Prostitution is contaminating in a physical way in so far as it is spreading HIV through the respectable population. Similarly, the airwaves are contaminating Indian cultural values through the sexual representations they beam into the pure homes of Indians. And the gay issue has been regarded once again as something that is contaminating the Indian family with its proselytizing agenda. " This theme is also deployed to counter the threat of 'Western imperialism.' The contaminant, which is corroding Indian culture, comes from the West, from outside of Indian culture. Satellite broadcasting is regarded as contaminating Indian culture. Gay sexual identity is similarly cast as a Western import that is targeting Indian youth and stripping them of the secure mantle of Indian cultural values, which reside in the institution of heterosexuality. AIDS is also posited as an import from a decadent and promiscuous Western culture that is setting adrift Indian cultural moorings. It is a step short of arguing that sex as a whole is a contaminating and corrosive import of Western cultural value.
According to Kapur, in postcolonial India, "sexual purity," especially women's "purity" is seen as an essential part of national identity, something distinctly "Indian." While she asserts that this idea is false, she also writes that cultural essentialism nearly governs India's cinema, television, and other forms of speech. The justification for the conservative response to non-normative sexualities is that it is not "Indian," rather another vestige of Western colonization. But this essentialist, "pure" India never was....
Questions: How are sexuality and feminism linked in postcolonial discourse? How do Women Make Movies filmmakers deal with the non-normative sexuality and culture dichotomy?... (MS)
What Child is This? Whose Child is This?
Kotz, Liz. "An Unrequited Desire for the Sublime: Looking at Lesbian Representation Across the Works of Abigail Child, Cecelia Dougherty, and Su Friedrich," p. 91/92 from Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar. Routledge, 1993.
Child's found footage and reconstructed materials offer a strategy of appropriation and erotic reinscription of pleasurable and problematic images from an array of sometimes deeply misogynistic mass cultural sources -- a strategy based on reconstructing and refiguring these images, rather than trying to produce an "affirmative image" of female or lesbian sexuality. The potentially threatening ambiguity with which this works can be seen in the porn sequence that ends the film, a sequence which provides a sort of epilogue or coda to it. ... Yet as a representation of lesbian sexuality, it is far from reassuring. It offers no safe place, no nostalgic retreat, from the voyeurism and entrapment of dominant cinematic codes. Instead of offering reassurance, or the illusion of an uncorrupted sphere of representation, the sequence seems to propose a series of questions which reflect back on the film as a whole: Who was this meant for? Who is the intended audience? Who is turned on? What kinds of images are disturbing? What is erotic?
The second part of the passage focuses on the idea of a "proliferation of sexual identities" a refusal to "isolate or compartmentalize lesbian desire" while simultaneously placing these representations in a greater historical/social/personal context than dominant cinematic codes would call for. I see WMM -- the organization as a whole -- reflecting these ideas in that they do not regulate based on subject matter or a necessarily "affirmative image" of women's experiences. Rather, women film-makers are documenting their own stories/creating from their own visions and, thus, a proliferation of identities are created and represented -- working out from a core rather than starting with a framework and filling in space. Also, many WMM films seem to operate heavily in a given historical context -- but back to this in a moment.
kinds of images are disturbing? What is erotic? -- coupled with implicit questions of complexity of representation -- Is there such a thing as an "uncorrupted sphere of representation? Can it be represented outside of history? What is a film-maker's obligation to locate the image in the context of history, oppression and resistance? How does one represent identity without collapsing it into an isolated, singular image? Is it possible to simply escape/ignore the "entrapment of dominant cinematic codes," or must they be confronted by alternative/counter cinema? Many WMM films
also deal with these more specific concerns. Filming Desire, for instance, takes us through the ways in which women film-makers deal with the above issues of representing sexuality, as well as questions of audience, eroticism, etc. The films of Trinh Minh-Ha also deal heavily with these questions of how identity is represented, how we negotiate/understand history and place our selves/films in that context. (KH)
Necessity and Queer Theory
My life was saved when poststructuralist (and postcolonial) feminist theory first introduced me to deconstruction and (the unpacking of) binary oppositions, problematizing the supposedly universal, modern subject of Western discourses, humanist, feminist, or otherwise "liberatory." Cultural studies gave me a way to talk about the vexed politics of pleasure and representation. And when power became not a possession but an exercise, and the individual investment in "identity" became troubled, critical queer theory jumped in the fray. Pushing for transgressions of normativity, queer theory offered what seemed to me to be a strategy. The fiction of authenticity falls by the wayside where I think it belongs, and the logic of non-contradiction also gets the boot. In their place, a notion of performativity.
Mimi Nguyen shows us what it's really all about. Queer theory, as well as feminist theory and cultural studies, is not a luxury. When Leslie Feinberg tells us in Outlaw that there were no transgendered role models or historical figures while s/he was growing up, and how important that would have been, we understand that queer theory and queer history is necessary. When the protagonist of Knowing Her Place considers suicide because she is trapped in her gender roles and oscillating between two worlds, queer theory and postcolonial theory could offer her a community, a place to understand her own roles and to change them. While Nguyen describes how queer theory has been important to her, she leaves us with the thought that we must always queer queer theory, that the act of queering must not be only about gender and sexuality, and that the act of queering might be the most important tool that we have. (MS)
Essentially Its About Gender
Waugh, Thomas. "We're Talking, Vulva, or, My Body Is Not a Metaphor" (1995/1999) , from The Fruit Machine. Duke University Press, 2000.
Noticing such patterns is not to take away from the urgent priority of focusing on the women's voices and images reshaping the vocabularies of bodies and sexualities in the eighties and nineties. It's about "taking our power back," says the tattoo artist from Stigmata (one of the films in Much Sense), about dealing with "visible stuff rather than internal stuff I can hide," says one of Boschman's scarred heroines. The last thing we need is yet another man griping about exclusion from women's space. Yet such a strict gendered focus can be hard to maintain in the current context. After all, Onodera, Ahwesh, Snider, Friedrich, and Parmar all could not resist incorporating male homoerotic imagery in their works in the show, and I for one am delighted with this "appropriation." Dialogue is continuing to open up as fast as the thighs in these works, and the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, in this symbolic landmark year, has finally opened its gates to transsexuals. On some level, at least in terms of bawdy and body images, biological gender essentialism may make less and less sense.