Paras Gupta, Week 13

Sacchi Bhatia in the article “What is Norms” talks about the disturbed culture of the representation of heteronormative relationship in Bollywood. At first, he picked the movie “Fire” which was released in 1996 when BJP was gaining power among the masses and the main agenda of the party was to promote Hindutva. The movie talked about the sexual desire of a lesbians and the character which were promoted as lesbians were named as Radha and Sita which led to the heavy backlash by BJP. After that there were hardly any attempt by movies to portray stories in which heteronormative relationship is involved. In India, Cinema plays an important role in forming and maintaining “cultural identities and representation” and there the movies portray gender discrimination and how there is mockery of heteronormative relationship.

In Hindi Cinema queer communities are considered as “hyper visible” and this can be elaborated because of the representations of homosexuality in Bollywood fail to demarcate the lines which separate between- lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer, questioning, inter-gender, and asexual identities.

The article further focuses on the complexity in the manner of gay and lesbian and which can be explained this reason, firstly that gender is constantly reinforced due to the performance of conventional sex roles. Secondly, same sex relationships contest the entire “matrix of heterosexuality” which includes not just “two bodies of the opposite sex” but a set of desires tied together through “rituals and socio-spatial practices and thirdly, the divides between heterosexuality and homosexuality are formed due to the established personal/national and traditional/modern constraints, which confounds sexual representations even further

Though this paper Sacchi Bhatia analysis certain common features were noticed of cinematic representations which showed implications of a compulsory heterosexuality: 1) Hindi movies were committed to a nationalist project and depicted patriarchal values as a superior practice, 2) social institutions especially family and marriage were a constant regulating factor, 3) lines between different sexual identities were converging and misleading, and 4) prevalence of discourses of race, class and ethnicity routinely strengthened the position of heterosexuality.