17 Queer Discourses and the New Literatures in English

Mr. Saidul Haque

About the Module:

This module will explore queer discourses in ‘New’ literatures in English. Besides studying the significance and relevance of reading new literatures through the prism of queer discourse, this module will discuss the interconnectedness between queer and postcolonial studies. It would look into the problematic of homogenizing queer studies in Anglo-American queer discourses. This module would study literary texts like Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai by Mahesh Dattani, R. Raj Rao’s “Crocodile Tears”, Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe and Ismat Chughtai’s “The Quilt”. It would address the politics of queer representation in ‘new’ literatures.

New Literatures:

New Literatures is an umbrella term that incorporates the rich literary productions of a geographically and culturally diverse area encompassing basically the former British colonies. The literary and cultural productions categorized under “New Literatures” are marked by certain plurality, heterogeneity and polyvalence. The common concern of this huge body of literary productions is its search for identity which was long denied to them by the colonialist project. New Literatures are then ‘political’ in nature and constantly negotiate with power structure/s. The term ‘New’ is also significant in terms of the experimentation of form, theme and language handled by these writers. The voice that resonates in the ‘new’ literatures is the voice coming from the marginalized and minority groups who were denied ‘agency’ by the consolidated ‘structures’ like patriarchy/ heteronormativity, colonialism, neo- colonialism, race, and so on. The ‘new’ literatures explore the voices of women, queer, colonized, proletariat, racially segregated, Blacks, Latinos, the hyphenated diasporic groups, among others.

Queer Discourses:

Exploration of ‘Queer’ discourse in ‘New’ literatures is then very significant as it is also the discourse that problematizes and investigates the issue of identity as well as the question of power and marginalization. Around the 1970s, feminist theory started theorizing gender as a social identity, fabricated, designed and perpetuated by social institutions rather than being something innate to the way “body” works. Kate Millet in her Sexual Politics argued that sex is biological but gender is a social construct. In Gayle Rubin’s words: “Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is…culturally determined and obtained.”(39). Michel Foucault in the History of Sexuality (1976 – 84) “theorized sexuality as located within structures and discourses of power. He was thus able to provide, for the first time, a concrete approach to the so-called natural marginalization of queer sexuality by arguing that certain forms of sexuality were constructed as unnatural and evil and its practitioners placed under surveillance. What Foucault was doing in his study of sexuality was to focus on the sexualized and sexual body as a locus of power play, where different forces like law or medicine mapped and categorized the body in particular ways before ‘acting’ upon it. Foucault thus shifted sexuality from the domain of pure body to discourses and culture” (Nayar 185-186). Therefore sexuality was defined and codified with certain parameters where heteronormative relationship was the rule. Any deviation from that role/rule would lead to criminalization and medicalization. Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) argues that gender is ‘performative construct’: “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.”(qtd. in Nayar 189). Subject is not something stable, fixed or preordained; rather it is through the subject’s various acts and performativity that constitute its reality. Gender identity is therefore not fixed and the conventional binary opposition of masculine/feminine or straight/queer is also socially and politically constructed. Queer studies is therefore “an attempt to redefine identities and carve out a cultural/political space within the dominant heterosexual paradigm, to simply stop being invisible or the “perverted” or “sick” “other” of heterosexuality” (qtd. in Nayar 184). Queer discourse sensitizes and interrogates the popular and cultural representations of gay/lesbian/transgender/bisexual as aberrant and deviant figure. Queer doesn’t prioritize a particular direction of sexual desire but restores the heterogeneity and potentialities of the desire at work in the formation of the subjective identity. Queer discourse destabilizes essentializing identities and deconstructs the “naturalness” of heterosexuality. Queer challenges ‘Compulsory heterosexuality’ that is structured around the patriarchal trope of marriage and the perpetuation of male dominated institutions like family, kinship and religion. “Queer now refers to not only gay/lesbian issues but also includes other practices, identities and communities-all of which have been marginalized in history such as bisexuality, sado-masochism, the transgendered and the transsexual”

The crisscrossing of queer discourse and the ‘new’ literatures is not merely limited to the search for sexual identity, but they share common concern about the problematic of racial, ethnic and cultural identity. Judith Halberstam in her book, In a Queer Time and Place:

Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), argues that “Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience-namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (2). She detaches queerness from sexual identity and imagines spaces inhabited by diasporic peoples and nations with a colonial past. For her these spaces follow a non-normative temporality (which she terms as “queer time”) as opposed to the normative timeline which is “upheld by a middle-class logic of reproductive temporality” (4). Queer discourse doesn’t then only disrupt the “naturalness” of the body, but denies going by the “logics of labor and production… the logic of capital accumulation” (Halberstam 10). Halberstam further notes that “the histories of racialized peoples have been histories of immigration, diaspora and forced migration” where the local spaces are conflated and the movement between create new, queer spaces, neither “here” nor there” (8). Halberstam suggests that the discourse of queerness “has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (2). Queer narratives depicted in ‘New’ literatures are then rich and varied in terms of the position of these writers. Annamarie Jagose states that queer project is critical of all those versions of identity, community and politics that evolves naturally and resists whatever is constituted as normal (99). Queer narratives in ‘new’ literatures grapple with the dominant construction of identity and heteronormative operations of power.

Anglo-American Conceptualization of the Queer Discourse:

There is also a homogenizing impulse in the Anglo-American conceptualization of the queer discourse. Following Foucault’s formulation of the category of the homosexual as a species, David Halperin suggests that the idea of homosexuality and heterosexuality are modern, Western, bourgeois productions (8). In the Western imagination, Oriental is constructed as a land of sexual promiscuity. But Vanita and Kidwai’s book, Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Indian Literature (2000) would argue that Indian “society rarely provided institutions that allowed it to be chosen and lived out as primary, in refusal of marriage” even though it was “romanticized and to some degree encouraged” (xviii). This argument points out that homosexuality in India was neither a Western import nor an oriental vice that needed colonial intervention. Besides this the homosexuals from the colonized races were doubly marginalized unlike the homosexuals of the Western countries. They had to negotiate with multiple oppressions because of their racial, economic and sexual “inferiority”. A study of queer discourses in new literatures is then fraught with multiple axis. There is a serious crossover between queer theory and the postcolonial. The editors of the special issue What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now? Of Social Text 84-85(2005) call for the implementation of “the Spivakian catachrestical approach to develop a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent”.

Politics of Representation:

This section will discuss the representation of queer issues and the politics of this representation in a few texts from ‘new’ literatures in English. This representation is also not necessarily monolithic.

The Interpreters:

In Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965), the appearance of Joe Golder, an African- American as well as a homosexual, demands critical intervention. Golder in the novel is then marginalized both racially as well as sexually. Otherisation of the homosexual character in the novel then occurs through different modes. There was a constant attempt on the part of the colonized races to debunk their stereotyping as effeminate and to present a masculine image of their race. Homosexuality during the colonial period of Africa was shunned very strongly. It is also quite telling in the novel that a homosexual character is racially hybrid and different from the Africans. He is an outsider in all sense. He is cast as the absolute ‘Other’ of the African nation state. The racial predicament goes hand in hand with the sexual predicament in the text. There were moments in the novel when there was constant effort from Golder’s side to cast off his outsider status. He said to Sagoe: I like black people. I really do. Black people are exciting, their colour has such vitality, I mean it is something really beautiful, distinctive” (Soyinka 195). Sagoe accused him of being “mentally white.” When Golder justified the practice of homosexuality in African land by stating that, “Do you think I know nothing of your Emirs and their little boys? You forget history is my subject. And what about those exclusive coteries in Lagos?” (Soyinka 199). Sagoe arrogantly retaliates, “if you don’t mind, I’ll persist in my delusion” (Soyinka 199). In the split between Golder’s reliance on history and Sagoe’s world of amnesia and delusion lies the politics of otherising homosexuality in the novel.

Funny Boy:

Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy (1994) recounts the gay childhood and adolescence of Arjie Chelvaratnam amidst the Tamil/Sinhala interethnic conflict in Srilanka. This novel from ‘new’ literatures too interlinks the queer theme with the ethnic strife. Space plays an important role in the unfolding of queer discourse in the novel. While the boys play cricket in the front garden, the girls are relegated to the territory near the kitchen. While Arjie is supposed to inhabit the first one, i.e. the male space, he transgresses the ‘norm’ and aligns himself with the second one, i.e. female space. Rather than playing the masculine game of cricket, he is comfortable with the feminine game of bride-bride. His dressing up in the clothes of the bride is symbolic of his journey towards flexible gender identity:

I was able to leave the constraints of myself and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self, a self to whom this day was dedicated, and around whom the world, represented by my cousins putting flowers in my hair, draping the palu, seemed to revolve. It was a self magnified, like the goddesses of the Sinhalese and Tamil cinema, larger than life; and like them … I was an icon, a graceful, benevolent, perfect being upon whom the adoring eyes of the world rested.

Gayatri Gopinath in her book, Impossible Desires (2005) suggested that “Arjie‘s performance of queer femininity radically reconfigures hegemonic nationalist and diasporic logic, which depends on the figure of the woman as a stable signifier of tradition” (174). In an interesting note, Arjie comments that “In the hierarchy of bride-bride, the person with the least importance, less even than the priest and the page boys, was the groom. It was a role we considered stiff and boring, that held no attraction for any of us” (Selvadurai 6). The marginalization of the groom figure unsettles the concept of heterosexual marriage. The groom being the representative of traditional patriarchy also gets less attention which is quite metaphoric of challenging patriarchy in queer discourses. In her analysis of the game, Gopinath suggests that “the apparent non-performativity of masculinity in the game references both the unimportance of the groom and the hyperbolic femininity embodied by the figure of the bride, as well as the potentiality of a female same-sex eroticism that dispenses with the groom altogether”. There is a constant patriarchal policing of Arjie to rid of effeminacy. He is forced to play cricket; he is provided male company like Jegan and finally enrolls him in the Queen Victoria Academy, an all male public school. Bakshi argues that both the trope of cricket and the public school are vestiges of a colonial past.

Interestingly, both the heteronormative institutions of patriarchy and colonialism are equally hegemonic in nature because effeminacy and empire always stand in violent opposition. But this homosocial space of the male school becomes a subversive space when Arjie builds a homosexual relationship with his classmate Shehan within the premises of the school. According to Bakshi, “The colonial/patriarchal enterprise of “becoming a man” is queered to reclaim the homosocial realm and re-signify it as a homosexual space”(79). While in Wole Soiynka’s novel, The Interpreters, there was a simultaneous otherisation of queer and racial identity and it was unaccomodative of any ‘other’ in its vicinity, Selvadurai’s novel is more accommodative. Arjie’s (belonging to Tamil ethnicity) queer romance with Shehan (belonging to majoritarian Sinhala ethnicity) and his disloyalty to Tamil ethnicity by intentionally making a mess of the poem while reciting (assigned to him by Black Tie, the principal, who expresses solidarity with Tamil identity) in a school programme challenges ethnic polarization of the nation. The novelist also facilitates a bond between queer subjects and the marginal others like Radha Aunty, his mother, Daryl Uncle and Jegan who are subordinated in terms of gender, race and class. Towards the end of the novel, Arjie’s emigration to Canada invites an ambivalent interpretation. A novel which continuously engaged with queering the homosocial spaces and normative identities, fails to give shelter to Arjie. Why this trope of getting instated in a White land? Is the White country more emancipating than the homeland of the postcolonial nation state? This signifies another kind of marginality as a South-Asian migrant in a white land with his sexual marginality. But at the same time Arjie’s remarks about the family signals a different kind of interpretation: “I was no longer a part of the family in the same way. I now inhabited a world they didn’t understand and into which they couldn’t follow me” (Selvadurai 285). He is now imagining a cosmopolitan space driven by “queer time”; a space free from the (hetero) normative structure of the family.

On a Muggy Night in Mumbai:

Mahesh Dattani’s recurrent portrayals of homosexual characters in his plays make him an important figure in South Asian queer culture. Complexities of gendered identities hold centre stage in most of his plays like Bravely Fought the Queen, Do the Needful, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai etc. The homosexual relationships in his plays are quite interesting because of its protagonists’ affair/s beyond their immediate own class. For instance, Nitin’s sexual advance with the rikshaw driver in Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), Alpesh’s sexual entanglement with the gardener of the family in Do the Needful (1997) and Kamlesh’s sexual relationship with the security guard of his flat in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai(1998) and a hijra’s(transsexual) relationship with a government minister’s son in Seven Steps around the Fire (1998) are all potential sites to identify the link between being queer and the identity and/or barrier of class. But all these potential homosexual relationships are portrayed as marginal theme in the plays and seem driven by physical pleasure as is evident in the relationship between Kamlesh and the security guard. Kamlesh satisfies his sexual hunger with the guard and pays him money. The guard being conscious of his identity as gay replies “no” when asked by Kamlesh if he does this for money. But he immediately changes his view and says that he does do this for money. The guard masks his gay identity to make money. The relationships do not seem to be built upon emotional bonds. But at the same time the guard’s oscillating performative between his gay identity and heterosexual identity is richly portrayed in the play. The only central theme of a homoerotic relationship between the hijra and the minister’s son ends with a tragic and catastrophic end with the planned murder of the hijra in Seven Steps around the Fire. The play, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is unique because it deals with a whole community of homosexuals. This play finely highlights the performativity of gender. Prakash/Ed wants to gain advantage by marrying Kiran, (who is incidentally his gay partner’s sister) because this mask of hetero-sexual marriage would enable him to be closer with his homoerotic partner, Kamlesh. Similarly Bunny in a popular serial, Yeh Hai Hamara Parivaar, acts as an ideal husband and father though he is a gay in real life. Kiran exclaims: “You are an ideal husband and father! I can’t imagine anyone else in that part” (Dattani 15). The irony as well as subversive force works together as the heteronormative words like “parivaar”, “husband” and “father” are enacted by someone who actually opposes all these terms. Gender is never a fixed category and it’s a cultural and social construct. Bunny’s identity as heteronormative figure is constructed and perpetuated “by the millions” (Dattani 13) who watch this serial. They are interpellated by the patriarchal norms in such a subtle ways that neither they could accept an ‘aberrant’ figure nor they do ask for an ‘aberrant’ figure in the same serial. The word “Hamara” in the title of the serial also indicates a majoritarian identity politics where perfect ‘Us’/ Self is always created as opposed to the ‘imperfect’ ‘Other’.

Crocodile Tears

As I was proposing a connection between queer discourse and the issue of class, I will just touch upon a story named “Crocodile Tears” by R Raj Rao, a contemporary gay writer from India. This is a queer story about the relationship between the editor of a publishing company and Ashutosh, the typesetter in the publishing house. From the beginning this relationship is structured around a certain kind of hierarchy because Ashutosh is not only a subordinate in the office but he is monetarily dependent upon the editor. Like the hierarchisation in heteronormative family, queer relationships are also driven by power as is evident in the editor’s comment: “At the time of parting, Ashutosh asked for money again. I was speechless. A wave of pity engulfed me as I went to the cupboard. If a young man could be reduced to this”.

Lesbian Desire:

This section will demonstrate the intricacies of same sex relationship between women in queer discourse basically from cultural texts from South Asia and particularly India. Though ‘new’ literatures break off from the old shackles of ideological productions justified and perpetuated by colonial domination, it often negotiates with the “time past” from a new perspective. Therefore, in order to trace the problematic of lesbianism, Vanita identifies the nineteenth century as “the crucial period of transition when a minor strand of pre-colonial homophobia became the dominant voice in colonial and postcolonial mainstream discourse” (Queering India 3). As the nationalists presented a masculine and virile image of men to counter the “effeminate” tag given by their colonial masters, things happened differently for the women. Partha Chatterjee has theorized a distinction created by the nationalists. As opposed to the public sphere controlled by men, they constructed a private space of home uncontaminated and immune to the corrupt influence of the West and colonial masters. This home as the sanctum sanctorum space was feminine and the women as “grihalakshmi” graced this space. This was a “spiritual” space synonymous with asexuality and only sanctioned procreative sexuality. Any transgression from this mythic construction of a sanitized version of womanhood is dismissed as deviant. As Gayatri Gopinath argues, either the queer woman is erased from a patriarchal nationalist rhetoric that refuses her existence or she is colonized by a liberalist Western discourse of sexuality that seeks to codify her subjectivity through indexes of ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’. Though there might be debates and disagreement about including Ismat Chughtai’s story, “Lihaaf” (1942) or “The Quilt” in a paper on ‘new’ literatures in English. But my deliberate choice to discuss about the story has some different objectives.

would argue that the denial of disclosure and the negation of consensus reality towards the end of the story are symptomatic of the problem of locating and codifying queer discourse in ‘new’ literatures in English. Narrated through the perspective of an innocent nine-year old girl, the same sex relations between Begum Jan and her maid Rabbo is shrouded within several circles of enclosures: the quilt, the veil and the zenana. On every night, the child witnesses the shaking quilt with terror: “Begum Jan’s quilt was shaking vigourously, as if an elephant was struggling beneath it” (Chughtai 8) and in the end “What I saw when the quilt was lifted, I will never tell anyone, not even if they give me a lakh of rupees” (Chughtai 12). Against the homogenizing impulse of Western discourses of queer, the ‘new’ literatures in English strive to accommodate queer discourses: the challenge they face is the problem of naming queer desire with some kind of authentically indigenous flavor. In Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, the repeated use of the adjective, ‘funny’ to define Arjie’s homosexuality by the adults signifies the deficiency of English to incorporate local versions of same-sex desire. It  is significant to note here Vanita’s observation that the presence of words describing same- sex desire between women in pre-colonial Indian texts (as in Urdu poetry of rekhti genre) is absent in colonial and postcolonial discourse.

Ladies Coupe:

Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe (2001) is another novel from contemporary writing in English which foregrounds the theme of same-sex relationships in India. The story begins in  a ladies compartment on a train. All the women passengers share their stories and generate a homosocial bonding. The story of Marikolanthu comes in the end but leads to a complex problem of lesbian desire. She builds an intimate relationship with Sujata, the daughter-in- law of the aristocratic household where she works. But Sujata breaks the relationship when she comes to know that Marikolanthu has simultaneously seduced her husband Sridhar. It is interesting to note that both the women hold onto their heterosexual privilege while having a homosexual affair. Same-sex relationships are portrayed as not self-sufficient enough to challenge (heterosexual) desires in the novel. Another basic concern in the novel that runs through almost all the texts from non-Western countries is the inability of naming this kind of desire. Marikolanthu only comes to term with her desire when she views Missy K and Missy V’s homoerotic bonding long after her own affair. Sujatha too fails to name their desire as  she considers it as something supernatural : “I know you used black magic to make me your slave…make me do things no woman would…but not any more, it won’t work any more”.

Conclusions:

As I argued that representation of queer discourse in ‘New’ literatures in English is not monolithic, I would conclude with a poem titled “WHO AM I?” by Indian lesbian poet Anu:

Who AM I?

I am Uncivilized, Barbaric, Heathen,

Primitive, Oriental

I am Passive, Submissive, Self-Sacrificing,

Obedient, Sati-Savitri

I am Dyke, Deviant, Queer, Asssimilated

Bitch from Hell (qtd. in Nayar 165).

This is the contradiction and inconsistency that mark the queer literatures. Its constant desire to transgress, to re- and un-define, to defer meaning, to defy disclosure, to mask and unmask, to challenge its own meaning/s has made this body of literatures more interesting. There are differences: whereas gay literature is generally associated with larger issues of the outside/ public, lesbian writings are more about desire inside home (though there are exceptions!). While queer writings from South Asia are more about the problematic of class and caste, ‘new’ queer literatures from other parts are more concerned with racial and ethnic issues. But one basic thread that connects and appropriates the study of queer discourses in “new” literatures is their negotiation with identity at a transitional/ crisis-laden/ transgressive moment. To quote from Kobena Mercer: “…identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent, and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainity. From this angle, the eagerness to talk about identity is symptomatic of the post modern predicament of contemporary politics” (259). As opposed to the idea of a linear, triumphalist view of hegemonic heteronormativity, queer constructs a labyrinthine and circuitous discourses of the body that is symptomatic of the polyvalence in ‘new’ literatures.

Reference

• Bakshi, Sandeep. “Towards a Feminine Ironic: Understanding Irony in the Oppositional Discourse of Women from the Early Modern and Modern Periods.” Dissertation, University of Leicester, 2011.
• Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. Print.
• Chughtai, Ismat. The Quilt & Other Stories. Trans. Tahira Naqvi and Syeda S. Hameed. New Delhi: Kali for Women. 1996. 7-19. Print.
• Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. Noida: Penguin Books, 2000. Print.
• —. Collected Plays. Vol. 2. Noida: Penguin Books, 2002. Print.
• Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2005. Print.
• Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York and London: New York UP, 2005. Print.
• Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.
• Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York UP, 1996. Print. Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle, New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
• Nair, Anita. Ladies Coupe. New Delhi: Penguin 2001. Print.
• Nayar, Pramod K. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: From Structuralism to Ecocriticism. New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2010. Print.
• —.Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction. New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2006. Print.
• Rao, R. “Crocodile Tears”. Out: Stories from the New Queer India. Ed. M. Hajratwala. Mumbai: Queer Ink, 2012. 247–269. Print.
• Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women.” Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham, NC: Duke            University Press, 2012. 33-65. Print.
• Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. New Delhi: Penguin, 1994. Print.
• Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters. New York: Africana, 1972. Print.
• Vanita, Ruth and Saleem Kidwai, eds. Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print.
• Vanita, Ruth. Introduction. Queering India: Same Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Ed. Ruth Vanita. New York, London: Routledge, 2002. 1-11. Print.