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Queer Talk: Desire and Intimacy in South Asia

2023; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/qed.10.2.0156

2327-1590

Jiya Pandya, Avni Sejpal, Sharvari Sastry,

African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues

The literary critic Barbara Johnson once wrote, "A letter always arrives at its destination since its destination is wherever it arrives."1 A letter's address is determined not by the sender but by the one who receives it, whomever that may be. As itinerant academics, queers, and feminists from South Asia, we contend with the question of address as we mediate distances and forge intimacies despite our multiple dislocations. The intertwined affective registers of alienation, nostalgia, defeat, lust, and humor have long marked our attachments to each other and to the idea of home. But how does one write a queer and feminist history of intimacy in postcolonial South Asia, and its diaspora, where social, sexual, and familial relations are so tightly controlled through regimes of patriarchy, caste, heterosexuality, and morality? In this milieu, the dialogic, epistolary, and digital forms of attachment—phone calls, letters, emails—bring together friends, lovers, collaborators, and queer feminist publics.Reading letters between people, tracing their attachments, their disidentifications, their desires, has long been an archival practice of queer folk, part of a fantasy of intimacy and community. But what are the epistolary archives of a Queer Asia routed through the subcontinent and its media? How might we read the queer letter as a worldmaking practice in spaces other than Europe or the United States? Here we present our own correspondence to each other, compiled through our collective and individual negotiations with intimacy, distance, and the forms of communication and media which have shaped and undone our queerness. January 2023PhiladelphiaDear Jiya and Sharvari,Sometime during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Chantal Akerman's epistolary documentary film News From Home (1977) arrived on my doorstep like a letter addressed to me. It might seem strange that I, a twenty-something queer Indian feminist laboring in precarious jobs in a post-9/11, post-recession New York, would feel hailed by the work of a lesbian Belgian filmmaker from the 1970s. Whereas Akerman was a Jewish emigrée heralded as an important feminist filmmaker, I was mired in a vast diasporic economy of Asian labor migration, precarious work, and migrant care work, taking on multiple blue-collar jobs to make rent and send money home. The distances between Akerman and me seemed insurmountable. But José Esteban Muñoz insists that we take seriously our own disidentifications with majoritarian culture, i.e., those performances of strategic misalignment whereby minoritized subjects fashion queer worlds by engaging with cultural texts that were never meant for them.2 Akerman's experimental cinema short-circuited my identity and desire even if I wasn't its intended audience. So as a wayward Indian femme just looking for some intimacy with the world, I claimed it for myself. To take a page out of Emily Dickinson, this was my letter to the world that never wrote to me.3News From Home is a plotless, epistolary film where intimacy is simultaneously presumed, mediated, and deferred. It comprises a series of long takes of a city not yet transformed by gentrification, set to Akerman's voice-over of her mother's anxious, cloying letters. The missives are one-sided, and we never see either mother or daughter on screen, but the film builds momentum through the repetition of tedious, domestic detail. Akerman's mother reports on mundane news from home: a heatwave, what's on TV, their failing shop, a small loan, her own boredom. She writes, "It's the same for everyone. We are all just waiting." Waiting for what? Here, maternal attachment is excessive, laced with dissatisfaction, expectation, and the demand for reciprocity from an errant daughter. The unevenness and confusion of their relation—a mother mired in the asphyxiation of bourgeois domesticity and claustrophobic complaint, a daughter more deviant, in riot against compulsory heterosexuality and the very institution of family—provides the minor drama and erotics of News From Home. The film's libidinal economy is one of intimate address, of endless wait and suffocation, of refusal and ultimate disappointment across the sentimental scene of family. Its pent-up tension can only culminate in Akerman's flight from the very domestic economy that has arrested her mother into a pose of waiting without end.If the unanswered letters in News From Home endlessly defer bourgeois domesticity and compulsory heterosexuality, how might the prolific cultures of intimate correspondence in South Asia interrupt the reproduction of the patriarchal caste family and set the scene for queer desire or intimacy? Epistolary form in South Asia is ostentatious—the letter is everywhere in its popular cinemas, print and material cultures, and reading habits. It is particularly vital to the expressive registers of Hindi cinema, where letters weather the crisis of cinematic romance, materializing distance and eroticizing waiting between lovers. But the chitthi, khat, or sandesha is not only a popular trope in the Bollywood film, it is also the driver of the heterosexual romance plot. Compulsory heterosexuality and the family form thereby persist in the epistolary. Where Akerman's film mercilessly obstructs intimate address, the Bollywood romance of letters usually ends in marriage. Its clandestine love letters only serve to reproduce the pact of privacy that undergirds the bourgeois caste family form. The feminist, queer, and wayward intimacies of the subcontinent remain unaddressed. In such a milieu, what would it mean to rethink the stakes of nonnormative intimacy in South Asia? Could the wayward letter locate a recipient unfettered from the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality, a queer subject disinterested in the domesticated form of the home? Our enthusiastic disidentification with the letters of young lovers that litter the erotic terrain of Indian cinematic history might represent the work of survival, pleasure, and worldmaking, but what would it take for Indian queers to abscond, to be in perpetual flight from, or even dismantle the family form? These correspondences are yet to be written. Yours, AvniJanuary 2023ChicagoDear Avni and Jiya,If letters, with their wayward intimacies and untimely deflections, disrupt the humdrum compulsions of heteronormativity, the telephone dangles the prospect of a world removed from these domestic dramas. Even at rest, a telephone is an outrageously theatrical object. You never know when it could go off, summoning a new cast of characters, triggering an unexpected chain of events. A paradigmatic image conjures itself in my mind: a woman, in profile, head thrown back in delighted abandon, one hand clasping the globular handset, the other intertwined in the coiling wire cord. This picture is an assemblage of various telephone-related ephemera I've absorbed over the years—a print ad from 1935 that proclaims: "Women of All Nations Demand a Telephone in the Home: Let India Lead!" Each corner showcases women of "America," "Europe," "Japan," dressed in representative regional garb, phones pressed into ears; a book-length rant from 1978, titled "What is Wrong With Telephones? with particular reference to Bombay," accusing high-end escorts of hoarding illegal phone lines, because "how can there be a call girl, without a telephone to call her up?"4In the 1970s, as telephones became ubiquitous on the popular cultural landscape in the Global South, they began circulating as metonyms for female desire, even deviance. Beyond the ambient heteropatriarchal anxiety that invariably haunts all new technologies, the sexualization of telephony was premised partly on the fact that telephone operators were largely young, middle-class women. In Egypt, some suggested, semi-humorously, that phones be shaped like a woman's body, so that men could visualize the otherwise disembodied female voice, and "even slam her to the ground if she distressed them."5 How could a woman on the phone elicit such extreme distress?For those of us who have grown up in the campy, vampy world of Hindi cinema, the question answers itself. Hindi films are saturated with representations of phone-loving women, crooning, swooning, gasping, and rasping into their retro rotaries. They take up space, sonically and visually, consecrated in that most flamboyant of cinematic subgenres—the song sequence. In several musical interludes, the one-sided montage of the woman and her tactile, frisky rapport with the telephone is itself such a consummate picture of libidinal pleasure, that the male recipient at the other end becomes notional, often forgotten, and almost always unnecessary. In the classic Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon (My Beloved's Gone to Rangoon) from the 1949 black-and-white film Patanga, the young woman beams beatifically while her estranged companion offers a litany of complaints. Her end of the exchange is almost entirely reported speech-song, as she narrativizes the phone call for an unseen audience. Her true partner in the scene is clearly the telephone, which she embraces with both hands as she gently waltzes across the room.These quaint phone frolics become more explicitly erotic as we peal through the decades, undoubtedly reaching their apogee in Sun Sun Re Balam (Listen, Listen My Love) from the 1966 film Sharda. The song begins with an audible gasp—we know the heroine has already intuited the soon-to-shrill telephone, as she slithers down the banister onto a plush red carpet strewn with bouquets, where the ruby red instrument gleams in anticipation. Undeterred by the lack of response on the other end, she serenades the phone, while the camera pans the length of her body, now enmeshed with the winding cord. Like many of her counterparts from the 1960s and 1970s, upon encountering the telephone, she is unable to stay straight. In song after song, we find women rolling and sprawling in desire, coaxed into recline by the genial maneuverability of the apparatus.The queer pleasures of these scenes of phone-loving women is their disruption of the very conditions of possibility within which they are notionally framed. Our heroines are purportedly in the throes of a sentimental romance, a two-way communication with their normatively ordained paramours. But what we see, instead, is a woman loving solo, diegetically unobserved by (and unobserving) anyone else. In these moments of suspension, the larger framing narrative recedes—the phone is no longer an object of mediation but an object of attention. The ostensible conceit of the telephonic loveline is that the phone is merely a prop, invisibly carrying messages of desire to the male lover on the other end. Yet, the visual field tells a different story, where the messages go to, and for, the telephone, and nowhere beyond. As the giver and receiver (as it were) of erotic desire, the phone, by its mere presence, disrupts the overarching heteronormative logic of the scene. It is "the proxy . . . [that] dangerously makes ''the world . . . move,'' leaving us with a dream-like glimpse into other possible and imagined intimacies.6 In shoring up these unseen, and perhaps as yet unknown worlds of romance, passion and companionship, the cinematic persona of the telephone dials up the ruptures between the medium and the message: it invites us to gleefully disbelieve what is before us, to make room for what may lurk just beside or beneath the profusion of normative images, plots and habits that pervade the popular cultural landscape in South Asia—to eagerly await newly disembodied pleasures of e-connection that lie virtually within reach. Yours, SharvariJanuary 2023DelhiDear Avni and Sharvari,Do you remember your first foray into e-communication? I remember logging in over the dulcet tones of our dial-up modem, heart skipping a beat each time my messenger pinged. I would click through chat rooms and scan contacts, fantasizing about who I could write to and what I could say. As fantasy collided with (elite) global realities, the home, the city, even the country became porous, calling seductively to young Indians like me. The Indian economy opened in 1991, VSNL made the internet publicly accessible in 1995, cybercafes dotted cities by 1997, and 2000 marked the arrival of MSN messenger.7 Temporalities, distances, and intimacies shifted. Daily relationships took on new valences as sequestered intimacies were built between online avatars—you never knew who you really knew until you spent a few hours with them on MSN.8I began to bask in the possibilities of global cosmopolitanism while sheltered within the confines of gendered familial concern. As Coke-Pepsi and foreign car ads rolled into the daily screenscape, so did fantasies of America and Europe, multiracial pen pals, and a new India taking its place on the international stage. Media around me supercharged these fantasies. In 1999, Tamil filmmaker Kathir set Raja and Roja's love story beyond the embodied and material constraints of language, class, and caste, in an internet chat room in his film dubbed in Hindi as Dil Hi Dil Mein (In the Heart of Hearts). The film's crowning achievement is its incredible item number, where men lust after "Mariya," a woman embodying both exotic online lover and internet itself who seduces them from atop a metal globe in a cybercafe. And who can forget how in 2002, Kunal Kohli brought email to Bollywood in Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (Will You Be My Friend!), a saga about Tina, Pooja, and Raj's cross-continental email romantic triangle involving assumed identities, friendship catfishing, neoliberal cosmopolitan domesticity, enforced marriage, and a quest for true love.In these cultural vocabularies, the internet became both the site and the agent of desire, teasing us through its dance between intimacy and distance. If, as you say, Sharvari, the pleasure of getting a phone call is the moment of picking up the receiver and romancing the phone itself, no matter who is on the other side, the pleasure of email is imagining that the entity on the other side is more real, present, and true than any actual self, but simultaneously also more exotic, mysterious, and fantastical than the selves you already know. Letters and emails are both marked by an intimacy only possible by what Esther Milne describes as an epistolary disembodiment, but emails are further marked by the simultaneity of certain presence and uncertain distance.9 This simultaneity, and the interweb's geographical fluidity, identity bending, and nonnormative intimacies feel, after all, more than a little queer. Radhika Gajjala remarks that even as access to the early internet was mediated through class, caste, and gender, its public "outness" made it "indeed a queer internet." It enabled "fluidity" of identity, citizenship, and gender, no matter one's "actual" sexual orientation, making it a space for community for those unsafe outside it.10But queer how and for how long? "Reel" uncertainties in film as in life seemed permissible only insofar as they promised resolution in the "real" world. Their (and our) tragicomedies are premised on a constant struggle to make legible the e-relationships we consider most intimate. It's not a coincidence that both sets of filmy lovers must overcome familial threats to prove their love, which in turn can only be justified through the "offline" intimacy of marriage. Raj, Pooja, Roja, and Raja may fantasize about life beyond the home, but domesticity via Hindu marriage, sanctified by state, priest, and family, is what ultimately completes the circle of desire. Familial domesticity, as you point out, Avni, becomes the thing to escape in a moment of desire, but, in e-India, it is also the point of return, to pin down that fleeting moment of virtual intimacy and make it "complete." The queer but not-queer 1990s internet both produces and restricts the early beginnings of e-fantasies.So where does that leave us, queer children of the IT Boom, searching for modes of navigating mobility, distance, homeland, and family? The diasporic and technological nostalgia these movies encourage certainly speak to narratives of queer and queerish pasts, but these are pasts that are embroiled deeply with unwelcoming and unconscionable presents. Can we reckon with the ways in which our nostalgias work against the worlds we want? Is there room for queer homes amidst the establishment of normative ones, or is the very possibility of an unlocated queer intimacy shaped by its impossibility, its existence within and without other spaces? Might we then have room for queer e-moments in letters and emails that are already written, resisting the urge to suture virtual and real, romancing the performativity of "truthful" intimacy, writing and calling out anxiously to those we love, even if we always only almost know them? Yours, JiyaOur brief correspondence is a small window into practices of intimacy in postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas. Exploring the limits and possibilities of collective life through media, we hold up to the light the objects and experiences produced in an exclusionary public sphere and see whether they reflect within and beyond them a modicum of queer promise. In our reflections, we end with this provocation: if Queer Asia is to be a method, we suggest, it must chart its own itineraries. We must locate our resistances, survival, and freedom within our own histories, cultural or otherwise, violent or otherwise, uncomfortable or otherwise, instead of as the belated gifts or remains of Western queer liberalism. Our intimacies and our complicities in the many homes that we create—virtual, epistolary, distant—open possibilities for a queerness that is not an end in and of itself, but rather a beginning, a doorway to new modes of being.