Beyond heteronormativity the shaping of the lesbian Ethos in India

Abstract

The discourse around LGBTQI issues at a both national and international level has been, at least over the past few decades, evolving in a variety of directions, from law and human rights, to psychoanalysis, to cultural theory and popular culture. As all these discourses and, perhaps more than anything else, queer theory, gain currency, it is important to stop and ask what happens in a context as varied as that offered by India. While on the one hand, there have been changes and challenges at the level of the law, and in academia, on the other hand, the visibility of LGBTQI issues in general and of lesbian lives and practices in particular has remained minimal. The thesis constituted an attempt at stock-taking, by asking whether between the 1990s, marked by the birth of queer theory, and 2009, the landmark reading down of Section 377 of the IPC, there is a sense of a lesbian ethos developing through a variety of texts. What is of interest is whether the ethos being created through these texts falls prey to heteronormativity, or whether it manages in various ways to subvert it. Using a selection of literature and films from this period, the researcher has attempted to identify various trends and concerns which go into the making of this ethos. The thesis has also placed the lesbian ethos in the necessary broader contexts offered by the LGBTQI movement and by the feminist movement, to try to understand the implications of the silencing of the former, which seems to have taken place. What has emerged from the analysis of the selection of texts is a sense of lesbian epistemologies ways of knowing the self and the other, ways of relating and being in the world which, while not very common, appear to hold the promise of an ethic of living. In this case, it seems necessary to explore the formation of these epistemologies in order to look at the various issues which form the ethos, through the lens offered by them. The thesis argues that the emerging lesbian ethos fragmentary through it is, and incomplete in the shape pre