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Indian Feminist Publishing and the Sexual Subaltern

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Elen Turner, Independent Researcher, Australia

Abstract

The discussion of queer politics, identities and “sexual subalterns” in India has, after 2009, entered a new phase. Discourse on sexuality was once largely focused on law and health policies; now, such discourse is better able to address positive identities and their multitude of articulations. The relationship between queer and feminist discourse has become more productive. This article examines independent feminist publishers as a representative of Indian feminist discourse on sexuality and sexual subalternity. Such publishers are significant mediators of feminist scholarship and discourse, so analysing their work can reveal much about ‘mainstream’ forms of feminism. The December 2013 Supreme Court judgment to uphold Section 377 is concerning to many, but in the four and a half years that homosexuality was effectively legal in India, the visibility of the sexual subaltern broadened to the extent that it may be difficult to return to a pre-2009 state.

Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalised “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”, usually interpreted as sodomy, was read down by the Delhi High Court in 2009. The Indian Supreme Court, in December 2013, overturned this judgment, effectually re-criminalising homosexuality. Section 377’s reading down was widely celebrated within the queer community as an important milestone, and the Supreme Court judgment lamented. But the four years in which homosexuality was in effect de-criminalised saw large shifts in public awareness and acceptance of homosexuality, shifts that the judgment of the Supreme Court will likely have little effect upon.

This article suggests that the discussion of queer politics, identities and “sexual subalterns” has, after 2009, entered a new phase, one that is not primarily focused on law and health policies, but is able to look towards positive identities and their articulation in a variety of forms. Furthermore, the relationship between queer and feminist discourse has become more productive. I specifically examine independent feminist publishing outlets as a representative of Indian feminist discourse on sexuality and sexual subalternity. By ‘independent’, I mean groups that may or may not operate with not-for-profit status, but that are not owned by large publishing corporations, or are subject to the editorial intervention of individuals detached from the main operations of the group. Such publishers are by no means the sole producers of feminist scholarship and discourse, but they are significant mediators of them, so analysing their work can reveal a lot about ‘mainstream’, urban forms of Indian feminism. While in the last decade or so, an increasing amount of online activism and publication has been occurring in India as elsewhere, such work falls outside the scope of this paper as that emerging media warrants a case study in its own right. Book publishing was a form of Indian feminist activism and knowledge production that began in the 1980s, and although it has always claimed to at the forefront of progressive feminist knowledge production, the contradiction between this self-belief and its interactions with the “sexual subaltern” makes it a genre worthy of especial attention…Access Full Text of the Article


 

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The Upside-Down Swan: Suniti Namjoshi

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Akshaya K. Rath, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India

Abstract

Diasporic, lesbian and transnational, Suniti Namjoshi—within the framework of postcolonial discourse—attempts to construct an ‘alternative universe’ in textuality. In constructing of an alternative political identity, Namjoshi undertakes a comparative approach in selecting subjects for producing a neo-textual universe, and a comparative study of cross-cultural identities remain central to the analysis of Namjoshi’s work. In this paper I argue that it is because of colonial anti-sodomy law, and because of religious and social stigma that the mission of constructing an alternative universe remains operative in Namjoshi’s work. I also suggest that in Namjoshi’s work, feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory merge but her work has been deliberately sidelined by the academia.

In 2006 Suniti Namjoshi (b. 1941) published Sycorax: New Fables and Poems. It included a section on the ‘unsung / untold’ story of Shakespeare’s Sycorax and a section on the ‘new’ life of Protea. By then, taking textual genesis from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and imitating the fashion of many postcolonial texts, in 1984 Namjoshi had published in From the Bedside Book of Nightmare a section entitled “Snapshots of Caliban”. “Sycorax”, a continuation of “Snapshots of Caliban”, of rewriting Shakespeare, attempted to reorganise the structure of the “humanist universe”—a project, rather a challenge, she attempted to undertake in The Jackass and the Lady in 1980. Rewriting Shakespeare to challenge the existing structure of the male-centred ‘humanist universe’ is part of the volumes of writing she has produced. They include rewriting of ancient and canonical fables and stories, and making new ones in the process of defining / identifying the lesbian / feminist ‘self’ amongst birds, beasts and animals. Rewriting canonical texts as a third-world lesbian feminist also includes exploring possibilities of multiple dimensions of traditional stories, fables and poems. For instance, the untold story of Sycorax portrayed in Sycorax, inclusion of an ageing sparrow as the witness of colonialism, and humanising Protea, a character from Greek mythology as a lady, are some of the instances of reorganising the world. Presently celebrated as a fabulist and a poet, Namjoshi has been constantly producing poetry and fables since the publication of her first collection of poems, Poems, in 1967.

Namjoshi’s Because of India: Selected Poems and Fables (1989) and Goja: An Autobiographical Myth (2000) are considered autobiographical and they show her development as a third world lesbian poet. Conversations of Cow (1985) and The Mothers of Maya Diip (1991) thematically remain critical of lesbian identity in a heterosexist world. The collections of work celebrating lesbianism are mostly written outside India and Namjoshi justifies the reasons behind such an exercise in the introductory sections of Because of India.

This article explores that Namjoshi maps the different facets of lesbian desire and identity within the framework of postcolonial discourse. It analyzes the representation of animal imagery with which she identifies the homosexual self. Further, it highlights in principle the way law, religion and social discourses are presented against sexual identities in Namjoshi’s work, and the way she attempts to frame an alternative universe in textuality. It argues it is because of Indian law against homosexuality and social stigma that the mission of constructing an alternative universe remains operative in Namjoshi. Further, it suggests that in Namjoshi’s work, feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory merge but her work has been deliberately sidelined by the academia…Access Full Text of the Article


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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Performing Pride/Performing Protest: LGBT Activism Post Recriminalizing of Section 377

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Priyam Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Abstract

The landmark judgment delivered by the Delhi High Court on 2nd July 2009 for reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and its reinstatement on 11th December, 2013 seemed to spearhead search for alternative spaces for performances. This paper aims at mapping and studying some LGBT protest performances emerging post recriminalisation of homosexuality under Section 377. Events and performances including LGBT pride parade, gay for a day (on facebook) and Global day of Rage have stirred public conscience and are known for the level of performativity and feminist/queer strategies like parody and camp. Considering the events during this period the categorization of the performances as feminist/queer itself is problematised. This paper aims to identify potential common ground wherein the feminism-queer divide breaks to produce alternative performance spaces. The case studies are historicized and considered through impact of state surveillance, the market, globalization, culture and changing feminist/queer ideology in the above mentioned case studies.

Introduction

The 90s in India has seen the emergence of the political assertion of the ‘private realm of sexuality’ (Narrain, 2004: 1). The euphoric outburst post the 2009 judgment reading down Section 377 seemed to be a culminating moment of the ‘performative coming out’ of queer sexuality in public space. In the capital, celebratory spectacles like pride parade, flash mobs and other performances contrasted the earlier more clandestine subcultures of queer life. The performative euphoria reflected through the effects of decriminalization was seen as the ‘new lease of life’ for different feminist/queer communities, legitimizing a space where their sexuality could be performed without the constant surveillance or harassment by the State. While the recriminalisation of Section 377 in December, 2013 curbed individual rights and ‘right to life’, LGBT activists along with people from the LGBT community and supporters for equal rights resorted to occupying strategic public spaces as well as virtual world through social media.

The euphoric celebration of sexuality in form of protest indeed contrasted a number of defiant performative incidents initiated by feminist and queer groups before. These earlier incidents were now recalled and re-contextualized as significant ‘performative’ expressions, which were reflected the mood for change. For example the incident of the Mangalore Pub Attack and the subsequent ‘pink chaddi campaign’ (Bangalore 2009), performance art on sexual harassment by Blank Noise, FKBK etc (Manola Gayatri: 2009). The self-confessed ‘frivolous’ response of the Pink Chaddi Campaign nevertheless set a precedent for later modes of protest whose impact may even be seen on the later slut walks. While citing particular feminist/ queer performances, I contextualize how one is inherently connected to the other in a more complex way than cause-effect syndrome… Access Full Text of the Article

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Sex, Sexuality and Gender in the Delhi Metro Trains: a Semiotic Analysis

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Anuj Gupta, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, India

Abstract

This paper explores the way sex, sexuality and gender are constructed in Delhi, India by using a semiotic understanding of reality whereby an individual is thought of as being subjectivized due to his being embedded in the socio-semantic text of a city full of signs which he/she interprets and appropriates. Within this socio-semantic text that the individual interprets, there are various determiners of interpretation and gender is one of them. The text of analysis is the collection of signs in the Delhi Metro trains and the methodology used is loosely based on the works of Roland Barthes. The purpose of this essay is to determine the ways in which the citizens of Delhi think of sex, sexuality and gender and analyze the ways in which these notions are reproduced on a daily basis through microcosmic texts like the signs in the Delhi metro trains.

Introduction: A “bookish” understanding of reality

The idea of a book serves as an appropriate metaphor for a semiotic understanding of “reality”. In such an understanding, both a book and reality are texts or collections of signs that the individual subject interprets though his faculties of interpretation, conditioned through his identity. However, it must be kept in mind that the text of reality and the interpreter are porous categories which constantly pour into and mould each other i.e., while the subject’s interpretation constantly reproduces reality, the very tools of perception that the subject has are shaped by social factors or determiners (that which the act of perception/interpretation will then go on to reproduce), creating a cyclical rather than a linear or causal model of the creation of the self and society. A circle has no origin, which is why it is virtually impossible to pinpoint which came first; the self or the social, parole or langue, the chicken or the egg.

There are various determiners that influence this hermeneutical act of creation of meaning and being which are spread out throughout the text of reality, both inside the individual and outside in the society. In simplistic terms, one could say that the primary schools of cultural criticism today (like Feminism, Marxism, Post Colonialism etc.) are oriented to the study of one such determiner of interpretation each and then through that determiner they postulate about this entire process. (For example, a post-colonial school of criticism would ideally focus on the significance of the determiner of race or ethnicity in the meaning created in a cultural artifact (like say Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), through which it would then go on to postulate larger theories about how this is connected to the ways in which people generated “meaning” and modes of being in the socio-cultural semantic realities from which this text emerged (In the case of the Things Fall Apart, this would perhaps refer to the interpretative communities of pre and post colonization Nigeria).

Ideas about these determinants of interpretation do not magically emerge hierarchically from “centers” of power (like the state, or the church or the police) as was thought traditionally. Foucault’s thought shows us that power rather operates in a horizontal manner and is present everywhere (Foucault 1980). It would thus be wise to rechristen these erstwhile “centers” of authority as “lenses” of authority. They should be thought of as convex lenses which concentrate certain ways of orienting these determinants onto the society in which they exist at a given time. When the individual comes into being in this socio-semantic space, his/her ways of interpreting it and orienting his/her self are influenced by such lenses of authority. Barthes’ essay, The Death of the Author argues that reading a text while keeping in mind what the author must have meant is a kind of censorship of meaning (Barthes 1978). Such a reading of a text restricts whatever meanings one might have produced. The writer figure should be thought of simply as the conductor of the textual symphony rather than its composer. If we transpose this argument onto the semantic text of reality, then just like the prominence of the intentional fallacy in the creation of meaning in the reading of a book, individuals in society too are usually influenced in their acts of interpretation of reality by the “author”otative lenses of power discussed above. Revolution in this sense would be a radical new interpretation of this text of reality that defies the meanings generated if one dutifully orients one’s interpretations in accordance with these lenses of ‘authority’…Access Full Text of the Article


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Biological and Psychological Lens to View LGBT Identities

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Manvi Arora, University of Delhi, India

ABSTRACT
In attempt to understand LGBT studies, it’s important to view it from an interdisciplinary lens. Studies focusing on LGBT people have not been subject of any single discipline with single object of study. The objects to large extend has been lives of LGBT people themselves. Hence, it is important not to isolate their experiences from social and scientific context. This implies that LGBT studies can only be practiced in amalgamation with different disciplines, in particular sociology, anthropology, biology, psychology, literature, law and history. At present in India and in many other cultures, all orientations and behaviours other than heterosexuality have been seen as “unnatural”, “abnormal” or “sinful”. In such a situation it is even more critical to understand Biological and Psychological perspective and theories behind variant sexual orientations, put forward in this paper.
BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
The biological perspective typically has explained human sexuality through reference to research concerning both human biology and sexual behaviour in other species. Biology indicates what is possible, often, what is pleasurable or painful. But biology does not imply what is proper and improper. Religion, traditions, culture and philosophy guides these judgments.
CROSS-SPECIES SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR
Biologists have asserted that we might arrive at a “natural” course of sexual behaviour by observing sexual activities among animals. Since animals are incapable of thinking like humans, they are thus unlikely to be influenced by confounding layers of tradition and belief.
For instance “All male mammals masturbate” (Beach, 1951) and animals also display homosexual behaviours. Female rodents and carnivores are most likely to mount other females when they are in estrus, the time of the month when they can conceive. Females in estrus usually show female mating behaviour in the presence of a male animal. Beach believes that role reversibility “reveals a potential for bisexual behaviour” in these mammals (1976). Chevalier-Skolnikoff agrees with Beach that primates appear capable of displaying both “male” and “female” sexual behaviour pattern. The sexual behaviour of lower animals is highly varied (Chevalier-Skolnikqf, 1976). If we were to accept their behaviours as standard for ourselves, we would probably widely expand rather than limit the range of human sexual activities to penile-vaginal intercourse leading to reproduction.
Theorizing Origins of Sexual Diversion
There are numerous biological theories that try to explain the origin of homosexuality, bisexuality and transgendered roles in humans.
a) The Genetics of Homosexuality
Over the past hundred and fifty years, volumes have been written in the professional disciplines and literature to explain the roots of one’s sexual orientation, particularly if it is homosexual or bisexual. Heterosexuality is assumed to be “normal” and therefore needs no causal explanation. Examination of sexual behaviour and orientation from cross culture, evolutionary and interspecies perspectives bring forth a wide variety of sexual expressions, hence substantiating the non-universal and not natural reasons behind it. Still a lot of work is being done by biologists to discover the root cause of variant sexual orientation.
“Kallmann’s (1952) studies with monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins were once taken as powerful evidence for genetic influence on sexual orientation. Among 40 pairs of identical twins, Kallmann found 100 per cent concordance rate for homosexuality. Among fraternal twins, only 57.7 per cent of the probands of homosexuals were exclusively heterosexuals. In Kallmann’s report, siblings with an identical genetic code in variably shared the homosexual orientation.”…Access Full Text of the Article

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Three Book Reviews: Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect and Queer Sociality, Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture and De-stereotyping Indian Body and Desire

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Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect and Queer Sociality

Shaka McGlotten

SUNY Press, 2013

Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture

Gilad Padva

Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

De-stereotyping Indian Body and Desire

Edited by Kaustav Chakraborty

Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013

 

Reviewed by

Rohit K Dasgupta, Doctoral Candidate and Associate Lecturer, University of the Arts London

 

It is not everyday one comes across a fascinating book like Virtual Intimacies. Shaka McGlotten has put together a very interesting ethnographic account of queer men’s negotiation with the digital world. A study of affect within cultural studies has seen a growth in recent years with several works of scholarship exploring this area. Virtual Intimacies is an important intervention not only in the field of digital media and communication but also more largely within contemporary queer studies. The relationship between digital culture and the queer identity has been commented upon by many including Sharif Mowlabocus’ Gaydar Culture and Christopher Pullen’s edited volume LGBT Identity and Online New Media. It would not be wrong to say McGlotten’s work extends some of the boundaries of these previous works. McGlotten places himself at the centre of this enquiry, as he navigates the digitally mediated queer sites which entangle the lives of queer people both online and offline. His own position as a gay man of colour informs the way he navigates and understands the politics of and possibilities of intimacy on the cyberspace. This auto ethnography gives this book a much more stronger and personal feel. He argues that that fluidity of the cyberspace and the intimate possibilities that it (supposedly) affords have been punctured by corporeality (3). Particularities such as race and class have an obvious impact on the possibilities that this space can provide. Queer spaces as he further argues were spaces where normal rules of social intercourse were suspended, whilst none of these were ‘truly liberatory’ (4), they are testament to the expansiveness that characterises queer sexual practices…Access Full Text of the Review


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Book Review: Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies by Rosie Thomas

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Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014

XV+ 325

Rs 875

ISBN: 978-8-125-05362-0

Review by Prateek

Reviewed by Prateek, University of Queensland, Australia

‘However, this is in no conventional sense a history of Bombay cinema’ Rosie Thomas writes in Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (3). Thus, the book, a marvel created after more than 30-year-long research, records her insight into the alternative history of Bombay cinema, and in addition provides a condensed history of subaltern Bollywood and auteurs/actors associated with it. The book celebrates Indian cinema studies that has become an established academic discipline over the past decade and simultaneously cautions us to challenge and complicate certain versions of Indian cinema history that have become fossilized. Rosie Thomas, Professor of Film Faculty of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK, inducts a subaltern genre of Bombay cinema in its complexity: pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial into the larger framework of internationally acknowledged Bollywood in a space of 10 chapters. Therefore, the book is an attempt to narrate more stories about Bombay cinema with which one can “reassess some of the myths and hazy generalizations that have grown up around its history” (Thomas 3).

The book can be considered as the most recent enterprise of Subaltern Studies. Subaltern Studies was initially conceived as a three-volume series to revise the ‘elitism’ of colonialists and bourgeois-nationalists in the historiography of Indian nationalism (Guha vii). Today, after the publication of ten volumes, the project has achieved a global status. Although, by the end of the 1980s, Subaltern Studies was the most dynamic sector within the emerging disciplines of postcolonial theory and cultural studies in the Anglo-American academy with countries ranging from Africa to Latin America partaking in the discipline, still it was never used in a full-fledged manner in regard to Indian cinema studies. Thomas becomes a pioneer to implement it in Indian cinema studies. Like the authors of Subaltern Studies, Thomas adopted a ‘history from below’ paradigm or ‘bottom-up’ approach to contest ‘elite’ or ‘top-down’ cinema history writing…Access Full Text of the Review


Book Review: A Poet’s Voyage to Sainthood: Hoshang Merchant’s Sufiana: Poems

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Hoshang Merchant’s  Sufiana: Poems.

New Delhi: Harper Collins. 2013. PP. 162. INR 350.

Reviewed

Rasheda Parveen, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, Odisha

Sex and Spirituality have no boundaries, so have been the articulations of the subjects in literature. The poetic of sexuality moves from being reflective of bodily sensuality to terrestrial pleasure and transcends itself in metaphysics. Hoshang Merchant’s Sufiana: Poems (2013) takes such a perspective towards “sexual pleasure” and endangers the intersections of the sexual and the spiritual. Experimenting with numerous traditions in composing poems—may it be Spanish troubadour, Indian mysticism, the subversive ghazals, prose tradition or Sufi style as in Bellagio Blues (2004)—he has finally settled his heart upon Sufi renditions of the homoerotic cult. As that of the wandering dervishes of Konya and Tabriz, he has set himself into a journey of fana—annihilation in the worldly companions. And at the same time, his desire for using an exceptional imagery reigns supreme in all his poems in the book. The language of sexuality gets portrayed through the musical notes and the vivid colours in the canvas of the poems and ghazals in Sufiana: Poems.
Depiction of sexuality has remained a central theme in most of the literary writings in India. With the Victorian values crossing the geographical boundaries with the colonial modern, the influence of the dictates becomes strong enough to bring in the active role of the binary opposites—heterosexuality and homosexuality. The influential portrayal of sexuality in the native literature has made it to lose the openness of the Indian philosophical minds. Hoshang Merchant true to his publicly projected image of a Parsi homosexual leads the portrayal of a sexual cult vis-à-vis experimenting with traditions and traditional symbols and images. The sexual mythology operating massively serves the literary canon in recovering what has been lost and what seems to have been endangered. Merchant who claims to be a “Parsi by religion, Christian by education, Hindu by culture and Sufi by persuasion” (Yaraana, 1999) alludes to the sacred way of living practiced in Indian societies which develops young ones into a homo-social group while taking them into an adult upbringing to adjust in a system of hetero-social cohabitation…Access Full Text of the Review


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Book Review: Masculinity and Its Challenges in India: Essays on Challenging Perceptions

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Masculinity and Its Challenges in India: Essays on Changing Perceptions

Edited by Rohit K Dasgupta and K Moti Gokulsing; Foreword by Ruth Vanita

Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland.

2014, 252pp. $45

 Review by Lipi Begum, University of the Arts London, UK

This is book provides an up-to-date insight on how multiple male identities are made in modern Indian cultures. The interdisciplinary nature of the essays close the gap in our understanding of masculinities affected by various layers of social, political, economic and technological shifts operating within a rapidly changing, complex and fragmented cultural context. The book challenges everything one knew about masculinity in India. It delves into authentic narratives and unseen discussions of masculinity, confronting our understanding of issues such as patriarchy and colonialism on the effects of men’s emotional desires and their roles as bearers of tradition –issues usually confined to debates on female sexuality in India.

A great selection of essays and writer sincluding, Sanjay Srivasta’s great opening essay on modern culture of masculinity in India, where Srivasta demonstrates how multiple and complex male identities have been shaped and constructed by the Britishness of the colonial sphere to the rise and demise of the urban twentieth century Five Year Plan (FYP) Hero. Srivasta’s essay challenges our understanding of the singular masculine Indian identity of the stereotypical colonial ‘effeminate Bengali’ (Sinha 1997), with the rarely discussed militant and masculine identity of the ‘martial races’ (Omissi 1991). Srivasta makes important arguments related to masculinity and modernity, from the representation of provincial masculinities within the metropolitan milieu of 1950s and 1960s Hindi films to the embodiment of Nehruvian and technological identities intertwined within the ethnography of the modern city.

The book challenges the homogenous nature of masculine identities in India through several essays. In Pranta Pratik’s essay he reveals the reality of how fat is more than just a female issue. Pratik provides insight into the ways in which fat is a complicated issue, intersecting with the ways in which the online queer communities discriminate along the lines of class, caste, education, sexual position, region and religion. A point which leads nicely onto Mangesh Kulkarni’s essay, which outlines an agenda for ‘Critical Masculinity Studies’ for future teaching and research to better understand homogenous and indigenous male identities, and Roshan das Nairs’s essay, which takes on the intersectionality debate full on, arguing if singularity is the problem then could intersectionality be the solution…Access Full Text of the Review

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Communal Tensions: Homosexuality in Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend

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Oliver Ross, Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK

Introduction

“A speechless Yudi welcomed his Milya with open arms. He wasn’t at all bitter about the manner in which Milya had dumped him. He was too old for self-respect, and too much in love. Tears flowed down his cheeks. His heart was full of gratitude and joy, so that when his prodigal lover complained about how long he had walked, Yudi sat the boy down and knelt before him to massage his chapped and weary feet.

From the far end of the room, two pairs of eyes watched Yudi risk rebirth as a shit-worm by touching the feet of a Bhangi. The eyes belonged to Gauri.” (Rao, 2003, p.226-227)

In this scene from Raj Rao’s novel The Boyfriend, Yudi, the well-educated and affluent Brahmin protagonist, is welcoming back his Dalit lover, Milind, after a prolonged separation. There appears to be an inversion of the inequities of power when romantic relationships straddle differences in age, class and caste, but the tone is not celebratory. Implicit in the hyperbolic description of Yudi’s “speechless” reaction of “joy” and “tears” is a critique of his servility, refracted through the eyes of the ostensibly liberal but ultimately conservative Gauri. The Boyfriend presents Yudi’s Brahminism as one of the ineluctable constituents of identity which coexist and overlap with his self-consciously Westernised homosexual orientation and preclude its ideal embodiment.In addition to spotlighting the Brahmin/Dalit divide, Rao polarises Yudi and Milind by insisting that the former self-identifies as “radically gay”, while the latter falls below the radar of Anglophone identity politics (p.193). Even when the two men are sexually or romantically united, they are separated by the ideological differences embedded in their class and caste, a leitmotif which contributes to Rao’s depiction of Yudi’s more general social alienation.In this article I argue that inThe Boyfriend, dubbed a ‘cult classic’ by readers and scholars alike, Rao hints at an essentialist, sacrosanct homosexuality which has the potential to unite men who love and have sex with men as a result of their shared abjection. In practice, however, gay identity intersects with and is exposed to the deleterious effects of other identity markers like class, caste and religion, and Rao presents this social determinism in apessimistic tone which occasionally borders on nihilism. Subsequently, I show how he aligns homosexuality with wider debates on religious communalism and nationhood in order to centralise its importance and emphasise the function of his novel as irreverent social critique.

   A lecturer in English at the University of Pune, Raj Rao wrote his doctoral dissertation at Bombay University on the poems of Nissim Ezekiel. While his poetry is similarly conversational, he is distanced from his mentor by his scatological diction and sexual voyeurism, which Hoshang Merchant (2009) describes as “tearing the veils of linguistic gentility” (p.166). At Pune Rao has inaugurated courses in gay literature and queer studies, but, despite his self-identification as gay, homosexual or queer, his writing makes clear that he acknowledges the contingency of these terms and is attentive to the numerous alternative identity markers available in India.In The Boyfriend and his 2010 novel Hostel Room 131 he adduces bothLGBT movements and longer-standing non-normative South Asian sexual and gender identities like those of the hijra and kothi.

In his introduction to Whistling in the Dark (2009), Rao makes explicit his mobilisation of the signifier ‘gay’ in the name of activism, and this strategic deployment has a correlative in his interest in queer politics. What he calls “the intrinsic quality of resistance built into queerness” (p.xv) echoes the idealism surrounding the term as it was co-opted by queer theory in the Anglo-American academic establishment of the early 1990s, in the wake of the formation of the anti-homophobic umbrella group Queer Nation in New York. Andrew Grossman (2001) dubs Rao a “radical utopian” (p.299); present in much of his academic and creative writing on queer themes, this stance is particularly salient in the introduction to Whistling in the Dark, where he analyses Foucault’s oft-cited remark on the normalisation of homosexuality as an identity category…Access Full Text of the Article


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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

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