Bodies in Transition: Exploring Queer Sexualities in Indian Cinema

95 Bodies in Transition: Exploring Queer Sexualities in Indian Cinema Hiya Chatterjee Representations of alternative sexualities in Indian popular culture are conspicuous through their absence and invisibility. This lack, especially in Bollywood, corroborates the critique that despite the increased visibility of the LGBTQ movement in post-liberalisation India, the transgender1 subcultures of Indian society still inhabit the periphery of the social consciousness. Most films centring on queer themes portray middle class characters and are reticent on queer sexuality, quite understandably so, in order to avoid censorship of a rigid and unimaginative Central Board of Film Certification of India. This is because popular culture in Indian society functions mostly as an ideological state apparatus intent on upholding the normative structures. Representation of sexuality in mainstream Indian cinema is circumscribed to the heteronormative, more specifically to cater to the (perverted) sexual fantasies of the cisgender, heterosexual male. The female body is not only a source of visual pleasure for the voyeuristic Indian male audience, but this act of deriving pleasure from the sexual otherisation of the female is considered essential to establish the self as ‘masculine’. This masculinisation of viewership has other consequences as well: it perfectly serves the patriarchal agenda of the heteronormative family in which the woman has to be tamed by the man to maintain the societal power relations and the sexual hierarchy.