Snakes On The Dance Floor: Bollywood, Gesture, and Gender

Abstract

Queer analyses of Bollywood have, for the most part, attended to homosocial scenes and LGBT representation; this essay takes a different approach by tracing the mimicry of screen divas Madhuri Dixit and Sridevi by gay South Asian boys and men. Madhuri and Sridevi are important dance pedagogues in Hindi cinema and have established intimate and embodied relationships with their audiences. Many gay men interviewed for this project in both India and the South Asian diaspora cite these two women as dance inspiration, and the men explain how when they were young they mimicked these actresses. For some of these men, the effeminate gestures they drew from the Bollywood screen were met with praise, but for others they resulted in discipline. The essay imagines the efficacy of returning to these nostalgic film gestures in adulthood, especially in the eroticized space of the nightclub. Combining film and dance analysis, interview and ethnography, this study maps the gestural language transferred between screen and body and the affective and embodied politics of dancing like a diva.