Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

8 Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories of Deepa Mehta’s Fire

8 Local Sites/Global Contexts The Transnational Trajectories of Deepa Mehta’s Fire Gayatri Gopinath In 1995 a group of Indian immigrant businessmen in New York City known as the FIA (Federation of Indian Associations) denied both SALGA (the New York–based South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association) and Sakhi (an anti–domestic violence women’s group) the right to march in the annual New York City India Day parade. The two activist organizations were banned from the parade, which celebrates India’s independence from the British in 1947, on the grounds that both groups were, in essence, “anti-national.”1 In 1996, however, the FIA allowed Sakhi to participate while continuing to deny SALGA the right to march. The FIA, as self-styled arbiter of communal and national belonging, thus deemed it appropriate for women to march as “Indian women,” even perhaps as “feminist Indian women,” but could not envision women marching as “Indian queers” or “Indian lesbians.” This particular configuration of gender, sexuality, and nation was echoed in the recent riots in Bombay and New Delhi prompted by the release of the 1996 film Fire. The film, made by the Indian Canadian director Deepa Mehta, depicts a lesbian relationship between two sisters-in-law in a middle-class, joint family household in contemporary New Delhi. In December 1998 local theaters in various urban centers in India were stormed by dozens of activists from the Shiv Sena, a Hindu right-wing organization that forms the militant wing of the Hindu 149 nationalist government currently in power. The Shiv Sena justified their actions by claiming that lesbianism is an affront to Hinduism and “alien to Indian culture .”2 Prior to the riots, the Indian media had made similar criticisms, claiming that the film had “very weak links to the true Indian milieu.”3 In other words, both the mainstream media and the extremist Hindu nationalist movement used the charge of inauthenticity (the notion that the film wasn’t “truly Indian”) to disavow both its queer content and its diasporic origins. It is this conflation of “queer” and “diaspora,” and the construction of both as impure and inauthentic within a hegemonic diasporic and nationalist imaginary, that I interrogate throughout my larger project on race, gender and sexuality in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Juxtaposing the controversies surrounding the India Day parade in New York City and the release of Fire in Bombay and New Delhi makes clear the ways an Indian immigrant male bourgeoisie (embodied by the FIA) reconstitutes in the diaspora the contemporary nationalist discourses of communal belonging in India (most blatantly espoused by the Shiv Sena). Both the FIA and the Shiv Sena interpellate “India” as Hindu, patriarchal, middle-class, and free of homosexuals. Furthermore, the conduct of both the FIA and the Shiv Sena makes explicit how hegemonic nationalist discourses, reproduced in the diaspora, position “woman” and “lesbian” as mutually exclusive categories to be disciplined in different ways. Within patriarchal nationalist and patriarchal diasporic logic, the “lesbian” can exist only outside the “home” as household , community, and nation, whereas the “woman” can exist only within it. My project examines how the gendered and sexualized discourses of bourgeois and religious nationalism in South Asia are reproduced in the diaspora through different religious, political, and economic structures, as well as through particular cultural practices. The ideological linkages that can be traced between immigrant communities in the diaspora and nationalist discourses in South Asia demand that we see these disparate sites as crucially connected, interdependent, and mutually constitutive. Indeed, as I hope to make clear, the concepts of nation and diaspora must always be placed in relation to one another. Furthermore, I would argue that fixed, essentialized concepts of national and diasporic identity are most fruitfully contested from a “queer diasporic” positionality. The concept of queer diaspora functions on multiple levels. First, it situates the formation of sexual subjectivity within transnational flows of culture, capital, bodies, desire, and labor. Second, queer diaspora contests the logic that situates the terms “queer” and “diaspora ” as dependent on the originality and authenticity of “heterosexuality” and “nation.” Finally, it disorganizes the dominant categories within the United States GAYATRI GOPINATH 150 for sexual variance, namely, “gay and lesbian,” and it marks a different economy of desire that escapes legibility within both normative Indian contexts and homonormative white Euro-American contexts. The necessity of producing a queer diasporic framework becomes particularly apparent when we try...