Queering Normativity and South Asian Public Culture: Wrong Readings Only 3031395085, 9783031395086

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
1: ‘The Normal’ Is Everywhere
1.1 Departures and Arrivals: Queering and Normativity
1.2 Methodology: Wrong Readings Only
1.3 Normativity is Invisible: Why Uncover Normativity?
1.4 Contra-Versus Anti-Normativity
1.5 The Queer Archive
1.6 Chapter Outline
References
2: How to Read Tagore ‘Wrong’: The Secret Life of Normativity
2.1 Tagore as an Artefact of South Asian Public Culture
2.2 Normativity as Denotation
2.3 Normativity within the Production of Tagore as Canon in Transnational Contexts
2.4 Schoolbookish Apparatus: Teaching Denotation
2.5 Contra-normative Acts: Accessing the Past as a Legitimating Lineage
2.6 Normativity and the Designation of ‘Alternate’ Readings: Re-Reading Tagore’s The Home and the World
2.7 Cultural Codes and the Gendered Effects of Normativity
Normativity and the Production of Subjecthood in Tagore’s Home
Interpellating Women: Normativity and the Making of Subjects
2.8 Queer Readings/Queering Normativity: Reading Tagore ‘Wrong’
2.9 Conclusion: In Defence of ‘Wrong’ Readings
References
3: Between the Two Mother Indias: Normativity and the Home
3.1 Maps, Mother, Goddess: The Himal Map
3.2 “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” and the Policing of Bodies
3.3 Normativity and the Indian Woman in the Home
3.4 Nationalism and Normativity: Excavating a Resolution
3.5 Nationalism and Normativity: Feminist Response to the Nationalist Resolution
3.6 Mother India: Two Texts and the Woman as the Home
Mother India (1927): The Discursive Constructions of Katherine Mayo
Mother India (1957): Mother-Goddess-Nation-Home
3.7 Sexuality and the Indian State in the 1950s: Nationalist Resolution, State Machinery
3.8 India’s Daughter (2015): Normativity to the Defence of Masculinity
3.9 The Symbolism of the Mother: Making ‘Proper’ Subjects of the Nation
References
4: ‘Caste No Bar’: Normativity and Gay Marriage
4.1 “[They] Lit a Fire in the Fucking Room”: Gay Marriage in Indian Public Culture
4.2 Queer Aesthetics: R. Raj Rao’s Anti-norm Politics
4.3 Caste versus Sexuality: Normativity in Male Same-Sex Relationships
4.4 “Caste No Bar”: India’s First Gay Matrimonial Ad
4.5 Caste and Heterosexual Matrimonial Ads in India
4.6 Play ‘Fair’? “I, of all People, Would not Practice any Sort of ‘Discrimination’” (Iyer, 2017)
4.7 Homonormativity Redux! Same-Sex Coupledom and Poverty Porn
References
5: Between Signs: Bollywood, Normativity, and Same-Sex Sexualities
5.1 All India Bakchod: The Open Secret and Male Same-Sex Sexuality
5.2 AIB Knockout
5.3 Fire (1997): Censorship and Normativity
5.4 Advertisements and Female Same-Sex Sexuality: Muslim Others
5.5 The Anouk Ad: #BoldisBeautiful
5.6 Normativity and Male Same-Sex Sexuality
5.7 The Teleology: Male Same-Sex Sexuality in Popular Hindi Cinema
5.8 Karan Johar and Dharma Productions: Normativity and Same-Sex Sexuality
5.9 From Caricature to Sympathy: Gay Men in Bollywood
5.10 Bollywood and New Normativity
References
6: Conclusions: Towards Queering Normativity
References
Index