Same-Sex Desire in Indian Culture: Representations in Literature and Film, 1970-2015 (1st ed. 2016)

Synopsis

This book explores representations of same-sex desire in Indian literature and film from the 1970s to the present. Through a detailed analysis of poetry and prose by authors like Vikram Seth, Kamala Das, and Neel Mukherjee, and films from Bollywood and beyond, including Onir's My Brother Nikhil and Deepa Mehta's Fire, Oliver Ross argues that an initially Euro-American "homosexuality" with its connotations of an essential psychosexual orientation, is reinvented as it overlaps with different elements of Indian culture. Dismantling the popular belief that vocal gay and lesbian politics exist in contradistinction to a sexually "conservative" India, this book locates numerous alternative practices and identities of same-sex desire in Indian history and modernity. Indeed, many of these survived British colonialism, with its importation of ideas of sexual pathology and perversity, in changed or codified forms, and they are often inflected by gay and lesbian identities in the present. In this account, Oliver Ross challenges the preconception that, in the contemporary world, a grand narrative of sexuality circulates globally and erases all pre-existing narratives and embodiments of sexual desire.

Copyright:

2016

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781137566928

Related ISBNs:

9781137570758, 9781137570758

Publisher:

Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

Date of Addition:

08/09/19

Copyrighted By:

N/A

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Entertainment, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts, Foreign Language Study

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.