Sex and sensibility: The homographic stardom of Ranveer Singh

ABSTRACT This essay examines the stardom of Ranveer Singh in the light of Queer Theory. In the last decade, Ranveer Singh has established himself as the superstar of the Bombay film industry. Not only has he acted in a range of challenging films, thereby proving his versatility as an actor, his quirky sense of clothing and style, as well as his eccentric personality and over the top public gestures, have been subject to endless public conversations and debates. In this essay, I argue, that Ranveer Singh’s aesthetics – both, on-screen and off-screen – mirror an aesthetics of queerness that militate against the normative expectations of a male star in the Bombay film industry. The characters that he plays on screen, his fashion, as well as his public conduct, together, are responsible for the construction of such an aesthetic. Rather than using ‘queer theory’ to examine the stardom of Ranveer Singh, this essay will look for ways in which Singh’s aesthetics allow the spectators to read queerness in non-identitarian ways. Singh’s body of works and his body-as-text repeatedly sabotage normative heterosexual tendencies, thereby, revealing that queerness need not always flow out of LGBTQ marked bodies.