Section 377 and the "Trouble with Statism": Legal Intervention and Queer Performativity in Contemporary India (Essay‪)‬

Setting the terms: after the Fire [1] While it would be problematic to fix a monolithic moment of change from invisibility to visibility in the context of queer citizenship in India, it could be argued that the events following the screening of Fire (1997) performed an important epistemic shift in public perceptions of queer visibility. Even while inadequately locating lesbian desire only in the context of failed heterosexuality, the film's representation of same-sex attachments between middle-class Indian women forced queer sexual politics in India into the national imaginary in an unprecedented, and at times, violent fashion. At one level, the rioting of the Hindu fundamentalist moral brigade at film screenings generated the usual conversations about the politics of censorship and freedom of speech; but at another level, the film, despite its shortcomings, generated a more useful extra-filmic discourse about the constructed nature of essential "Indianness" and the ideology of compulsory heterosexuality through which such essentialist understandings of national identity were predicated. If homosexuality was not part of "Indian" culture, as some state officials claimed, the film successfully foregrounded that homosexuality was not an import of western decadence, and in fact was quite commensurable with indigenous identity formations.