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393 20 Perfection on a Plate Readings in the South Asian Transnational Queer Kitchen Anita Mannur The Queer Kitchen During the last decade, a wide corpus of writing about food in diasporic contexts has emerged in ethnic studies and its interlocutory fields of gender, race, and sexuality studies. One such work is Krishnendu Ray’s Migrant’s Table, a sociological inquiry that maps the foodways of Bengali American households in the United States.1 Through a series of interviews and thick ethnographic research, Ray establishes the central desires and ideas at stake in the Bengali American culinary imaginary. But implicit in his analysis, as with several inquiries into foodways in the domestic space, is the notion that food preparation in the home is yoked to an unyielding form of heteronormativity. Whether they seek to reinforce or bring their own spin to Bengali home cooking, cooks in the home are almost always described as “wives” and “mothers,” so that South Asian diasporic foodways are mapped by an implicit heteronormativity. Nonetheless , the home space is one of the least likely spaces to guarantee what I refer to as unyielding heteronormativity. The kitchen is always already a homosocial space that allows for articulations of same-sex intimacy to emerge through and against the strictures of a regimented heteronormativity. Culinary narratives are particularly rich sites for examining the queer potentialities and promises of desire, precisely because food preparation in the domestic space is heavily invested in the ideologies of heteronormativity. When cooking is about the queer and when it refuses the narrative of unequivocal happiness, it establishes alternative logics. If cooking is resignified to complicate heteronormativity, it can be about pleasure, not teleologically oriented to a “happily ever after” that often implicitly circumscribes a narrative of heteronormativity, but about an alternative, affective fulfillment that understands pleasure without insisting on happiness or happily ever afters. Two recent queer South Asian diasporic texts that intervene into this discursive rendering of sexuality are the 2006 novel Bodies in Motion and the 2006 film Nina’s Heavenly Delights. In examining the Anita Mannur 394 queerness of these texts, one visual and one written, I hope to push scholarship about food studies toward the linkages between food and sexuality.2 Through a British Asian film and a Sri Lankan American novel, I also hope to further expand the transnational purview of Asian American studies, so that the questions asked are more definitive than the objects interrogated.3 Perfectly Queer In her pathbreaking work on queer diasporas and South Asian public cultures, cultural critic Gayatri Gopinath theorizes the position of impossibility vis-à-vis the articulation of a queer female subjectivity. For Gopinath, the “foregrounding of queer female diasporic subjectivity is not simply an attempt to bring into visibility or recognition a heretofore invisible subject.”4 Rather, the queer subject is always an impossible subject in the context of a heteropatriarchal structure that delegitimizes queer female subjectivity. Certainly, the impossibility of imagining queer female subjectivity helps explain the latent queer narrative of the relationship of the two female leads in Gurinder Chadha’s 2000 crossover hit, Bend It Like Beckham. In the film, a pair of soccer-playing friends, Jess and Jules, find their friendship tested because of a mutual love for their coach. In between, the film’s comedy emerges from misunderstandings that would view Jules and Jess as queer. After all, what could be queerer than two soccer-playing girls? But according to one reviewer, if the film forecloses the possibility of queer desire, it is because of the implicit homophobia of the diasporic Indian audience. Chadha, as one reviewer notes, “originally planned to include a lesbian romance between the characters of Jess [Parminder K. Nagra] and Jules [Keira Knightley], but “chickened out” at the last minute for fear of offending and upsetting Indian audiences.” On the website AfterEllen.com, Sarah Warn notes: In a perfect world, a small-budget British film starring an unknown Indian actress as a girl who overcomes sexist and cultural barriers in order to play soccer while falling in love with another girl would become a word-of-mouth phenomenon and ultimately generate millions in U.S. and international box office revenue. But this isn’t a perfect world, and the Bend It Like Beckham director knew that wasn’t going to happen; something had to give, and that something was the lesbian romance.5 Notable in Warn’s description is the notion that in a perfect world, a lesbian romance can exist without...

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