E3W Literature | University of Texas

Gayatri Gopinath
Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures
Duke University Press, 2005
247 pages
$22.95

Reviewed by Rebecca Anne D’Orsogna

In an analysis of Indian Canadian director Deepha Mehta’s controversial film Fire, about the developing queer relationship between two middle-class, Indian sisters-in-law, readers see clearly the “impossible desire” that is the focus of Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. In Fire the women’s lesbian relationship, though it exists and grows, remains unarticulated, “signaling the unthinkability of a queer female subject position within various mappings of nation and diaspora.” The unthinkably queer relationship remains unnamed in Fire, since the two main characters declare there is no word for their relationship in Hindi. According to Gopinath, reviewers in the United States latched onto this silence surrounding lesbianism in Fire, as a way to position India as a less progressive and modern nation than the United States. In contrast to response in the United States, conservative groups in India called for a boycott of Fire claiming that Mehta, as a denizen of Indian diaspora, could not represent “real” Indianness and Indian values. What is impressive about Gopinath’s analysis of this film is not only her close reading of the representation of queer, female, South Asian identity, but her ability to connect that silent, but explicit representation to larger issues of modernity and national identity in a transnational context. It is this methodological approach, which positions Impossible Desires as an important new piece of scholarship.

Above all else, Impossible Desires is an intervention. Gopinath’s scholarship intervenes in queer studies, diasporic and transnational studies, South Asian studies and Asian American studies. By looking at South Asian and South Asian diasporic popular culture through a queer lens, Gopinath has modeled an important theoretical framework for scholars interested in ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in a transnational context. Gopinath’s emphasis on process and flexibility in the construction of identity in relationship to diaspora and sexuality creates a dynamic space in which to analyze culture. However, Gopinath’s attempt to address so many slippery and interlocking ideas sometimes causes key points about diasopora or feminism to disappear in the actual textual readings; in many instances one is left wanting more explicit connections between diasporic cultural texts and the nation-state with queer feminist readings. This is particularly true in her chapter on masculinity, “Surviving Naipaul,” in which the political importance of the creation of South Asian identity is clear, but the relationships between nation and diaspora are left in the background. Despite this problem, the complexity of her approach elucidates heretofore neglected links in the texts she examines.

In particular, Gopinath easily finds meaning in otherwise seemingly insignificant scenes or minor characters in the works she examines. For example, in her reading of the film East is East, about a Pakistani family living in Britain in the early 1970s, Gopinath focuses on Mina, the daughter in the film who primarily serves as a foil for her brothers’ relationship with their father. Gopinath centers her discussion of East is East on Mina’s reenactment of a well-known dance scene from the famous Bollywood film Pakeezah. In Gopinath’s hands this scene becomes a space connecting diasporic and national identity that is tenuous, intimate and awkward; instead of beautiful gowns, Mina dances in galoshes and a white tunic. Though Mina’s dance is not “queer” in the sexual sense, Gopinath argues that its queerness lay in Mina’s ability to upset the dominant patriarchal domestic scene in which she is to serve as silent drudge through dancing.

Gopinath’s focus on marginalized, female, South Asian queer identity highlights neglected characters and practices in, what Gopinath calls, South Asian public culture. Gopinath argues that public culture differs from popular culture in that its archive is more inclusive; public culture in addition to conventional popular culture artifacts, such as films and books, includes the quotidian and undocumented acts of life, making public culture all the more difficult to capture. Gopinath’s focus on queer identity, which is often left out of South Asian popular culture let alone its public culture, compounds the difficulty of finding artifacts to examine. Unable to locate adequate sources in public culture, Gopinath turns to representations of queer identity and spaces (i.e. public culture) in popular culture. These queer readings, of public culture represented in popular culture, according to Gopinath, allow the texts to be incorporated into an archive of queer South Asian public culture. However, this reader had hoped for further examination of unmediated South Asian queer public culture.

Gopinath’s expansion of queer beyond sexuality and her focus on construction of the home, both in the sense of domestic intimacy and in the sense of national homeland, is the greatest strentgth of her work. Gopinath’s attention to domestic space in Impossible Desires brings to mind Ann Laura Stoler’s seminal essay “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” which called for scholars to foreground intimate and domestic spaces in order to better understand colonial and post-colonial relationships. Like Stoler, Gopinath uses domestic spaces to explain the balance of colonial tensions still evident in South Asian diasporic culture. Gopinath, by emphasizing queer domestic space goes further than other scholars in unearthing the tenuous and contradictory links between postcolonial conditions and queer identity. The sites of popular culture that Gopinath employs throughout Impossible Desires focus on domestic intimacy in both the sexual and non-sexual sense. In one of the strongest sections, Gopinath constructs the “symbolic power” of cinema in ethnic and national identity in the South Asian diaspora. Gopinath deftly teases out queer themes in Bollywood and Hollywood films on South Asian diaspora, such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun …! (Who Am I to You?), Subhah (Dawn), Monsoon Wedding, and Bend It Like Beckham. In her analysis, Gopinath locates the “impossible desires” of female characters, who wish to subvert the heteronormativity in the patriarchal domestic milieu in which they exist. In these instances, Gopinath does not necessarily use the term queer explicitly in relation to sexuality, rather she includes all subversion to conventional female existence as a kind of queerness.

At the center of Gopinath’s work is the wish to disrupt conventional diasporic and feminist scholarship, which she views as caught in, rather than subverting, binary articulations of South Asian culture. Conventional diasporic scholarship, in Gopinath’s view, emphasizes nostalgia for the “home” nation-state, nostalgia tied to ideas of tradition and authenticity that are threatened by the experience of living abroad in diaspora. Similarly conventional feminist scholarship focused on South Asia creates binaries of modern and traditional, with women in South Asian society homogeneously portrayed as traditional and anti-modern, as opposed to liberated and progressive women in the West. Through the combination of feminist, queer, diasporic, and postcolonial studies, Gopinath creates a framework with which to disrupt the binaries created when these frames are used alone. Queerness, in the work Gopinath analyzes, problematizes the idyllic vision of homeland in diasporic popular production.

Overall the theoretical framework Gopinath has articulated in Impossible Desires is an important addition to scholarly work on ethnicity, gender and nationality. It is a first step towards more complex and invigorated readings of global popular culture. It is also an invitation for other scholars to consider ways of creating new archival sites of invisible public cultures through creative readings.