The literary field of queer cultural production in contemporary India: considering popular queer texts via Bourdieu

In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu puts forward the idea that culture is discursively produced and that the field that informs, constitutes, and problematizes cultural production is crucial towards understanding how cultural transactions, dynamics, and politics work. Since literature is a key marker of society’s outlook on and reception of sensitive subjects like non-heteronormativity, this article focuses on the queer literary field – LGBTQ+-related texts and publication – in/of contemporary India. To this end, I look into trends in publication of Indian queer literary texts in English since 1976 through Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural production of the field of queer literature and consider popular texts like Shikhandi: And Other Queer Tales They Don’t Tell You; Our Impossible Love; She Swiped Right into my Heart, and read them vis-à-vis Bourdieu’s theorization, in order to conceptualize an idea about how texts and contexts interact with each other towards (re-)producing and (re-)constructing contemporary queer culture(s) in the Indian context.

Crip Theory

Crip theory began to flourish in the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory in the early decades of the 21st century. These fields attend to the complex workings of power and normalization in contemporary cultures, particularly to how institutions of modernity have materialized and sedimented a distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” and to how subjects deemed “abnormal” have contested such ideas. Disability studies pluralizes models for thinking about disability: if a culture of normalization reduces disability to lack or loss and positions disability as always in need of cure, disability studies challenges the singularity of this medical model. Disability studies scholars examine how able-bodied ideologies emerge in and through representation, and how such representations result in a culture of ableism that invalidates disabled experiences. Crip theory, in turn, emerged as a particular mode of doing disability studies, deeply in conversation with queer theory. The pride and defiance of queer culture, with its active reclamation or reinvention of language meant to wound, are matched by the pride and defiance of crip culture. Crip theory, however, is generatively paradoxical, working with and against identity and identification simultaneously. Crip theory affirms lived, embodied experiences of disability and the knowledges (or cripistemologies) that emerge from such experiences; at the same time, it is critical of the ways in which certain identities materialize and become representative to the exclusion of others that may not fit neatly within dominant vocabularies of disability. Many works in crip theory focus on the supposed margins of disability identification as well as on the intersections where gender, race, sexuality, and disability come together. Crip theory, additionally, offers an analytic that can be used for thinking about contexts or historical periods that do not seem on the surface to be about disability at all. Cripping offers a critical process, considering how certain bodily or mental experiences, in whatever location or period, have been marginalized or invisibilized, made pathological or deviant. Within queer theory, crip theory thus perhaps has its deepest affinity with queer of color critique, with its attention not just to substantive identities but also to processes of racialization and gendering that pathologize or make aberrant particular groups. Queer theory, queer of color critique, and crip theory, moreover, often combine studies that focus on a macrolevel recognition of the complex workings of political economy (neoliberal capitalism, in particular) and the seemingly microlevel vicissitudes of identity, embodiment, or desire.

NO FATS, NO FEMMES, NO ASIANS: REIMAGINING SEXUAL AND ETHNIC IDENTITIES OF QUEER ASIAN MEN

There is a common belief in the queer community that the oppressed cannot oppress others. In many ways, this support paper will document the meandering paths I took to create the short documentary No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians. But more than that, it addresses how such blatant racism and discrimination is accepted in the queer community. It is a discussion of how queers and Asians are portrayed in the media, and how the early representation of these two groups has created trauma and has become ingrained in the larger queer community. I will be borrowing from important questions raised by neocolonialists, critical race and queer theorists, as I make references to popular and queer culture. These will be my guides for a theoretical investigation of identity politics in Canada, specifically identities of queer Asian men. Using experimental, auto ethnographic, and performative documentary tactics, I will offer alternative images and different ways of presenting those images so that they cannot be taken up as another form of subjugating queer Asian men into stereotypical discourse.

NO FATS, NO FEMMES, NO ASIANS: REIMAGINING SEXUAL AND ETHNIC IDENTITIES OF QUEER ASIAN MEN

There is a common belief in the queer community that the oppressed cannot oppress others. In many ways, this support paper will document the meandering paths I took to create the short documentary No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians. But more than that, it addresses how such blatant racism and discrimination is accepted in the queer community. It is a discussion of how queers and Asians are portrayed in the media, and how the early representation of these two groups has created trauma and has become ingrained in the larger queer community. I will be borrowing from important questions raised by neocolonialists, critical race and queer theorists, as I make references to popular and queer culture. These will be my guides for a theoretical investigation of identity politics in Canada, specifically identities of queer Asian men. Using experimental, auto ethnographic, and performative documentary tactics, I will offer alternative images and different ways of presenting those images so that they cannot be taken up as another form of subjugating queer Asian men into stereotypical discourse.

City Powd’ring

This chapter examines how Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term positions the cloth trade as pivotal to the construction of sexuality and sexual relations in the city. Circulating with cloth in the play is queer urban sexual knowledge. Antitheatricalists feared that the theater was a site of sexual pedagogy and initiation in the early modern period. Michaelmas Term subtly embraces that role for the city comedy, and the chapter draws on queer theories of materiality to demonstrate that the play’s relentless focus on the materiality of selfhood is pertinent in querying the limits of biological determinism and essentialism that characterize mainstream politics around sexuality today. The play can prompt us to consider how alternate forms of queer ontogenesis derived from the past have affordances for the production of queer culture in the present.

Can I Be Frank with You?

When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of queer cultural artifacts, Rocky Horror has also inherited many of the complicated representational aspects of its sources, such as the racist coding and simultaneous racial erasure of Gothic and horror conventions as well as rapidly changing and often conflicted trans identity politics of the mid- twentieth century. These problematic appropriations and omissions become all the more salient in light of Cox’s 2016 performance. In this article, Crookston examines how Rocky Horror has functioned as a performative queer cultural archive and how Danny Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.

Turkey’s queer times: an introduction

Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual rights organizations and forms of sociabilities, and the dissemination of elements of queer culture—that has engendered both scholarly and public attention for sexual dissidents and gender non-conforming individuals and their lifeworlds, while it has also created new spaces and venues for their self-organization and mobilization. At the point of knowledge production and writing, this visibility and the possible avenues of empowerment that it might provide have been in jeopardy: not only do they appear far from challenging the dominant norms of the body, gender, and sexuality, but queerness, in all its dimensions, has become a preferred target for Islamist politics, conservative revanchism, and populist politicians.

Authenticity, uniqueness and talent: Gay male beauty influencers in post-queer, postfeminist Instagram beauty culture

The emblematic rise of the female Instagram influencer has been understood as exemplifying shifts in postfeminist and neoliberal frameworks of femininity. Yet, the central place of gay men in postfeminist beauty culture and its intersection with ‘post-queer’ culture have so far escaped considered attention. In this article, we examine the performance of femininity by four of the top gay male influencers in Instagram beauty culture, Jeffree Star, James Charles, Bretman Rock and Patrick Starrr, whose followings make them as or even more popular than their most high-profile female counterparts. These influencers are notable for their visibility, fame and authority in beauty culture on Instagram, a space populated primarily by girls and women, with its focus on the application of makeup. We explore how the production of femininity by these gay male beauty influencers demonstrates a key, yet relatively unexplored relationship between postfeminist conditions of visibility and the mainstreaming of queer male identities, suggesting that this cultural space of shifting power relations positions a privileged subset of gay men as equal, if not more compelling, in fulfilling contradictory postfeminist demands of authenticity, individuality and femininity.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the theoretical and historical contexts that shaped the texts examined in Staging Discomfort. The chapter pays significant attention to the role of the revolution’s breed of masculine heteronormativity as a vehicle for creating exclusions based upon the visibility of queer difference. This chapter also outlines (queer) Cuban theater history in order to trace the development of an autochthonous theater, as well as signalling how queer culture resists the repressive aspects of the revolution.