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QUEER BE/LONGINGS
Respondant: Annette Schlichter, Comparative Literature and Women's Studies link to faculty profile
Moderator: Anna Cavness

"Queering Home: South Asian Diaspora and Sexual Identity Politics in Stephen Frears’ and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette"
Rahul Krishna Gairola, University of Washington

Perhaps one of the most salient issues to haunt current dialogues on postcolonial, diaspora, and transnational studies is the relationship of diasporic subjects to the slippery notion of “home.”  In surveying the many ways that diasporic subjects have dealt with experiences of home (ranging from the failed assimilation of racialized subjects in their new homes to the nostalgia and trauma of exile felt in relation to the former homeland), it is clear that conceptualizations of home have too often, in their privileging of racial formations that underpin Western racism, elided questions of sexuality.  The stakes are high for engaging questions of sexuality in the frame of home – to begin with, eliding questions of sexuality from notions of home risks naturalizing heterosexuality as the commonsensical sexual paradigm of home and nation.  With such concerns in mind, this paper discusses Hanif Kureishi’s acclaimed film My Beautiful Laundrette in tracing shifting notions of “home” in a British/ South Asian diasporic and queer frame. 

My reading of My Beautiful Laundrette demonstrates the ways in which queer South Asian diaspora resist the interpellative praises of the British nation-state during the years of Margaret Thatcher.  Hailing diasporic South Asians as the country’s new “meritocrats”1, Thatcher echoed Ronald Reagan’s neo-liberalism while inviting them to belong in the nation-state in and through their use-values as profit-making cogs in the British economy.  This would arguably shape South Asian diaspora as cogs in the machinery of British (trans)national capitalism – a descendent of the very system of imperialist exploitation that led to South Asian migration into the urban centers of Great Britain.  However, Kureishi’s film demonstrates the ways in which this subject-making agenda is undermined by modes of belonging that cross race, class, and sexual lines.  Indeed, my reading argues that some diasporic subjects are able to set the terms for their own belonging in the erstwhile colonial imperium of London in and through non-heteronormative2 practices that “queer” traditional spaces of nation and home. 

In particular, I evince the ways in which Johnny and Omar, an interracial, non-heteronormative couple, radically resist such qualified calls for belonging in their new “home” country in rejecting traditional home space that reinscribes the very capitalist logic that praises South Asian immigrants for properly assimilating into the rubric of the nation-state.  As an empowered subject of a diasporic history involving colonialism and the partition of the Indian subcontinent, Omar in particular skillfully negotiates the identity politics of losing one’s home to a dominant conqueror (the UK), experiencing one’s home divided by that conqueror, and designing a home in the land of the conqueror.  As agents negotiating their own terms of belonging in the country, the queer, interracial couple of Johnny and Omar cross class lines as they “queer” the space of a launderette located in rough part of London slums in My Beautiful Laundrette.  These agents’ non-heteronormative sexual practices thus act as politically charged weapons that ideologically reappropriate the very nation-state that once subjugated the Indian subcontinent3.

Archives of Humor: Homoerotic cinematic Spaces in Karan Johar’s Kal Ho Na Ho
Neetu Khanna, UCLA

With the sudden popularity of NRI (“nonresident Indian”) themes in recent Bollywood film such as Bend it Like Beckham and Monsoon Wedding, the success of these films mark the way in which the NRI has become a facilitator in the what M. Madhava Prasad describes as the “relocation of the seismic centre of Indian national identity somewhere in Anglo-America.”4
  
Centered on an Indian immigrant family in New York City, Karan Johar’s 2003 Bollywood hit, Kal Ho Na Ho, standsdeeply implicated within this project of identity “relocation.”  Against the backdrop of the celebrated American ‘multicultural,’ ‘hybrid’ pop culture iconography of the film, a number of tabooed and controversial topics are surfaced, most strikingly, homosexuality.   Emerging from a cinematic trajectory and history of homoerotic subtext in Hindi film, Kal Ho Na Ho brings to the ideological forefront queer subjectivities that have arguably never before been so boldly integrated into the heteronormative matrix of Bollywood film.  This paper focuses on both the use of humor and the visual mechanisms through which the homoeroticism of Kal Ho Na Ho is integrated into the heteronormality of Hindi cinema.

In this paper I will be examining the moments and cinematic spaces where this homoerotic subtext rises to the cinematic ‘text,’ and what it means for humor to provide the vehicle through which queer thematics rupture the heteronormative matrix of Bollywood cinema.  This paper is situated within a larger project of mine that seeks to explore the ways in which humor, in a number of cultural forms, is able to carve out unique political and ideological spaces within various regimes of oppression.  What frames this larger project is the question of how we would both “read” and archive cultural artifacts differently if we were to closely engage with the humor and pleasure of these forms that emerge in marginalized and silenced communities of color.  While the humor of this film clearly proves hospitable for existing narratives of colonialism, nationalisms, and its concomitant homophobia, I am interested in the ability of humor to play with meaning and systems of signification that inevitably open up a “politics of possibility.”5

In this paper, I examine the ways in which the humor of the film and the embodied responses of laughter operate in the space of the Hindi movie theater in Los Angeles as well as the transnational online exchanges of the Bollywood chatroom.  In mapping out various readings of the film’s humor, I hope to tease out both the possibilities and dangers that the humor opens up in the context of this “national identity relocation.”  In taking seriously the laughter within the movie theater and the pleasure of the global exchanges of queer readings documented in the online chatrooms, we may engage with the humor as both a technology of translation and a rich alternative archive of signifying in Bollywood film.

"Corps Étranger: Mona Hatoum and Queering the Body"
Robert Summers, UCLA

Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian-born artist who presently works in the UK and the US, has consistently reckoned with the body, and she has offered up visceral performances, photographs, and videos of the body or fragments of it—be it her own, or her mother’s, her friends’, strangers’, and/or animals’.  She also uses remnants—the detritus—of the body (hair, tissue, organs, carcasses) in order to explore (the violence of) the fragmented body and the fragility of it.  Through the use of bodily fragments and remnants her work shows the oscillation relationship between inside/outside, self/other, and human/inhuman.  Within the literature on Hatoum, it has been well argued that her lived experiences has made her extremely aware of being a particular kind of body in this word, and being from a particular place and people, which, indeed, does shape one’s view of the world.6  In sum, this is the dominant staging of Hatoum’s art and the scripting of her author-function.  For me, this dominant scripting and staging of Hatoum’s artistic practice seems to have omitted the ways in which her art can be seen as queering the body (as a whole or in pieces).

As an art historian, coming from a “Western” and “queer theoretical” position, I will argue how current issues of globalism, late capitalism, and the proclamations of the “end of identity categories and politics”—specifically from most quarters in modern and contemporary (Western) art history, are deeply located in and dominated by “American/Western” art historical interests—while they simultaneously disavow this position.7Therefore, it is my aim to not only show how “queer theory” can engage in the aforementioned debates circulating around Hatoum and/as her artwork, but also show how “queer theory”—far from being a theoretical position for and by “gay, white men”—as it so often devolves back into—has something to say about sovereignty, cosmopolitanism, globalization, late capitalism, and cultural and identity politics today.8  Furthermore, I hope that by working “queer theory” along side (and in) the artwork by Hatoum, “queer theory” can open up again—making dominate readings become un-done and also showing what “queer theory” can learn from a practice such as Hatoum’s, and how this may aid in the rerouting and rethinking of what we have been calling “queer theory.”

Indeed, there are some theoretical traps here, but doesn’t “queer theory” mean learning (among other things) that uncharted territories and possible mistakes (sometimes very big ones) can be of value?  Indeed, this paper is for a re-looking and a re-analyzing, but this time without our templates and pre-formulated arguments and assumptions, and I believe the artwork by Mona Hatoum can lead to some unexpected sites where we can begin to think gender, sexuality, race, and class completely differently—in ways that do not just simplistically align them.