Queer Politics of Naming and Figuration of the “Lesbian” in Maja Ma

Abstract

In post-377 neoliberal India, with the emergence and proliferation of subscription-based video streaming platforms, the cultural field has undergone a sea change. In this complex, shifting, and evolving cultural terrain, representation of queer/lesbian women is becoming less uncommon. Maja Ma contributes to this growing cultural landscape by offering the representation of a “lesbian” who is also a Hindu mother, aunty, and wife. In this paper, I explore what the politics of naming—which has largely been avoided by films committed to the representation of queer women in Hindi cinema—offers the film’s “lesbian” protagonist, what it reveals about her complex figuration as aunty-mother-wife, and what naming offers relationalities that are forged, informed, and altered by the private disclosure as well as public revelation of her queerness. Drawing on queer cultural studies scholarship focused on India, as well as scholarship on the complexities of “lesbian” activism in India, I interrogate the shift that Maja Ma engenders in Indian queer cultural landscape, and the queer possibilities it offers this field, while paying attention to dominant norms of representation it aligns itself with.

Keywords:

• Lesbian
• aunty
• wife
• mother
• queer

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the excellent anonymous reviewers of South Asian Review for their critical and insightful comments and suggestions, which helped me rethink some of my core arguments in this paper, for which I remain deeply indebted to them.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Government of Canada, through Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship [application number: 475717].

Notes on contributors

Sohini Chatterjee

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate and Vanier Scholar in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at The University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her research interests revolve around queer cultural studies, trans and queer activism, trans and queer disability studies, and resistance movements in India. Her work has recently appeared in QED: A journal in glbtq worldmaking, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Women’s Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, among others. [email protected]