IMPOSSIBLE DESIRES Gayatri Gopinath
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Perverse Modernities
IMPOSSIBLE DESIRES
A series edited byJudith HalbersÍam
and Lßa I¡we Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures
Gayatri Gopinath
:
Duke (Jniversity Press Durham and London zoo5IM POSSIBLE DESIRES
An Introducrion
In a particularþ memorable scene in My Beautífu| I-aunilrette (dir. Ste-
phen Frears, 1985), British Pakistani screenw¡iter Hanif Kureishi,s
groundbreaking film about queer interracial desire in Thatcherite Britain,
the white, working-class gay boyJohnny moves ro unbutton the shirt
of his
lover' the upwardly mobile, Pakistan-born Omar. Omar initially acquiesces
to
Johnny's caresses, but then abruptly puts a halt to the seduction. FIe turns his
back to his lover and recalls a boyhood scene of standing with his imrnigrant
father and seeingJohnny march in a fascist parade through their South
London
neighborhood: "It was bricks and bottles, imrnigranrs out, kill us. people
we
knew - - . And it was you. we satu you," omar says bitterþ
Johnny initially
recoils in shame as omar brings into the present this damning image
Êom the
past of his younger self as a hate-filled skinhead. But then, as Omar
conrinues
- I speaking, he slowly reaches out to draw omar to him and embraces
omar
,/ Êom behind. The final shot Êames Omar's face
as he lets his head fall back onto
Johnny's chest and he closes his eyes.
The scene eloquently speaks to how the queer raciarized body becomes a
historical archive for both individuals and communities, one that is excavated
through the very acr of desiring th e raciafother. For omar, desiringJohnny
is
| ' irrevocably interrwined with the legacies of British colonialism in
South Asiaz Chapter One Impossible Desires 3
and the more irnmediate history of Powellian racism in r9óos Britain.l In his
- memory of having seen
Johnny march ("we saw yorl'), omar in a sense re-
verses the historical availabiliry of b¡own bodies to a white imperial gazeby
turning the gaze back onto Johnnyt own racist past. The scenet ambiguous
ending-where omar closes his eyes and succumbs to caresses-may
Johnnyi
suggest that omar gives in to the historical amnesia that wipes out the legacies
of Britain's racist past. Yet the meaning and function of queer desire in the
scene are far more complicated than such a reading would allow. IfforJohnny
sex with omar is a way of both tacitly acknowledging and erasing that racist
past, for omar, queer desire is precisely what allows him to remember. Indeed,
the barely submerged histories ofcolonialism and racism erupt into the present
at the very momenr when queer sexualiry is being articulated-
h¡
eueer desire
does not transcend or remain peripheral to these histories but instead it be-
comes central to their telling and remembering: there is no queer desire with-
out these'histories, nor can these histories be told or remembered without
simultaneouslylevealing an erorics of power.
upon its release in 1985, My Beautful L"aundrette engendered heated contro-
versy within South Asian comrnunities in the ur, some of whose members
took exception to Kureishit_matter-oÊfact depiction of queer interracial de-
ffi
sire between white and brown men, and more generally to his refusal to
Johnny paniel Day-Lewis) and
produce "positive images" ofBritish Asian lives.2 The controversy surrounding Omar (Gordon Warnecke) in My Beautíful I-nundrette
its release prefigured the at times violent debates around queer sexualiry and (dir. Stephen Frears, r985).
dominant notions of communal identity that took place both in South Asia
and in the diaspora over the following decade.3 In New york ciry for in-
Twenry years later, Kureishii film remains a remarkably powerfìrl rendering
stence, the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association waged an ongoing battle
of queer rzcíalizeddesire and its relation tJ-.-ory and history r.irlrl
throughout the r99os over the right to march in the annual India Day parade, a "rr¿
touÃstone and precursor to much of the queer South Asian diasporic cultural
controversy I will rerurn to later in this chapter. And in several Indian cities in production that I discuss in rmpossible Desires.a The texts I consider in this book,
December r998, as I discuss in detail in chapter 5, Indian-canadian director following Kureishit lead, allow us to dissecr the ways in which discourses of
Deepa Mehta's fifrn Fíre was vociferously arrâcked by right-wing Hindu na-
sexuality are inextricable from prior and conrinuing histoiies or ã"_to"lrlit-,
tionalists outraged by its depiction of"lesbian" sexuality. These various battles
narionalism, racism, and migration. In Kureishib film, as in the other queer
in disparate national locations speak to the ways in which queer desires, bodies, diasporic texts I examine in this book, queer desire reorients the rraditionally
sites olme backward-looking glance of diaspora. Stuart Hall has elegantþ arriculared the
"tradition,' peculiar relation to the pest that characterizes a conservative diasporic imagi-
They also nary. This relation is one where the experience ofdisplacement "gives rise to a
sexualities and diasporic affiliations within a narionalist imaginary and it is this
certain irnaginary plenitude, recreating the endless desire to return to 'lost
mapping of qrleerle¡1 o¡to d_iaspora that is the subject of this book.
origins.' to be one again with the mother, to go back to tt. b.ginrring.';4 Chapter One Impossible Desires 5
If convenrional diasporic discourse is marked by this backward glance, this clear the ways in which even articulations of
"overwhelming nostalgia for lost origins, for 'times past; "6,e queer diaspora diaspora run the risk of stabili ;--
*Uy
rnóbilir.s questions of the past, memory and nostalgia for radically different n*"t¡rl-I¿unàreneþr.rêrut a useful point of departure in addressing
purposes. Rather than evoking an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic many ofthe questions that concern me throughout this book. As the film makes
momen-t outside history what is remembered through queer diasporic desire the bonds ofrela-
and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place riven with contra- ãn fathers andio.ts
dictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles. serves as a central and recurring feature within diasporic .-¿ U..o.tt.t
""t."ri".,
Joseph Roach, in his study of Atlantic-rim performance cultures, uses the -
.....--.. -.-Í
-;;¿aoh.r-fô;ilì"ìå"ti"¿i.üðns ofiarñe.reis and diffeien.t,h"t,Stuart Hall
as
suggestive phrase "forgotten but not gone" to name that which produces the ---
haì;s atowl{ha.ja:t:1i1.
:o-3,Pt1!ng {efìrucions
of diasporic subjectivirylo For
conditions for the þresent but is actively forgotren within dorninant histo- Freud, the oedipal drama explains the consolidatfpn of proper gender idenci-
diasporic cultural forms and practices point to submerged fìcation and heterosexual object choice in little boys, as masculine identification
and colonialist violence that continue to resonate in the with the father is m"àe while feminine identification with the mother is re-
present and that make themselves felt through bodily desire. It is through the fused. In his rg5z work Blacþ skin, whíte Masks, Frantz Fanon resituates the
queer diasporic body that these histories are brought into the presenr; it is also oedipal scenario in the colonial context and shows how, for racialized male
through the queer diasporic body that their legacies are imaginariveþ con- subjects, the process whereby the little boy learns to identify with the father and
tested and transformed. Queer diasporic cultural forms thus enact what Roach desire the mother is disrupted and disnrrbed by the þlack) father's lack ofaccess
Í terms "clandestine countermemories" that bring into the present those pasts to social power.ll Fanon's analysis, which I enæge \7v.ith more fully in chaPter 3,
.
that are deLiberately forgotten within conventional nationalist or diasporic makes evident the inadequacy of rhe oedipus complex in explaining the con-
Ii,Jsc.ipts.)tf,
as Roach nores, "the relendess search for the puriry of origins is a srruction of gendered subjectivity within colonial and postcolonial regimes of
lvoyage not of discovery but of erasure,"e queer diasporic cultural forr4s work power.'While I am interested in idencifiing h.î q":-:elf:::*t ñtr":
against the violent effacements that produce the fictions ofpurity that lie at the Fanon in reworking the notion of oedipaliry in relation to racialized
heart ofdorninant nationalist and diasporic ideologies. culinities, I also ask what alternative narrafives emerge when this story of
Significandy, however, I(.ureishi's exceverigl._9ljþ9.
f9Saci9¡_of colonialism oedipality jettisoned altogether. For even when the male-male or father-son
is
and racism as ,!9y_rlg
lo.lpped onto queer (malg)
þodies crucially depends on a narrative is mined for its queer valences (as in Inundrette or in other gay male
particular fixing of female diasporic subjectiviry. The filmt female di;qp*i.
character Tania, in fact, functions in a classic homosocial triangle as the con-
duit and foil to the desire between Johnny and Omar, and she quite literally
disappears at the film's end. 'We lest see her standing on a train platform,
suitcase in hand, having left behind the space of the imrnigrant home in order
The original meaning of diaspora sumnons up the image of scattered seeds and . . .
to seek a presumably freer elsewhere. Our gaze is aligned with that ofher father
inJudeo-christian . . . cosmology, seeds are metaphorical for the male "substance"
as through an open window; the train rushes by, she vanishes. It
he glimpses her
that is traced in genealogical histories. The word "sperm" is metaphoricdly linked
is unclear where she has gone, whether she has disappeared under the train
to diaspora. It comes ftom the same stem [in Greek meaning to sow or Scetter] and
tracks or is safely within the train compartment en route to a different life. She
is defìned by the oEo as "the generative substance or seed of male animals."
tures to another Diaspora, in its Uaditional sense, thus refers us to a system ofkinship reckoned
e literally as the I through men and suggests the questions of legitimacy in paterniry that pacriarchy
ric figure makes gerlerates.l2ó Chapter One Impossible Desires 7
These et)'rnological traces ofthe term are apperent in Kureishi's vision ofqueer
Gilroy and Stuart Hall, powerfully move the concept of diaspora away from its
diasporic subjectivity that centralizes male-male relations and sidelines female traditional orientation toward homeland, exile, and return and instead use the
1vrry þs ¡o oh ffi IU giås *h'erJK,rïäiËi ïiéïi là:"ã, on. ffi u tt,
subjc e e i terrn to reference what Hall calls "a conception of identiry' which lives with
o.r¡rrrî*il,ä i räig. ofso.rtt aìii., diirpoiìrütêritore, fiË, and -usic in and through, not despite. difference; by hybridity."la This tradition of cultural
order to ask if we can imagine diaspora differently, apart from the biological, studies, to which my project is deeply indebred, embraces diaspora as a concept
reproductive, oedipal logic that invariably forms the core of conventional for its potential to foreground notions of impuriry and inauthenticiry that
formulations of diaspora. Itj|o:l so by paying- special attenrion to queerfemale resoundingly reject the ethnic and religious absolutism at the center of na-
!" t!:_!:"ty:*,;liir poritø,rJiÇ tlr"røi-ì
subjectívíty this particulai tionalist projects. Viewing the (home) nation through the analytical frame of
stitutive absence in both dominant nationalist and diasporic discourses. More
"ìã,r-
diaspora allows for a reconsideration of the traditionally hierarchical relarion
surprisingly perhaps, and therefore worth inrerrogating closely, is the elision of between nation and diaspora, where the former is seen as merely an im-
queer female subjectivity within seerningly radical cultural ãiaióE¡i¿ã-ãr poverished imitation of an originary national culture.ls Yet the antiessentialist
asporic projects that cenrer a gay male or hetèroieiual feminist dt"_
notion of cultural identity that is at the core of this revised framing of dias-
ject- Impossible Desíres refuses ro accede to the splitting of queerness from
pora functions simultaneously alongside what Hall terms a "backward-looking
feminism that mlks such projects. By making female subjecUrrity .árrrrd to , conception of diaspora,"16 one that adheres to precisely those same myths of
spora in purity and origin that seamlessly lend themselves to nationalisr projects. Indeed
¡11y_s_gþ
structures ofkin- while the diaspora within nationalist discourse is often positioned as rhe ab-
,rr. á¡"ìt,..-t jected and disavowed Other to the nation, the nation also simultaneousþ
I use to frame the texts I consider-queer díasporas, impossibility, and south Asian recruits the diaspora into its absolurist logic. The policies of the Hindu na-
public cultures-as they are hardly self-evident and require greater elaboration
tionalist government in India in the mid- to late r99os to court overseas "NRr"
and contextualization. (non-resident Indian) capitallT is but one example of how diaspora and narion
can function together in the interests ofcorporate capital and globalization.l8
Hindu nâtionalist organizations in India are able to effectively mobilize and
Queer Diasporas
harness diasporic longing for authencicity and "tr¿dition" ánd convert this
In an overview of recent trends in diaspora studies, Jana Evans Braziel and longing into materiallinkages berween the diaspora and (home) nation.le Thus
Anita Mannur suggesr rhat therzalu_e=gldttg=e rerm which at its most diasporas can undercut and reify various forms ofethnic, religious, and state
literal describes the dispersal and movement ofpopulations from one particular
nationalisms simultaneously. Various scholars have pointed out the compliciry
national or geographic location to other disparate sites-lies in its critique of not only between diasporic formations and different nationalisms but also
the nation form on the one hand, and its contestatio.r ofã. hege-ånicã;; between diaspora and processes oftransnational capitalism and globalization.2o
of globari;adol ôg lþ. o1hgr.13 ñiciõ"arsm äid glob-alizatio" J" ì;&.¿-..*- The inrimate connection betr,veen diaspora, nationalism, and globalizarion is
stitute the two broad rubrics within which we must view diasporas and di- particularþ clear in the South Asian context, as the example of Nn.r capital
asporic cultural production. Flowever, the concepr of diaspora may not be as
underwriting Hindu nationalist projects in India makes all too epparenr.
resrstant or contestetory to the forces of nationalism or globalization as it may
Vijay Mishra importantþ distinguishes betrveen two historical momenrs of
first appear. clearly, as Braziel and Mannur indicate, diaspora has proved a South Asian diasporic formation: the first produced by colonial capitalism and
remarkably fruitfi¡l analytic for scholars of nationalism, cultural identiry race,
the migrarion of Indian indentured labor to British colonies such as Fiji,
and migration over the past decade. Theories of diaspora that emerged out of
Trinidad, and Guyana in the late nineteenth and earþ twenrieth centuries; and
Black Bricish cultural studies in rhe r98os and r99os, particularþ those of paul the second a result of the workings of "late modern czpttaT" in the mid- to8 Chapter One Impossible Desires 9
late twentieth century. Significantly, in addirion to producing labor diasporas, ductions that Gilroy celebrates take shape. Sharpe notes that the transnational
colonial capitalism also produced what Kamala Visweswaran terms e "middle- cultll,r,-al-practicesthatclroy'ar"*îäf ñ.õõt.aç;.b;Ç;;;;rh;it'"
man minoriry" that served the interests of the colonial power and acted as a 'World: "to consider London and New York as global city centers is to recog-
conduit berween British colonial administrators and the indigenous popula- nize the degree to which Gilroyt mapping of the black Allantic follows a
tions in East AÊica and other locations in the British Empire.21 The legacies of cartography of globalization."2a Sharpe's analysis is a particularly useful caurion
this inirial phase of South Asian diasporic formation in the nineteenth century against a celebratory embrace of diasporic cultural forms that may obscure the
are apparent in the second phase ofmigration engendered by globalization in ways in which they are produced on the terrâin of corporate globalization.
the mid- to late tvventieth century. Mishra defines this diaspora of "late mod- Thus just as diaspora may function in collusion with nationalist intefesç, lg lgg_
ern capital" as "largely a post-rgóos phenomenon distinguished by the move- must we be attentive to the ways in which diasporic cultural forrns are pro-
ment of economic rnigrants þut also refugees) into the metropolitan centers of ducted in and through transnational capitalist processes.
the former empire as well as the 'New'World' and Australia."22 While South The imbrication of diaspora and diasporic cultural forms with dominant
Asian migrants in the r9óos were allowed entry into the ur primarily as low- nationalism on the ori"e hand, and corporate globalization on the other, takes
wage labor, the class demographic and recia\zation of South Asians in the place through discourses that are simultaneously gendered and sexualized.
United States was strikingly different. Vijay Prashad has pointed out how the Feminist scholars of nationalsm in South Asia have long pointed to the par-
r9ó5 Immigration and Narionaliry Act, which shifted the criteria for U.S. ticular rendering of "woman" within nationalist discourse as the grounds upon
citizenship from a quota system to "farnily reunification," encouraged the which male nationalist ideologies take shape.2s Such scholarship has been in-
immigracion of large numbers of Indian professionafiprimarily doctors and - structive in demonstrating how female sexuality under nationalism is a crucial
scientists; this demographic was pârticulâù lng to the U.S. govern- site ofsurveillance, as it is through women's bodies that the borders and bound-
^ppr
ment in that it was seen âs a \May to bolster U.S. cold war technological aries of com¡nunal identities are formed. But as I argue in chapter 5, this body
supremacy.23 Visweswaran ârgues that this professional technocratic elite in the ofwork has been less successfirl in fully addressing the ways in whicÈàominant
United States funccions in effect as a latter-day middleman minoriry working nationalism institutes heterosexuality as a key disciplinary regime. Feminist
in collusion with dominant national interests in both the United States and in scholarship on South Asia has also, for the most part, remained curiously silent
India- Mishra, Prashad, and Visweswaran thus point to the ways in which ibout how alternafive sexualities may constitute a powerfirl challenge to pa-
South Asian diasporic formations engendered by colonial capitalism (in the triarchal nationalism.26 Nor has there been much sustained attention paid to
form of labor diaspor"Ð 11d those engendered by globalization and tran_s- the ways in which nationalist framings ofwoment sexuality ere translated into
national capitalism (in the form ofa bourgeois professional class) function in the diaspora, and how these renderings of diasporic women's sexuality are in
tandem with different national agendas. turn central to the production of nationalism in the home nation.27 In an ,
Clearly, then, the cultural texts that emerge Êom these diflerent historical article on Indian indentured migration to Trinidad, Tejaswini Niranjana be-
moments in South Asian diasporic formation must be seen es inextricable not gins this necessary work by observing that anticolonial narionalists in India
only from the ongoing legacies of colonialism and multiple nacionalisms but in the earþ twentieth century used the figure of the amoral, sexually im-
also from the workings of globalization. Indeed theories of diasporic cultural pure Indian \Moman abroad as a way of producing the chaste, virtuous Indian
production that do not eddress the imbricarion of diaspora with transnational woman at "home" as emblematic of a new "nationâlist morality"2s The con-
capitalism shore up the dominance of the latter by making its mechanisms -solidation ofa gendered bourgeois nâtionalist subject in India through a con-
invisible. In ân astute critique of Paul Gilroy's influencial formulation of black fìguration of its disavowed Other in the diaspora underscores the necessity of
diasporic culture in The Black Atlantic,Jenny Sharpe argues that globalizarion conceptualizing the diaspora and the nation as mutually constituted forma-
provides*tLg unacknowledggd l_eï1t" upon which the diasporic cultural pro- tions. Flowever, as I elaborate in chapter ó, Niranjana's ârticle still presumes thero Chapter One Impossible Desires r r
heterosexuality of the female diasporic and female nacionalist subject rather_ T:.9[v4æS4:t[t]'.i".f._..'r,9|E1T3T:-1:lp_italism.Suturing"queer"
th.an recognizing institutionelized hêterosexualiry as e primary structure of to_*d?.lplcra" thus-recrrperates those desires,.practices, and subjectivities that
both British colonialism and incipient Indian nati are rendered impossible and unimaginable within cowentional diasporic and
nisischola.s of South Asia and the South Asian ""T1*J.T:åT,3:':'.4 :g:'i9:l+ttgt .or-qy,9sllg:sr 1loÈe_. yirds, .b_ecomes
heterosexuality as a structuring mechanism of both state and diaspotiãìI a ya-y..tg idgglogies by restoring the im"pure, inauthentic,
:].41:l.g:-l_"Lt_g1ali¡-t
riònãisms makes clear the indispensability of a queer critiquej-\.-gu.g!_gl" nonreproductive potential ofthe notion ofdiaspora- Indeed, the urgent need
asporic framework insists on the imbrication of nation and diãspora ,@gh to trouble and denaturalize the close relationship benveen nationalism and
the production of hetero- and homosexualiry particularþ as they are mapped het_e¡9¡gga]i3r- 11qpci¡ely wþat m{gs the notion of a queer S+p.9-1"_-lg
onto the bodies of women. ) compelling.3l A queer diasporic framework productively exploits the analo-
gorÃîebdo., between nation and diaspora on the one hand, and benveen
Just es discours.s of ferl"le sexualiry are central to the mutual consritution
ofdiaspora and nation, so too is the relation benveen diasporic culture and he on the ot
globalization one that is mediated through dominant gender and sexual ide- he 1.rs.to-tþ^e-na
ologies- Feminist theorists have astutely observed that globalization profoundly the queer is seen as the debased and inadequate copy ofthe heterosexual, so too
shapes, transforms, and exploits the gendered arrangements ofseemingly "pri- -."'..''..within nationalisg-lggic positioned as tLe queir Oth.r ôfth. "ãtiot,
is diaspora
vate" zones in the diaspora such as the "imrnigrant home."2e But while much its inauthentic irnitation. The concept of a queer diaspora enables a simulta-
schoLarship focuses on how global processes function through the differentia- neåus critique of heterosexualiry and the-nátion form wËile exploding the
tion of the labor market along gendered, racial, and national lines, how dis- binary oppositions between nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homo-
courses of sexualiry in the diaspora intersect with, and are in turn shaped by, sexualiry original and copy.
globalizarion is only beginning to be explored.30 Furthermore, the impact of If "diaspora" needs "queerness" in order to rescue it from its genealogical
globalization on particular diasporic localions produces various forms of op- i1q!gg.l:, jql"_:ll:ï' also needs "diaspora" in order to make it more supple
posicional diasporic cultural practices that may both reinscribe and disrupt the in relation to questions of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization. An
gender and sexual ideologies on which globalizarion depends. eiriêfging bòdy of quèer of color scholarship has taken to task the "homonor-
The critical framework of a specifically queer diaspora then, may begin to mativity" of certain strands of Euro-American queer stud:ies that center white
unsettle the ways in which the diaspora shores up the gender and sexual gay male subJectiviry while simultaneously fixing the queer, nonwhite ra-
ideologies ofdorninant nationalism on the one hand, and processes ofglobaliz- cíaltzed, znd/ or imrnigrant subject as insuffrciently politicized and "mod-
ation on the other. Such a framework enables the concept of diaspora to ful- ern."32 My articulation of a queer diasporic framework is part of this collective
fill the double-pronged critique of the nation and of globalization thet Braziel project of decentering whiteness and dorninant Euro-,\merican paradigms in
and Mannur suggest is its most useful intervention. This framework "queers" theorizingîãx""tity Uðtn toå"lly t.".rs.rrtiondly.'On ,Ëã -;;'ú."p1. i.n i,
"nd
the concept of diaspora by unmasking and undercutting its dependence on a C * q". *- r" ññrõá ãã gãöîdisfdeñrãñilnõñ-here ro n o r m a úve p ra c ri c es
-
genealogical, implicitþ heteronormacive reproductive logic. Indeed, while the and desires that may very well be incommensurate with the identity categories
Bharatiya Janata Party-led Hindu nationalist government in India acknowl- o!"gay" and "lesbian." A queer diasporic formation works in contradistinction
edged the diaspora solely in the form of the prosperous, Hindu, heterosexual to the globaliztaon of "gy" identity that replicates a colonial narrative of
Nnr businessman, there exists a different embodiment of diaspora that remains development andprogress thatjudges all "other" sexual cultures, communities,
unthinkable within this Hindu nationalist imaginary. The category of "queer" and practices against a model ofEuro-American sexual identiry.33 Many of the
in my project works to name this alternative rendering of diaspora and to diasporic cultural forms I discuss in this book do indeed map a "cartography of
dislodge diaspora from its adherence and loyalty to nalionalist ideologies that globalization," in Sharpe's terms, in that they emerge out ofqueer communitiesT
12 Chapter One Impossible Desires i3
The concept of3,t"::-.
in First'World gtobal cities such as London, New York, and Toronto. Yet we !glrh-.$t:l diaspora, then, function: oq-ylllriplg
must also remember, as Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd point out, that "trans- levels throughout this book. First, it siruares the formation of sexual subjeç-
.::
national or neo-colonial capitalism, Like colonialist capitalism before it, continuès I'JlÐLIlg'" .11g¡ryqo.ry] {gyl_€.dtr¿rc., capital, bodies, desire, and labor.
to produce sites ofcontradiction that are effects ofits always uneven expansion Second, queer diaspora contests the logic thet.situates the terms "qugçr" 4nd
ttäiärpô."" ;'hete.osexualiry"
but that cannot be subsumed by the logic of commodification itself."3a In other as dependent on the originaliry of and "nation."
words, while queer diasporic cultural forms are produced in and through the fi4Iffgi:-9:.c-""'T:1!i9-9:T""?l!_:"!..c9:ies within the united States for
workings of transnational capitalism¡hey 4:g i5gy14: 'q!fq means by which to sexual variance, namely "gay and lesbianl' and it marks a different economy of
critique the logic of gb91_:"pi:d-i¡¡elf. The cârtography of a queer diaspora desire that gscapgs legibility within both normative South Asian conrexts apd
tells a different story ofhow global capitalism impacts local sites by articulating homonormative Euro-American contexts.
ocher forms of subjecciviry culture, affect, kinship, and comrnunity that may The radical disruption of the hierarchies berween nâtion and diaspora, het-
not be visible or audible within standard mappings of nation, diaspora, or erosexuality and homosexualiry, original and copy, that queer diasporic texts
globalization. 'Whet emerges within this alternative cartography are subjects, enact hinges on the quêstion of translation. Many of the texts I consider here
comrnunities, and practices that bear Little resemblance to the universalized can be understood as diasporic translations of "original" national texts: for
"gay" identiry imagined within a Eurocentric gay imaginary. instance, in chapter 5 I read Deepa Meht¿'s Fire against (Jrdu writer Ismat
Reading various cultural forms and practices as both constiluting ând consti- Chughtai's r9+r sh-ort sjgy on which Mehta's n- irìããffii-.ãffity,
tuted by a queer South Asian diaspora resituetes the convenlions by which itr .tr"pt.r a, f rlt"rt. Indian American direcror Mira Nair's zoor frlm Monsoon
homosexuality has traditionally been encoded in a Euro-Âmericân context. We earlier manifesration th" BoFãE Hî"ã t""g""g.
",
Queer sexualities as articulated by the texts I consider here reference familiar ù. K?|:!n; i. / (-Who Am I to You?, dir- Sooraj Ba{arya,
tropes and signifiers of Euro-American homose*rrrlity-r,lÉ-"s the coming- 1994). In most popular and critical discussions of Fire or Monsoon Wedding,
oo, .r".."tirr. ,"d it, ;;-;drnt ,n".tà., of secrecy and disclosure, as well as both within and outside India, the earlier, ' --ãg.ötrîf,;Ffr;ffii€.-ãðh*fitm
gender inversion a.td Jioss-d.ésiing-while investing them with radically diÊ are conveniently forgotten and effaced. In restoring the prior text as central to
ferent and distinct significations- It is through e particular engagement with the discussion of the contemporary text, and in tracing the ways in which
South Asian pubìic culture, and popular culture in particular, that this de- representations of queerness shift from "original" to "remake," I ask what is
familiarization of conventional markers of homosexuality takes place, and that 6-.;hï;íäd gäi.red in rhis process of translatio". n."ai"g aiì$o.ì. rexrs as
alternative strategies through which to signify non-heteronormacive desire are Iranslations nnay seem to run the risk of reif ing rhe binary beuween copy and
subsequently produced. These alternative stretegies suggest a mode of reading Erg-"t;--ttfrkx t-"Ëfi /1ng tFre " áation "
as th e ori ginl ió è"r- in"t diasp o ra'
and "seeing" same-sex eroticism that challenges modern epistemologies ofvisi- merely attempts to replicete. Just as the narion and the diaspora are mutually
bility, revelation, and sexual subjectiviry. As such, the norion of a queer South constitutive categories, by extension so too do the "original" national text and
Asian diaspora can be understood as a conceptual apparatus that poses a cricique its diasporic translation gain meaning only in relation to one another. Te-
of moderniry and its various narr¿tives ofprogress and development.3s A queer jaswini Niranjana, in her study of translation as â srrategy of colonial sub-
South Asian diasporic geography ofdesire and pleasure stages this cririque by j_ectification, observes that translation functions within an idiom of fideliry
rewriting colonial constructions of "Third World" sexualities as anterior, Pre- betrayal, and authenticiry and appears "as a transparent representation ofsome-
modern, and in need of'Western political development-constructions that are thing that already exists, although the 'original' is actually brought into being
recirculated by contemporary gay and-l::þi"lj-:::-ggl{-q-:_11,-t:j. It simulte- through translation."36fn thejuxtaposition oftexts that I engage in, the queer-
neously interrogates different South Asian nationelist narratives that imagine nessof either text cân only be made intelJìgible when read against the other.37
and consolidate the nation in terms of organic heterosexualiry. Furthermore, reading contemporary queer representations (such as Mehtat14 Chapter One Impossible Desires r j
Flre) through their "originals"(such as Chughtai's short story) militates against tures ofthe home-as domestic space, racialized community space, and national
a developmental, progress narrative idenrityformation that posits the space-while imaginatively working to dislodge its hereronormative logic.al
"L*V" From the two sisters-in-law who are also lovers in Deepa Mehta's fìIm Fire, to e
and agains the (home) netlgr-r--a:3
diaspora as a space ofsexual freedom over an_d
Ler
space ofsexual,oþþreSäon. Rather, I am interested in how the erotic econo- Brirish Asian gay son's grappling with his imrnigrant father in Ian Rashid's
mies of the priót texd'afäüiafped differently within a diasporic context. Trans- short fìlm Suruiuing Sabu, to the queer and transgendered protagonists of Shani
lation here cannot be seen as a mimetic reflection of a prior text but rather as a Mootoo's and Shyam SeTããlLraiT novels, home is a vexed location where'
productive activiry that instanriates new regimes ofsexual subjectiviry even as it queérìüÈ¡èðtñüËo;äìËry-ä;rìr;; and subjecrivities are formed by its logic
effaces earlier erotic arrangements.
Finall¡, in its most important intervention into dominant nationalist and "Telt;te9Ë:y-lil,::lg:.,",.Ti".-it.
Historian Antoinette Burton writes of how, in the memoirs of elite women
diasporic formations, the framework of a queer diaspora radically resituates writers in
late-colonial India,_ the "home" itself becomes an archive,,, "a
questions ofhome, dwelling, and the domestic space thet have long concerned dwelling-place of a critical history rather than the fälsely safe space of the
feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarship. Historians of coloniaiism and pa*:'42 Similarly, the queer diasporic texts.l-4$gÐ:b-ughout this book
anticolonial nationalism in India have examined in detail the ways in which n-y'!.-:. iF-iti"_;:fò'-s of,,iotence a,ìf,
home and housing were crucial to the production of both a British colonial l9ry*.l.ly-, qossi-b-ilir¡ and_qromise thal 99 enshrined within "home" spac_ç.
and Indian anticolonial nationalist gendered subjectivity in the nineteenth These queer diasporic texts evoke "home" spaces th¿t âre permanently and
century.38.Pârtha Chatte{ee argues that in late-colonial India, "the battle for already ruptured, rent by colliding discourses around class, sexuality,_and ethnic
the new idea of womanhood in the era of nationalism was waged in the jdentiry. }-çy
lel.:l.l1o-boqh ¡he.s-paçe of "home" and the nation by -"king
home . . . it was the home that became the principal site ofthe struggle through þggh th9 site_of desire and pleasure in a nostalgic diasporic imaginaS)The
which the hegemonic construct of the new nationalist patriarchy had to be *!..*tgl-9rne-9". h".T-.::l the_se texts,
""ù.1j1î.g1v_qel9.'^e!î .L939a9gfill1,.,
normalized."3e Contemporâry nationalist and diasporic discourses clearþ bear This resignification of "home" within a queer diasporic imaginary makes three
the marks of these colonial and anticolonial nationalist legacies of "home" as a crucial interventions: first, it forcefully repudiates the elision of queer sub-
primary arena within which to imagine "otherness" in racial, religious, na- jects from national and diasporic memory; second, it denies their function as
tional, and gendered terms. The "home" within both discourses is a sacrosanct threat to family,/community/nation; and third, it refuses to position queer
space of puriry radition, and authenticiry embodied by the figure of the subjects as alien, inauthentic, and perennially outside the confines of these
"woman" who is enshrined at its center, and marked by patriarchal gender and entrtres.
sexual arrangements. It is hardly surprising, then, that the home emerges as a
particularþ fraught site of contestation within the queer diasporic texts I dis-
Impossibility
cuss in this book.
Just as the home has been a màjor site ofinquiry within feminist postcolonial Because the figure of "woman" as â pure and unsullied sexual being is so
scholarship, queer studies has also been particularþ attuned to the home as a central to dominant arciculations of nation and diaspora, the radical disruption
primary site of gender and sexual oppression for queer and female subjects.ao of "home" that queer diasporic texts enect is particularþ apperenr in their
Yet while many lesbian and gay texts imegine "home" as a place to be left representation of queer female subjectivity. I use the notion of "impossibiliry"
behind, to be escaped in order to emerge into another, more liberatory space, es a wey of signaling the unthinkability of a queer female subjecr position
the queer South Asian diasporic texts I consider here are more concerned with within various mappings of nation and diaspora. My foregrounding of queer
remaking the space of home from within. For queer raciahzed migrant sub- female diasporic subjectivity throughout the book is not simply an atrempt to
jects, "staying put" becomes a way of remaining within the oppressive struc- merely bring into visibility or recognition a heretofore invisible subject. In-\7
t6 Chapter One Impossible Desires 17
_ deed, as I have suggested, many of the texts I consider run counter to standard inclusion in the parade in New York City-are not as unrelated as they may
"lesbian" and"gay" narracives ofthe closet and corning out thât are organized initially appear.rPaola Baccheta has argued that one of the central tenets of
exclusively around a logic ofrecognition and visibility. Instead, I scrutinize the Hindu nationalist i and genders
deep investment of dominant diasporic and nationalist ideologies in producing tgall_those who do , parricularly
this particular subject position as impossible and unimaginable. Given the Indian Muslims.as Thus. while these cwo evenrs are certainly not comparable in
illegibiJiry and unrepresentabiliry of a non-heteronormative female subject te-imlof or the level of violence, together they mark the ways in which
scale
within patriarchal and heterosexual configurations of both nation and dias- terrifyingly exclusivist definicions of communal belonging are relayed and
pora, the project of locating a "queer South Asian diasporic subject"-and a translated between nation and diaspora within the realm of public culture,
queer female subject in particular-may begin to challenge the dominance of through intersecting discourses ofgender, sexualiry nationaliry and religion.
such configurations. Revealing the mechanisms by which a queer female di- The literal erasure of Muslims from the space of the (Hindu) nation coincides
asporic positionaliry is rendered impossible strikes at the very foundation of with the s).nnbolic effacement of queer
subjecrs from a "home" spa,ce nostâl-
these ideologicel structures. Thus, while this project is very much situated gically reimagined from the vantage point of the diaspora. Indeed the batde
within the emergent body of queer of color work that I referenced earlier, it between sarca and the Nrra, that continued throughout the r99os makes
also parts ways with much of this scholarship by making a queer female subject explicit how an Indian imrnigrant male bourgeoisie (embodied by the Nrra)
the crucial point of departure in theorizing a queer diaspora. In so doing, reconstitutes Hindu nationalist discourses of com¡nunal belonging in India by
Impossible Desires is located squarely at the intersection of queer and feminist interpellating "India" as Hindu, patriarchal, middle class, and free of homo-
scholarship and therefore challenges the notion that these fields of inquiry are sexuals.a6 This Hindu nationalist vision ofhome and homeland was powerfully
necessarily distinct, separate, and incommensurate.43 Instead, the book brings contested by sarca at the r99j parade, where once again the group was
together the insights of postcolonial ferninist scholarship on the gendering of literally positioned at the sidelines of the official spectacle of narional recon-
colonialism, nationalism, and globalization, with a queer critique of the het- stitution. One sarca activist, Faraz Ahmed (aka Nina Chitron), stood at the
eronormativiry of cultural and state nationalist formations.aa edge of the parade in stunning, Bollywood-inspired drag, holding up a banner
The impossibiJity ofimagining a queer female diasporic subject within dom- that proclaimed, "Long Live Queer India!" The banner, alongside Ahmedt
inant diasporic and nationalist logics was made all too apparent in the battle in performance of the hyperbolic femininity of Bollywood film divas, interpel-
New York City benveen the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (sarca) lated not a utopic future space of national belonging but rather an already
and a group of Indian imrnigrant businessmen known as the National Fed- existing queer diasporic space ofinsurgent sexualities and gender identities.
eration of Indian ,\ssociations (r.rrra), over sALGAt inclusion in the Nrra- That same year, the NFr,{ attempted to specify its criteria for exclusion by
sponsored annual India Day Parade. The India Day Parade-which runs down denying both sarca and Sakhi for South Asian'Women (an anti-domescic
the length of Madison Avenue and is an ostensible celebration of India's inde- violence woment group) the right to march on the grounds that both groups
pendence from the British in r947-is
an elaborate performance of Indian were, in essence, "entinâtional." The offìcial grounds for denying Sakhi and
diasporic identiry and a primary siteof contestation over the borders and sALGA the right to march was ostensibly that both groups called themselves not
boundaries ofwhat constitutes "Indianness" in the diaspora. ln rggz the newly "Indian" but "South Asian." The possibility ofPakistanis, Bangladeshis, or Sri
' Lankans marching in an "Indian" parade was seen by Nrra members es an un-
formed sarca applied for the right to march in the parade only to be brusquely
turned down by the N¡ra. Later that same year, right-wing Hindu extrernists acceptable redefinition ofwhat constituted the so-called Indian community in
demolished the Babri Masjid, a Muslim shrine in Ayodhya, India, setting offa New York City. In r99ó, however, the NFrA allowed Sakhi to participate while
ftenzy of anti-Muslimviole.r..(h.r. tvvo events-the destruction ofthe Babri concinuing to deny sALGA the right to march. The Nrra, as self-sryled arbiter
Masjid in Ayodhya, and the resistance on the part of the Nrra to sALGA's of communal and national belonging, thus deemed it appropriate for womenr8 Chapter One Impossible Desires r9
to march "Indian wofnen," even perhaps as "feminist Indian women," but
as "foreign,"
as a product of being too long in the West, and therefore is an-
could not envision women marching as "Indian queers" or "Indian lesbians"; nexed to the "host" nation where she may be further elided-partic,,rt"ly if
clearþ the probability that there may indeed exist "lesbians" within Sakhi was undocumented-as a nonwhite imrnigrant within both a mainstream (white)
not allowed for by the Nrra. lesbian and gay movement and the larger body of the nation-stâte.
The controversy surrounding the India Day Parade highlights how hege-
Iþ: -tT9::""g9ygy T_ik l :l:ll how the unthinkabiliry of a queer fe-
monic nationalist discourses, produced and reproduced in the diaspora, posi- male diasporic subject is inextricable Êom the nadónãfiJt oveivaluation of tlie
tion "woman" and "lesbian" as mutually exclusive câtegories to be disciplined heterosexual female body; U"r it ,fio f"ncrions in randem wich the ril;i;
in different ways. Alannya Bhattacharjeei work on domestic violence within neous subordination ofgay ã*ai-eîubj..uriÇ. ifroliúro,rgfrorrt this book, I pay
Indian imrnigrant coÍununities in the United States, for instance, demon- clôse attention ro_rhe tr-ighly specific brirTntimately related modes of domina-
strates how imrnigrant women are positioned by an imrnigrant male bour- tion by which various racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized bodies are
geoisie as repositories ofan essential "Indianness." Thus any form oftransgres- disciplined and, contained by normarive iotions of communal identiry. The
sion on the part of women may result in their literal and symbolic exclusion rèndering of queer female diasporic subjecriviry as "impossible" is a very par-
from the multiple "homes" which they as imrnigrant women inhabit: the ticular ideological structure: it is quite disrinct from, but deeply connected to,
patriarchal, heterosexual household, the extended "famlly" made up of an the fetishization of heterosexual female bodies and the subordination of gay
immigrant communiry and the national spaces of both India and the United male bodies within dominant diasporic and nationaljst discourses.ae Impossible
States.aT Sunaina Maira's ethnography of South Asian youth culture in New Desires atternpts to track the mutual dependency and intersections between
York City further documents the ways in which norions of chastity and sexual these different modes of domination, as well as the particular forms of accom-
purity in relation to second-generation daughters are "emblematic not just of modation and resistance to which they give rise. Indeed, as my brief discussion
the farìrilyi reputation but also, in the context of the diaspora, of the purity of of My Beautiful Lnundrette suggested, and as I elaborare in the following chap-
tradition and ethnic identiry a defense against the promiscuity of 'American ters, queer female diasporic subjectiviw remains unimaginable and unthink-
influences."'48 Both Bhattacha{ee and Maira valuably point to the complex able not only wirhin dorninant nationalist and diasporic discourses but also
ways in which the gendered constructions of South Asian nationalism are within some gay male, as well as liberal feminist, rearticulations of diaspora.
reproduced in the diaspora thropgh the figure ofthe "woman" as the boundary Thus, in their eLision of queer female diasporic subjectiviry, gay male anô
marker of ethric/racial community in the "host" nation. The "woman" also liberat feminist framewoiks may be comþ[cit wttr dominå"i natiotiriit ãtìã
bears the brunt of being the embodied signifier of the "past" of the diaspora, diasporic discourses.
that is, the homeland that is left behind and continuously evoked. But what 'While
the phrase "impossible desires" refers specifically to the elision of
remains to be fully articulated in much feminist scholarship on the South Asian queer female diasporic sexuality and subjectiviry I also use it to more generally
diaspora are the particularþ disastrous consequences that the symbolic freight evoke whatJosé Rabasa, in his analysis of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas,
attached to diasporic women's bodies has for non-heteronormative female Mexico, calls "a utopian horizon of alternative rationalities to those dominant '
subjects. Within the patriarchal logic of an Indian imrnigrant bourgeoisie, a in the West."5o Noting that one ofthe rallying cries of rhe movement is "Edgíd
"nonheterosexual Indian woman" occupies a space ofimpossibiliry in that she b llyÑlt-i
--P-=g-{ lh:-imp ossible ), Rab as a understands the zap atistas'
!
is not only excluded from the various "home" speces that the "woman" is evocation of pre-Columbian myths combined with a pointed critique of the
enjoined to inhabit and symbolize but, quite literally, simply cannot be imag- North American Free Trade Agreement and former president Raúl Salinast ,
ined.'Within patriarchal diasporic and nationalist logic, the "lesbian" can only economic reforms as articulating a particular vision of time, history and na-
exist outside the "home" as household, communiry and nation of origin, tional collectivity that runs counter to that of dominant Mexican nationtism.
whereas the "woman" can only eúst within it. Indeed the "lesbian" is seen as The "impossibility" ofthe Zapatistas'subaftern narrative, argueò Rabasa, lies in-
zo Chapter One Impossible Desires 2r
its incompatibility with the "modern" narratives of dominant nationalism that is within the realm of diasporic public culture that competing notions of
relegate indigenous people to the realm of the pre-political and the premod- communiry belonging, and authenticiry are broughr inro srark relief. Such
ern. The power of the Zapatistas thus "resides in the new world they call an understanding of public culture reveals the intimate connections between
forth-a sense ofjustice, democracy, and liberty that the goveÍfrrr,eÍrt cannot seemingly unrelated events such as the India Day Parade controversy and the
understand because it calls for its dernise."sl It may inicially appear incongruous desrruction of the Babri Masjid that I just described. The queer diasporic
ofgender, sexualiry and miption-iîtñ-e-Sciüth i\sían $õra--
to begin a study public,culture that is the focus of this book takes th. fo.rn6lifËõSã
with an evocation of an indigenous,peâsânt struggle_^in southern Mexico. ã6lé%ilili1;;;õ¿Ëä;ñi."1ffiá', d."r, and novels that have a
"i¿"ði,
However I hnã the notiói-ol"the impossible,' as articulated by R;Ër's*.\ ,fã.ìfi."lly transnational address wèl ilihðy afe deeply roored in the politics
readingof Zepatismo, to have a remarkable resonance with the project engaged .frþ,:- i.ç" comrnuniries often leave
in throughout this book. The phrase "Exigíd lo imposible!," in relarion to a traces that resist textualizatíon, they allow .x to ..if,i.rË *h"i'lo"iiif"ì"iì
queer South Asian diaspora, suggests the range ofoppositional practices, sub- viable archive ôlSouÈh niián diasfõiTð cultuial-þroducrion in the first þlace.sr
jectivities, and alternative visions ofcollectiviry that fall outside the develop- Ìhus the archive of queer publiè culture that I track here also ..r.o-p"rr.,
mental narratives of colonialism, bourgeois narionalism, mainstream Liberal cultural interventions that are much harder to document, such as queer spec-
feminism, and mainstream gay and lesbian politics and theory. "Demanding tetorial practices, and the mercurial performânces and morãiñ6iñ-aliõrms of
the impossible" points to the failure of the nation to live up to its promises of sõialìù-(5õiñ;;as.äil¿ã"tt*¿r"..dãã".)-trr"t..*;G.,î'shlt"-bl
democratic egalitarianism, and dares to envision other possibilities of existence fèsdvals, and other communiry eventö. Thii qìééi di"rpoii.
exterior to dominant systems oflogic.
"iãfiìîãiîñðiftät
runiaþainst the grain of conventiöriã diasporic or netione.lisr archives. in that it
documents how diasporic and nationalist subjectivities are produced through
the deliberate forgetring and violent expulsion, subordination, and criminal-
South Asian Public Cultures
izaríon acrices, and identities. This archive is the storing
Throughout this book, I attempt to read the traces of "impossible subjects" as house countermemo.l.)' to once again use Joseph
J
they travel within and away from "home" as domestic, communal, and na- Roach ch sexually and racially marginalized corunu-
tional space. In so doing, I ask how we can idenrify the mulcitude of "small nities reimagine their relation to the past and the present. By narracing a
acts," as Paul Gilroy phrases it, that fall beneath the threshold of hegemonic diflerent history of South Asian diasporic formation, a queer diasporic archive
nationalist and diasporic discourses.s2 This project of mapping the spaces of allows us ro memorialize the violences of the p"r, JrJi-ffii"g ;';;üièi
"rfiif.
impossibi-liry within mulriple discourses necessitates an engagement with par- ways of being in the world,"ss as Dipesh Chakravarty phrases it, that extend
ticular cultural forms and practices that are at the margins of what are con- beyond the horizon ofdorninant nationalisms.
sidered legitimate sites of resistance or the "proper objects" of scholarþ in- This different mode of conceptualizrng the archive necessitates different
quiry. The term "South Asian public cultures," in my project, functions to reading strategies by which to render queer diasporic subjects intelligible and
name the myriad cultural forms and practices through which queer subjects to mark the presence of what M. Jacqui Alexander terms an "insurgent sex-
ardculate new modes of collectivity and kinship that reject the ethnic and uality"_that works w'ithin and against hegemonic nationalist and diasporic
religious absolutism of mulriple nationalisms, while simultaneously resisting logic.s6 Indeed, the representations of non-heteronormative desire within the
Euro-American, homonormative models of sexual alterity. My understanding texts I
consider throughout the book call for an alternative set of reading
n...k.ftõãëñ;îiì'ôi-õf
ofthe term builds on Arjun Appadurai and Carole practices, e queer diasporic reading thatjuxtaposes what appear to be disparate
"p"bii.."ttìi.t¡tà-Ç*i"f i"F"ã-a.-uìi.o*hõ"t.r,sionsand.orrrr.ãF texts and that traces the cross-pollination benveen the various sites of non-
tions beüveen sltes .,liro."l processes" play out.5-G normative desires that emerge witbjn,them. On the one hand, such a reading
"àtiã"rf "ndì.ãil"iio"JYou can also read
