Homosexuality

Naturalizing ‘Queerness’: A Study of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy

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Prateek, Ramjas College, New Delhi, India

If the representation of same-sex sexuality in punitive terms leaves gays in shock, then the legitimizing of Article XVI Section 377 (which bars gay sex) in India made gays all over the world, especially in South Asia speechless and traumatized. In response to this universally misconstrued image of an ‘unnatural’ man, Shyam Selvadurai, a Canadian-Sri Lankan writer creates a narrative which not only offers an ‘innocent peek’ into the biased perspectives of heterosexuals towards queers but the use of a child narrator is a deliberate ploy with which he deconstructs the craving for a so called ‘healthy’ text.’ Thus, this article, by musing on Selvadurai’s most acclaimed text Funny Boy (1994), attempts to examine how and why ‘unhealthy’ texts are constructed. Secondly, it elaborates on the subtle literary strategies used by Selvadurai to debunk pre-conceived notions of a heterosexual literary text. Finally, the article while locating a gay narrative in the social and cultural context of Sri Lanka, presents a gendered analysis of homosexuality in Sri Lanka.

Unhealthy Text

A healthy text is a heteronormative construct, which refers to a text where first, heterosexuality is naturalized and homosexuality is either sidelined or demonized; secondly, where the writer manages to exorcise the demons of unheard voices, and finally, the writer can prevent the eruption of contested spaces. Since Selvadurai challenges all the above mentioned conventions connected to a heterosexual text, his text can be considered as a snapshot of what one can call as ‘unhealthy text.’

Jonathan Ned Katz while chronicling the history of heterosexuality discussed the idea of “invention of heterosexuality.” Following the argument of Freud, Katz points out that “heterosexual” is not merely a noun but frequently an adjective, describing a “drive,” a “love,” an “instinct,” and a “desire,” as well as a sexual activity and a type of person (66). What Katz called “the invention of heterosexuality” referred to his idea that “heterosexuals were made, not born.” According to Katz, the idea of heterosexuality emerged at a specific point in history, and its history intertwines with the story of industrialization and urbanization, the rise of the middle classes, the complications of empire, and the scientific and philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment. The term heterosexuality was created to give medical and intellectual legitimacy to the desires of the emerging middle class…Access Full Text of the Article


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Revisiting Homophobia in Times of Solidarity, Identity and Visibility in Uganda

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Prince Karakire, GUMA, Researcher and Director, Social Economic Research and Development, Uganda

Abstract

There is an apparent deepening in anxieties of the increasing rapid social change in Uganda, with the escalation of homophobia, if not more so. Homosexuals in their quest for solidarity and visibility have increasingly become victims of homophobic violence. In this study, I draw upon critical studies in geography, urban sociology, feminism, anthropology, Queer theories, and identity politics, to poignantly axamine manifestations of homophobia in the context of changing social structures. For this purpose, I adopt a multi-sited ethnography and hybrid genre of discourse analysis.

Introduction

There is an apparent deepening of anxiety in relation to the subject of homosexuality in Uganda. Despite anthropological narratives of African culture’s zero tolerance to homophobia, (see, Mutua, 2011; Epprecht, 2004; Murray, 1998, etc), itsintensificationandsolidification has not only had dire consequences for the homosexual community, it is a matter of curiosity. This curious trend, it ought to be mentioned, has emerged at the same time that as gay visibility are increasingly beginning to emerge and obscure the traditional same-sex behaviours, where homosexuals are continuously stepping away from the typically African gender-stratified systems that have long characterized same-sex relations between men. Consequently, gay men in their quest to sexually construct themselves have increasingly become affected by society’s aggressive compulsion to denigrate gay visibility.

And yet, a bulk of the body of work on homosexuality and homophobia persistently revolves around traditional explanations for contemporary homophobia. A few other studies either tend to disclose homophobia toward the gay communities (see, for instance, Kaoma, 2009), or merely explicate the difficulties gay men face while attempting to live the lives they feel they ought to be living. For instance, some studies on homophobia in Uganda mostly adopt a reductionist perspective often reducing homophobia to nothing more than a product oftraditional attitudes and values (Chi-Chi and Kabwe, 2008; Epprecht, 2001), the American Christian Right (Kaoma 2009), and the colonial entrenchment of homophobic laws (Sanders, 2009; Epprecht, 2004). And yet such narratives are not only inappropriate as they serve to conflate the agency of the African leaders and ordinary people who engage in homophobia and homophobic practices, they also reinforce streotypical ideas, and fail to offer consistent answers for the apparent growth of political and public expedience and intensification of homophobic practices.

Besides, contemporary homophobia is simply too complex to be reduced to a few ‘historical’ underlying factors such as culture, religion, or a simple binary opposition between the religious right and advocates of feminism and/or secularism. Consequently, homophobic effects of homosexual visibility and solidarity ought to be explored. It is the aim of this study therefore to constitute the conflicts and dynamics between homophobia andwesternnotionsof (homo)sexuality within global contexts. In the sections that follow, I draw upon critical studies in geography, urban sociology, feminism, anthropology, queer theories, and identity politics, to poignantly axamine manifestations of homophobia in the context of changing social structures. The subsequent section explores literature to revisiting homophobia in modern times…Access Full Text of the Article


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“Against the Order of Nature”?: Postcolonial State, Section 377 and the Homosexual Subject

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Shramana Das Purkayastha, Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College, Kolkata, India

Abstract

In the light of the theorisation on identity-formation, the present paper proposes to discuss how the post-colonial Indian nation-state, through its multiple apparatus, becomes complicit in the discursive genesis of heteronorm. Issues of national culture and authentic tradition create in India a special kind of problem that queer-activism needs to grapple with. The focus of my discussion would specifically be on the debates surrounding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. I would like to interrogate how legal discourses appropriate the language of power, stereotyping both non-normative identities as well as the normative definition of Indian alterity, and serve to push the sexual minority into a cultural absence within the state.

Queer studies, as the discipline has evolved over time, have repeatedly raised and debated the question as to what kind of sexual behaviour constitutes the very narrow definition of the heteronorm. The possibility/viability of developing a habit of creative scepticism, necessary for deconstructing existing paradigms and imagining alternative forms of identity based on counter-normative sexual practices, has occupied the centre stage in the recent development of queer critical literature. Anthropologist Gayle Rubin is one of the pioneers of such iconoclasm. Critiquing the forcible marginalisation of non-normative people during the 1980s, she, in her seminal 1984 essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”, emphasises the urgent need to see through the very political construction of sexuality. Rubin asserts: “It is up to all of us to try to prevent more barbarism and to encourage erotic creativity… It is time to recognise the political dimensions of erotic life”. (35, emphasis mine) Related to this is Judith Butler’s concept of gender performance, as elaborated in her influential work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. At its simplest, Butler’s notion emphasises the centrality of “performance” in maintaining one’s assigned gender role. The stability of the mutually exclusive categories of male and female is insured through repeated iteration of normative performative codes. As Butler comments, “…heterosexuality is compelled to repeat itself in order to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and identity…” (Qtd. Hall, 108)

In the light of this theorisation on the very political and contingent nature of identity-formation, the present paper proposes to discuss how heteronorm is discursively and performatively generated in the Indian post-colonial nation-state. I would like to interrogate the politics of systematic ostracism that is carried out against the Indian queer subject through the post-colonial nation-sate’s various machineries of power. The focus of my discussion would specifically be on Section 377 of Indian Penal Code. The issue gains in topical significance, given the current atmosphere of hostility that reeks of homophobia and belies India’s claim to modernity.

It is pertinent to note at this juncture that the politics of gender stereotyping and of the marginalisation of the sexual deviant in India is marked by particular cultural-national specificities. A blind application of western paradigms to understand the identity politics in India would be misleading. The dominant ideology in India does not always function around a simplistic binary between the heterosexual and homosexual. (Kapur, 237) Therefore the resistance faced by non-normative sexual entities too cannot be explained in terms of homophobia alone. Indian society betrays a discomfort regarding all issues of explicit sexual expression, be it same-sex love or the public display of affection. “Heteronorm” in India does not necessarily refer to male-female mutual attraction. Rather, marital, procreative and domestic sexual activity alone is legitimised. Counter-normative sexual behaviour in India therefore includes homoeroticism as well as all those different kinds of heterosexual love that transgresses the aforementioned categories (Bose, xviii). Any discussion of queer politics in the Indian nation-state, hence, must always take into account this complex network of power that permeates virtually all layers of Indian sexuality…Access Full Text of the Article


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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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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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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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Breaking through the Limits of Flesh: Gender Fluidity and (Un)natural Sexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

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Swikriti Sanyal, Rabindra Bharati University, India

Abstract

With the politicization of sex around the nineteenth century, the categories of gender and sexuality became primary instruments of disciplining the personal as well as the public body. Sexual decorum, pertaining to one’s gender and in accordance to social prescription, was encouraged and practised at large, alienating and condemning all forms of sexual expressions that did not conform to the economics of marriage and reproduction. Heteronormativity deployed mass homophobia which caused the suppression and erasure of major homosexual documentation in an attempt of silencing the homosexual voices and experiences. The absence of lesbian material in women’s literature is a case in point. The chief responsibility of the lesbian feminist project lies in identifying or deciphering the underlying essence of lesbianism in women’s writing at large. Following a similar objective, I propose to highlight the socio-political and cultural construction of homosexuality in an attempt to identify the undercurrents of lesbian desire and the dissolution of gender binaries in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The idea of this research is to read gender as performance while interpreting the ideological politics as well as the literary poetics of Woolf’s writing.

Homosexual writing in the English literature has always been problematized by the socio-political oppression and cultural taboo on the unregulated expression of same-sex desire. Most of the fiction related to the issue remained either unpublished or available for circulation only in private quarters. It is rather difficult to come across any significant main stream literary work with homosexual content before the augment of the twentieth century, and even then the writers took care to camouflage and mask the uninhibited exhibition of this outlawed desire. Radcliff Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) is one of the first attempts towards lesbian writing and the demonstration of what was then considered to be ‘sexual inversion’. The fact that it was received with public aggression followed by a trial and subsequent prosecution speaks volumes about the homosexual intolerance of the age. Virginia Woolf’s pseudo-biography, Orlando, published in the same year, approached the topic differently. Woolf’s lesbian consciousness (though Woolf never identified herself as a lesbian, she was at various stages of her life described as homo-, hetero-,bi- or asexual) taken together with her feminist approach offered a deployment of gender instability in her dialogue with (un)natural sexualities. Orlando’s paroxysmal shifts between male and female, heterosexuality and homosexuality, reality and fantasy, past and present, life and poetry, biography and autobiography unsettles and disavows the very possibilities of fixed meanings and binaries.

Before getting into an elaborate diagnosis of Woolf’s commitment to the lesbian feminist project and her politics of representation, it is crucial to map the evolution of the homosexual identity, and its relation to the notions of sex and gender, over the centuries, from a condition of social incognizance in the eighteenth century (during this time homosexuality was widely labelled under the generalized act of sodomy) to its discursive explosion in the nineteenth and twentieth century, in order to grasp the author’s four hundred year long narrative of the life of her protagonist. Following Michel Foucault’s (1976) critic of the repressive hypothesis of sexuality in the nineteenth century, it can be acknowledged that with the turning of sex into discourse, other forms of sexualities, which did not did not adhere to the economics of reproduction, were expelled from reality; minor perversions came to be dealt with legal severity and sexual irregularities were medicalized and categorized as mental illness, leading to a production and propagation of a kind of sexuality that was ‘economically useful and politically conservative’ (p. 36-37). While in the preceding century, sexual practises revolved around marital obligation and all sexual offenses (like adultery, rape, incest and homosexuality) were labelled under general unlawfulness, the nineteenth century experienced a shifting of focus from conjugal sexuality to perverseness. Foucault writes, “It was time for all these figures . . . to step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were. No doubt they were condemned all the same; but they were listened to” (p.39). Thus, the Victorian epoch encountered a multiple implantation of perversion rather than its suppression; perverse identities like homosexuality became both the effect and the instrument of power – it was embedded in bodies, judged through personal conduct and wrapped in an eternal flux of power and pleasure (Foucault, 1976, p. 40-45)…Access Full Text of the Article


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The Homosexual as Pariah: Thinking about Homosexual Existence in the Context of Evangelical Christianity in the 1960’s

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Taylor Cade West, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

Abstract

 In the 1960’s some American homosexuals began to speak; they worked to establish a dialogue between themselves and a society from which they were excluded. Evangelical Christians first followed the societal pattern of silence in regards to homosexuality. Later, as the clamor and presence of homosexuals increased, many evangelicals reacted pointedly. The historical coming out of homosexuals and evangelicals’ response, as it is documented in the pages of Christianity Today, serves as a supreme example of the pariah condition that many homosexuals and queer people were experiencing in the 1960s and continue perforce to experience today. It is the purpose of this paper to think about, in the context of evangelical Christianity’s reaction to homosexuality, the homosexual as pariah; to explore the character of a marginal existence.

 It is perplexing to live in a society of which one is not a part (as is the case of queer peoples in so many parts of the world). Where silence reigns, where speaking is a forbidden act, one very often will stumble through the world beclouded by a haze. There is no guide for the perplexed, very seldom does a hand reach through the mist and escort a person to a ground upon which one may speak, one may be. Seldom, if ever, does a whisper break the darkness of one’s insecurity and say, “Go elsewhere. Here you have no place.”

The act of the “Homosexual as Pariah” has not come to a close. Still, well into the twenty-first century, a queer person may be born into a family in the presence of which she may never be herself. A homosexual may live in a society from which he is excluded and at times violently oppressed. And as many gains are being made as far as political and social freedoms in some parts of the world, some states are attempting to restore laws that prevent homosexual activity, the meaning of which is a grotesque violation of the private realm of human beings; and other states have enacted legislation which equates public expression of homosexuality as a kind of “horror-propaganda” against a regime already sunk in a morass of civil rights violations.

Universally speaking, the homosexual—along with all queer peoples—is subject to an imperiled existence and it is in this context of simultaneously expanding and contracting freedom that we must contemplate what it means to be a homosexual or queer person in society. The purpose of this paper does not go beyond an attempt to understand.

In our endeavor to understand, it seems appropriate to fall back on the historical example of evangelical Christianity’s reaction to homosexuals as they began to speak out in 1960s America; through this moment in gay history, we may begin to see the quality of homosexual existence in society. In so doing, we will find that the worldview of those who are members of society is diametrically opposed to the reality of those who find themselves at society’s margins. It will also become clear that the price of assimilation into decent society is nothing less than existence itself. And lastly, we shall attempt to discover a possible alternative that is open to the pariah…Access Full Text of the Article


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The Invisible Closet: Pressures and Difficulties of the ‘fringe-queer’ Community

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Joe Weinberg, University of Minnesota, Crookston

Abstract

LGBT studies is generally focused on the members of the queer community who are/were at some point ‘in the closet.’ That closet becomes a focal point of their identity, and the process of coming out of the closet is seen as an important and momentous occasion in that person’s life. But there are some groups that fall under the wide umbrella of the queer community that live in an ‘invisible closet.’ While their particular practices are not considered ‘mainstream,’ they are so tightly focused that sharing that identity with others is tantamount to involving others in their sexual practices. In particular, the fetish community lives in this invisible closet. If they tell anyone of their interests, they are literally sharing the details of their sexual activities, something that is often seen as “none of their business.” When a homosexual ‘comes out’ to friends and family, they are not providing details or involving these groups in their sexual activities. This ‘coming out’ instead allows them to express their identity freely, but maintain a modicum of privacy. When someone involved in the fetish, kink, or bdsm community ‘comes out,’ they express their identity, but by the nature of the beast, they do NOT maintain that privacy.
That said, the ‘invisible closet’ is no less restrictive to those within it, and often times it is a worse place to be, because the person inside has a conflicting desire: they want to maintain their privacy, but also be true to their own identity.

This balancing act is all the more difficult to maintain because it is invisible. While those within invisible closets don’t have to worry about the same discrimination faced by other members of the LGBT community, as they can easily ‘pass’ or ‘hide,’ this very capacity makes the pressure to break out of the closet even stronger. It is frequently driven home, both by society at large and by the members of the LGBT community who DO and CAN come out, that members of these other groups face a much more subtle, but no less intense, discrimination. By drawing attention to this closet, it can be seen how important it is to allow these subcultures to identify themselves without facing discrimination. There are no laws or even politically correct trends that support these groups, and while it is easy for them to hide, it is nonetheless incredibly hard ON them to do so.

Introduction: Coming out of the Closet

Coming out of the closet can be seen as a sort of rite of passage for the queer community. And the closet is not limited to homosexuality. As Sedwig writes: “The gay closet is not a feature only of the lives of gay people” (p. 68); anyone who does not fit into the heteronormative definition of sexuality is potentially in a closet, and coming out of that closet is a significant moment. This moment where a young man informs his friends and family of the identity that he has hidden from them for so long can be cathartic, can be dangerous, and can be freeing. Sometimes it is met with anger. Sometimes it is met with misunderstanding, suggesting that maybe this is a phase, something that can be gotten over. Some people come out of the closet to support and applause. Some come out only to find that no one was surprised in the slightest.

Whatever the reaction, the moment of coming out of the closet is a significant one. When a girl tells her parents that she is a lesbian, she is exposing her inner most self, raw to their criticism and desperate for their acceptance. But she is also doing it with the knowledge that things may end badly, with results ranging from ostracism to outright physical violence. Somehow, though, the possibility of acceptance has finally outweighed the fear of rejection. Maybe she wants to bring a girlfriend home for the holidays. Maybe her parents don’t have the same authority they once did. She has finally come to terms with her identity, and is ready to present that identity, that true self, to those whose opinions truly matter to her…

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Discursive Sites of Production and Opposition: Post World War I Popular Music Scene in Britain

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Samraghni Bonnerjee, Independent Researcher, Kolkata, India

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Abstract

The post World War I British music scene was varied, spanning several genres, from croon, swoon, jazz, blues, to swing – with influences both home-grown as well as imported. New dances, jazz music, and cocktail parties were continuously being imported from America, aided by the popularity of American cinema, which shaped the form of leisure activities of Britain throughout the Twenties and Thirties. However, the conservative response to these forms of music was strict, and post War society was involved with means of trespassing the restrictions and legislations. This paper intends to look at the genres of popular music and their spatial sites of performance – dance halls and ball rooms in England as well as the English colonies – as discursive sites of production and resistance. Keep Reading

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