(Im)/Possibility of Locating the Queer Female Subject in the Indian Diaspora
Reviewed Work: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. By Gayatri Gopinath. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005
In Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Gayatri Gopinath undertakes the task of locating queer diasporic female subjectivity arguably missing from cultural productions of South Asian diasporas. She explores not just the erasure but the ‘impossibility’ of imagining queer female subjectivity in dominant discourses of the nation and diaspora. The book thus takes up the queer of colour and feminist project of centering the subjectivity of marginalised others. First published in 2005, it can be placed in the same body of work as queer diasporic scholars like José Esteban Muñoz and Martin Manalansan.
The book is divided into a theoretical introductory chapter, five body chapters and an epilogue. Gopinath begins with a critique of both nationalist and heteronormative feminist discourses that centre male subjectivity and render queer women in the diaspora invisible. In the next five chapters she applies queer diasporic reading practices to diverse cultural productions within film, music, literature and art in an attempt to read the traces of these ‘impossible subjects’ in unlikely locations.
At the core of Gopinath’s work is a critical interrogation of the three terms that constitute the title of the book: “queer diasporas, impossibility, and South Asian public cultures”. She uses theories of diaspora as analytical tools to interrogate nationalism, colonialism, migration, and cultural identity. This is particularly relevant for a critical analysis of the South Asian diaspora and its relationship with the South Asian homeland, framed as it is in essentialist understandings of home and belonging. However, as she aptly notes, to understand the complex relations between nationalism, diaspora, transnational capitalism and globalisation, it is also necessary to see how these are linked through discourses that are gendered, sexualised and racialised. It is by recentering the queer female diasporic subject, Gopinath argues, that we can critique “discourses of ‘purity’ and ‘tradition’ inherent in nationalist and diasporic ideologies, but also reveal the presumed whiteness of queer theory and the compulsory heterosexuality of South Asian feminisms”.
A significant contribution of this book is its attempt to interrogate a fixed understanding of non-heterosexual sexualities. Queerness in Gopinath’s work goes beyond sexuality and is a way of thinking through and reworking fixed notions of home, family, nation, and diaspora. More specifically, she uses the category of queer to name an alternate framing of diaspora, one that does not adhere to nationalist ideologies or the interests of transnational capitalism.
Gopinath traces the ‘impossibility’ or unthinkability of queer female subjects within dominant nationalist and diasporic discourses to the centrality of the (heterosexual) woman in the construction of the nation and diaspora, an argument that has been made by feminist postcolonial scholars. But what is more surprising to her is their absence from feminist diasporic projects. Deploying a queer (specifically, a South Asian queer) diasporic framework and a ‘scavenger methodology’ theorised by Jack Halberstam, Gopinath compares films, books, and music in national and diasporic settings to trace these elisions and exclusions.
For instance, in Chapter Four, she analyses diasporic, “self-consciously feminist” films such as Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood and Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham to show how the agency or even the possibility of female same-sex desire is foreclosed by limiting queer potential and desire to the body of the gay male (supporting) character. The progressive, ‘middle-wave’ cinema of the 1970s and 80s like Subah/Umbartha is unable to articulate female same-sex desire “in terms other than pathology”. Instead queerness is pitted against feminism and feminist autonomy and emancipation comes at the expense of “lesbians”. Similarly, in Ian Rashid’s gay diasporic film Surviving Sabu the home space is imaginatively raptured and transformed by queer male diasporic subjects but at the cost of the troubling absence of the female diasporic subject. In fact, the absence of the female subject (in this case, the mother) is what allows the immigrant home in the film to be transformed from a heteronormative space into one where the homosocial bonds between father and son slip into homoeroticism. In these ways, Gopinath argues, even progressive, radical projects — in which queerness is always centred on the gay male body and female sexuality is always heterosexual — can become complicit with nationalist, conservative agendas.
The ‘impossibility’ of imagining the queer female diasporic subject in the home space resonates with feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler’s observations on the politics of recognition and power. In Undoing Gender, Butler posits that undoing a person’s right to personhood can be achieved either by withholding or conferring recognition. For both Butler and Gopinath omission, rather than derision, serves to render these identities invisible.
Gopinath thus concerns herself with foregrounding articulations of queer female desire and subjectivity not in the usual spaces where “lesbian” subjectivity is clearly delineated, but in seemingly less-evolved spaces of gender and sexual politics where initial impression would suggest the ‘impossibility’ of their existence. She locates it in musical genres like giddha and newer hybrid genres like the UK-based Asian Underground and New Asian Dance Music; in the ‘chutney’ music of Trinidad performed in female-only spaces of the diaspora; in the heterosexuality-oriented hyperbolic femininity and female homosocial spaces of Bollywood films like Razia Sultana and ‘middle-wave’ cinema like Utsav; in the song-and-dance sequences of neocolonial Bollywood romances like Hum Aapke Hai Koun..!; in the middle-class Hindu north Indian household of Fire; and in the inner sanctum of a traditional Muslim household in Ismat Chughtai’s short story The Quilt (Lihaf).
Gopinath’s deconstruction of these cultural texts, the comparisons between them, and their relation to the subject of ‘impossible’ (female queer) desires is nuanced and incisive. In her interpretation, a queer reading of Utsav’s female erotic bonding between the wife and the courtesan mistress — decried by feminists as a heterosexual male fantasy — might “allow for the possibility of triangulated desire that does not solidify into ‘lesbian’ or ‘heterosexual,’ but rather opens up a third space where both hetero- and homoerotic relations coexist simultaneously”. Similarly, the “real queer” in East Is East may not be the explicitly gay son who leaves home but the daughter Mina who stays behind. In her resistance to letting her immigrant woman’s body become the site where nationalism and honour play out, Mina queers and transforms the home space from the inside.
Part of the ‘impossibility’ of these forms of queer female desire, with their unfamiliar codes and signifiers, lies in the difficulty of reading them through western liberal narratives of ‘the closet’ and ‘coming out’. And it is precisely the association of queer studies with a politics of visibility that Gopinath is critiquing. Certain articulations of same-sex desire, according to her, may not be allowed to exist (and may not even seek to exist) outside heteronormative structures. But the recognition of the possibility of such desire interrogates both the homonormative imagination of same-sex desire as well as heteropatriarchal, nationalist discourses that seek to separate non-normative gender and sexuality from a South Asian identity.
To be sure, Gopinath’s use of South Asian public cultures and literature as a critical tool of queer and feminist analysis is an imaginative and exhaustive one. But the basis for choosing certain cultural texts and the parameters of comparison between them are not always immediately clear. It is certainly possible to compare the music of music of British-Asian Underground bands with Monica Ali’s diasporic novel Brick Lane, or VS Naipaul’s Trinidad-based diasporic novel A House for Mr. Biswas with the queer Canadian diasporic texts Funny Boy and Cereus Blooms at Night. But the choice of these texts is never fully explained. Often, by drawing these comparisons, Gopinath runs the risk of conflating varying histories, geographies, and diverse diasporic settings.
Besides, her reading of these cultural texts is obviously from a specific diasporic point of view located in the global North but that goes unnamed and unacknowledged through the course of the book. We can ask ourselves what other interpretations of the same cultural texts could be possible if we were to read them through the lens of other diasporas, or if we were to make sense of South Asian queer female desire from within South Asia, and if those would differ substantially from Gopinath’s analysis.
As mentioned earlier, the book is not only concerned with queer, diasporic, South Asian identity but linking it to larger questions of modernity and national and diasporic identity in a transnational context. It is an ambitious project and Gopinath’s attempt to address so many interconnected ideas sometimes causes key ideas like nationalism and diaspora to disappear from her readings. One is left seeking more explicit connections between diasporic cultural texts and the nation-state through queer feminist readings. This is especially evident in the study of diasporic/immigrant masculinity in Chapter Three ‘Surviving Naipaul’ where Gopinath makes clear the underpinnings of colonial legacies in the formulation of a South Asian identity but does not explore its connections with the nation and diaspora.
That said, the book is an important intervention in the field of queer, diaspora and South Asian studies. Through her project of situating the hidden queer female diasporic subject, Gopinath envisions a notion of diaspora that does not replicate the heteronormative imaginings of nation, and a notion of queerness that disrupts and reworks the home. In doing so, she creates new points of entry for future scholarship on queer diasporic belonging.
