Hypothetical queering in Malayalam cinema

Gender and sexuality has always been a crucial hub of discourses on which postmodern identities are often defined and experimented. Postmodern identity defines itself on the self-definitions that it assumes to be the chief traits of the postmodern structural patterns of normative behavioural constructions. These postmodern identities are gays, lesbian, straight, bisexual, exhibitionist, submissive, dominatrices, swingers (people who engage in partner exchange), switchers (people who change from being gay to being straight or vice versa), traders (gay men who have sex with straight men), born-again virgins(people who have, technically, lost their virginity but pledge to renounce sex until marriage), acrotomophiliacs(people who are sexually attracted to amputees), furverts(or furries- people who dress up in animal suits and derive sexual excitement from doing so).The important point here is that we draw on these categories in order to make sense of who we are: we define ourselves in part through our sexuality.

The constructed sexuality and sexual identities define the  postmodern man. In the pace of postmodernity, the constructed imageries of sexuality also alter as per its convenience. The visibility of Sexuality may be found everywhere in the contemporary world of normative structural patterns. The sexual feeling and behaviour of a person may term his/her sexuality. When applied to groups of people (e.g. heterosexuals) ideas of social attitude and organization are implied to term their sexuality. Socio-cultural and political forces shape sexuality and connect in important conducts to relations of power around class, race, and especially, gender. This relational connectivity of gendered signifier and structures of power discourses embrace the hierarchical order of mainstream discourse on which one may diminish the other. The social and cultural construction of a person’s sex and sexuality may term his/her gender. The normative structural pattern of the cultural understanding of sexuality is about the masculinity and femininity, in other words, ‘proper’ ways for men and women to behave. This cultural normative construction of sexuality refers the politics of the postmodern visual industry through the normative structural pattern of the preconceived subjective ideas about sexual behaviour. The behavioural patterns of gender, sex, and sexuality can overlap but are exact match. This ‘mismatch’ has generated a fascinating body of film production and criticism.

Cinema is one structure among others that constructs sexuality.It is both the means of construction and destruction of normative patterns on which most of the socio-cultural canons and credos connect.Earlier, cinema required fixed iconography for audiences to follow the narrative, which cost the characters to be stereotyped. Thus, within mainstream cinema especially, but not exclusively, stereotyping is not questioned. Equally, sexuality was ‘normally’ taken to refer to heterosexuality. Motion pictures contribute a crucial set of signifiers that actively participate in the multifaceted processes that codify sexuality and gender. Cinema may presumably speak for the voices or the group on which it has mass appreciation and reception, therefore the forsaken sound of the category of the identities may always be abandoned that it would become the part of muted discourses on which none may talk or walk. The history of cinema itself is the history of dominant voices. The elite class representation and the subverting attempts on the side of the mainstream voices have manipulated the subtext voices that are consciously been forsaken. Whatever attempts may done, the unconscious contentment of the dominant cultural psyche would surpass the conscious psyche of the subtexts. 

Mainstream Malayalam cinema has projected, and at times hastily displayed liaison, homicide, dissension, viciousness. The notable fact is that the reluctant behaviour of the industry to discuss the ‘queer’ on screen. Malayalam cinema from 1930’s to the present has taken us to the possible levels of aesthetic and intellectual reflection and entertainment, possibly adopted from every thought of Malayalam cultural psyche, social system and perceptions on gender and sexuality. It celebrates the aesthetic appreciation of nature and female body and treats ‘sexuality without falling into vulgarity’. Malayalam cinema is also on the verge of transformation as it practices the ‘hypothetical diplomacy’ on gender ideology and sexual constructions. Recent years show the transformation of Malayalam cinema as well as cultural psyche on the issues of sexuality. A close reading of Malayalam cinema shows the hegemony of the mainstream celluloid voices. The obvious fact is that the whole process of cinematic realization is fulfilled through the negation of certain identities that have a potentiality to question the current flow of linear sexual discourses. This linearity of gendered discourses often places the Malayalam cinema on the hot seat of contradictions.

Cinema is the youngest of all the modern arts through which many of the modern concepts and ideologies emerged and conceived the form of discourses. Queering of the mainstream heterosexual space is much celebrated for its queerness itself. This paper would look in to the gendered constructions of the Malayalam cinema that is often well known for its sexual and violent treatment of identities. The paper is concerned mainly with films that do not depict queerness explicitly, but employ or provide platform for lesbian and gay interventions and the myth, history, role, status of homosexuality as time goes back.