Representation of non-normative sexualities is still a tantalizing dream in India, even within the oblique and supposedly more liberal platforms like art and literature. Catering to this need, this study focuses on the exploration of the deviant sexualities in cinema, photography and literature, specially in the Indian context. Unfortunately, even within the queer artistic explorations, hijras have not been much represented and therefore the first part of the book aims to excavate the multiplicity of the transgender lives by analysing various art forms, having transgender cinema and hijra photographic series as the major thrust areas. These tales of plain subjugation hide convoluted issues like necropolitics, overlap among sports, gender identity and nationalism, crazy-queen syndrome, pansexuality, transfeminism and transmisogyny.
The second part of this book deals with the contemporary gay and lesbian literature and how a specific kind of spatial appropriation is visible there. Through these artistic works, there is an attempt to excavate the specific Indian queer spatial experiences which are quite different from the visibility-centric coming out narratives of the West. As opposed to perceiving invisibility only as a monolithic technique of erasure, these works demonstrate that secrecy and camouflage are also strategies to combat the insidious effects of homophobia. And since Indian spatial configuration produces many homosocial spaces, the unique coexistence of homo and hetero desires is a specific feature of Indian ethos. Thus, the mutually symbiotic relationship between art and emancipatory politics is quite evident from the detailed discussion on various art forms that depict queer lives. The key issues that have been explored through this book are necropolitics, issues surrounding sex-reassignment surgery (SRS), transfeminism, exploration of queer geographies including death scapes, AIDs citizenship and queer flânerie. It indubitably legitimizes somewhat the role of art in queer politics at a fundamental level.
The invisibility accorded to queer literary works in India has a systematic sinister agenda of silencing. Such a hidden target can be countered only by cataloguing the still unexplored queer texts in various Indian languages and by developing unique critical tools to analyse these texts in a such a manner that helps in excavating the convoluted layers and subversive potential of queer identities.
This book aims at developing an exclusive literary framework to analyse the Indian queer literary works. In all, there are seven chapters which deal with the themes of plurality of lesbian existence, ambivalent adaptation techniques adopted by the writers to grant visibility to subaltern sexualities, overlapping of class and homosexuality, the development of exclusive queer aesthetics by inversion of accepted mode of literary language, imagery and techniques, the doubly marginalized identity of lesbian diaspora and the specific rift between lesbianism, feminism and queer activism in Indian context as presented in literary studies.
It also deals with the issues of biphobia, violence on hijra identity (perhaps one of the most marginalized identity in LGBTQ movement), the depiction of symbiotic relationship between space, sexual identity and sexual citizenship in Indian literary texts and the efforts made by the writers to homosexualize various so-called normative spaces.