Jigna Desai

Homo on the Range: Mobile and Global Sexualities

Exposing many discrepancies, Deepa Mehta’s film Fire provoked conflict in India in 1998 as Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena members not only attacked and closed theaters but also repeatedly condemned and attempted to communalize the film for its “deviancy.” These events surrounding the film are part of the postcolonial nation-state’s complex histories and power relations. I suggest that Fire illuminates how contemporary postcolonial and transnational cultural discourses articulate racialized, classed, sexualized, religious, and gendered forms of social regulation and normalization. This essay interrogates the various transnational, diasporic, and national discourses surrounding Deepa Mehta’s Fire, with specific attention to how normativities and identities are mobilized with the circulation of the film. I begin with its Western reception and trace through the Shiv Sena attacks, Deepa Mehta’s defenses, and finally, lesbian and diasporic responses. The conclusion locates Fire within diasporic film production and also addresses how these responses and the distribution of the film raise questions regarding the context and the reception of such “diasporic” films within globalization. Overall, I argue that the resultant discourses of normativity, like the film itself, expose negotiations not only between the subject and the nation-state but also between the politics and economics of globalization and postcoloniality. In this essay, I use queer theory and analysis to provide a significant understanding of the production, regulation, and normalization of nonEurocentric sexualities and heteronormativity as well as other social normativities.1 Elaborating on the scholarship of Michael Warner and David Eng, I employ queer studies not as identical to gay and lesbian studies but as a useful framework and methodology for interrogating the heteronormativity of cultural citizenship in the postcolonial nation-state. Like these Jigna Desai Homo on the Range

“There's Nothing More Debilitating than Travel”: Locating US Empire in Todd Haynes' Safe

In the second half of Todd Haynes’ film Safe (1995), a travel-weary Carol White is greeted upon her arrival at the Wrenwood facility by Claire, who in sympathy exclaims that “There’s nothing more debilitating than travel.” Reading this statement ironically, it becomes one of the most pointed highlightings of Carol’s privilege—and that of the other Wrenwood occupants—in the film. It implicitly invokes Carol’s very ability to travel due to her class and racial status. In this sense, it suggests that Carol’s debility, her mysterious illness, is fundamentally tied to her privilege. While Safe has attracted much interesting and important analysis, there has been no sustained investigation of the ways in which the film implicates Carol’s illness with the privileges that come to certain subjects, specifically within US empire. Claire’s expression of sympathy about the ostensible debilitation caused by travel indirectly references the two geographical regions between which Carol is traveling: the urban environs of the Los Angeles area and the New Mexico desert locale of Wrenwood. These two regions are overdetermined figures of a nexus of imperial meanings, invoking both the history and contemporary practices of US empire. Los Angeles often figures as both a global city that leaves the US border open to all manner of threat from the East and the South and as a symbol of the perceived threat of the inner-city, attesting to a generalized anxiety over the US’s long reliance on slavery and economic exploitation to attain the status of global super-power. The New Mexican desert figures simultaneously as frontier and as heartland: a space where genocide has depopulated the land and reinscripted within it a naturalness posed as already-existing, as well as a space protected from the contaminating threat posed by the west coast. Given all of the rhetoric in the film about the “environment” making Carol ill, as well as the aesthetic attention to positioning Carol in very specific ways within these two geographical locations, it seems crucial to ask the question of what connection there

Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia

1. Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia Gita Rajan and Jigna Desai 2. In search of the choreographies of daily life and struggle Ananya Chatterjea 3. Churnings of a movement: Sangtins diary Richa Nagar and Richa Singh 4. Citizenship and dissent: South Asian Muslim youth in the US after 9/11 Sunaina Maira 5. Global nationalisms, pastoral identities: Association for Indias Development (AID) negotiates transnational activism Kumarini Silva 6. Impact of tsunami in the East - Muslim womens perspective Shreen Saroor 7. Bending bodies, borders and desires in Bapsi Sidhwas Cracking India and Deepa Mehtas Earth Rani Neutill 8. Eat, pray, love mimic: Female citizenship and otherness R. Diyah Larasati 9. Grassroots Texts: Ethnographic Ruptures and Transnational Feminist Imaginaries Piya Chatterjee

Nodes of connectivity: Transnational and global advocacy at the popular level

South Asian Popular Culture has a signature presence in the visual culture field, querying the numerous ways that Bollywood and photography, for example, influence, shape and reshape the terrain of the popular. This special issue of the journal adopts a slightly different stance and examines the many modes that academics, activists, advocates, and artists envision and produce to remake communities – both discrete and with open borders. The issues addressed here by our authors overlap and intersect, especially because they adopt a gender-sensitive perspective. Consequently, the special issue presents different dynamic sites where global advocacy and transnational activism are taking place. These sites are useful in contesting and re-imagining ways of knowing and being within South Asia and its diasporas. In that sense, the agenda of this issue is to examine factors and agents that raise awareness of and/or create transformations in the experiential reality of peoples of South Asia, both rooted and diasporic. Our goal is to highlight spaces, or more accurately gesture to nodes that function as localized zones, as intersecting points, as links and networks, and/or as places that initiate transnational and global momentum to imagine and often concretize new visions for social justice in community formations. The deliberate breach of discourse categories in our issue, i.e. ranging from theoretical to anecdotally ethnographic, is an attempt by the joint editors to query how global forces play out in the popular terrain and how and why global activism and advocacy work to further social justice. Over the last three decades or so, even as the sheer number of people speaking about the nature, significance, and impact of globalization has increased exponentially, the discussions themselves have remained discrete and guided by disciplinary premises, albeit with a few infrequent overlaps amongst the discussants and their viewpoints. And, even as we seem to privilege the paths that global forces take, we are cognizant (as our authors here) of the fact that the postcolonial predicament is very real for many peoples of South Asia, as are the advantages and disadvantages that diasporic agents bring to bear on national and transnational questions. So too, we recognize the meaningful impact that transnational subjects and phenomenon link peoples from here and there in intersubjective fashion. Highlighting global forces thus help us mark a contemporary moment in understanding nodes of connectivity that are forged in and around South Asia to spark discussions of social injustices and transnational advocacy and activism.