Queer is by
definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.
There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an
identity without essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a
positivity but a positionality vis-Ã -vis the normative (Halperin 62).
In general, 'Queer'
may be seen as partially deconstructing our own discourses and creating a
greater openness in the way we think through our categories. Queer theory is,
to quote Michael Warner, “a stark attack on normal business in the academy”
(Warner 25). It poses the paradox of being inside the academy whilst wanting to
be outside of it. It suggests that a "sexual order overlaps with a wide
range of institutions and social ideologies to challenge the sexual order is
sooner or later to encounter these institutions as a problem” (Warner 5). Queer
cinema as a term came about quite probably, by identification with the trends
in critical theory begun in the mid-1980s, namely, queer theory. Queer theory
looks at, and studies, and has a political critique of, anything that falls in
to normative and deviant categories, particularly sexual activities and
identities. The word queer, as it appears in the Oxford Dictionary, has a
primary meaning of ‘odd,’ ‘strange.’ Queer theory concerns itself with any
forms of sexuality that are ‘queer’ in this sense and then, by extension, with
the normative behaviours and identities, that define what is ‘queer.’ Thus,
queer theory expands the scope of analysis to all kinds of behaviours,
including those that are gender –bending as well as those, which involve
‘queer’ non- normative forms of sexuality. Queer theory follows feminist theory
and gay/lesbian studies in rejecting the idea that sexuality is an essentialist
category, something determined by biology or judged by eternal standards of
morality and truth. For queer theorists, sexuality is a complex array of social
codes and forces, forms of individual activity and institutional power, which
interacts to shape the ideas of what is deviant at any particular moment, and
which then operate under the rubric of what is ‘natural,’ ‘essentialist,’
‘biological,’ or ‘God-given.’
Queer theory
emphasizes radical otherness that the otherness of the normative structural
patterns of the normal discourses of everything especially gender and
sexuality. In many ways, it begins from similar observations as structuralism,
but with a very different perspective on the value of structures because in
structuralism, structuralists treat social structures as indispensable for
social cohesion, but queer theorists treat structures as the root of human
domination. Therefore, queer perspectives are critical of anything mainstream
that are proponents of structured normalities and hegemonial regularities or any
social force that pushes us in to the mainstream category. Acknowledging the
inevitable violence of identity politics and having no stake in its own
hegemony, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity. But it is in
no position to imagine itself outside that circuit of problems energised by
identity politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that
its operations inevitably attract, queer allows such criticisms to shape its-
for now unimaginable- future directions.
'The term', writes
Butler, 'will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it
yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions
by which it is mobilized'. The mobilisation of queer- no less than the critique
of it- foregrounds the conditions of political representation: its intentions
and effects, its resistance to and recovery by the existing networks of power.
Most people in and
outside of the academy are still puzzled about what queerness means, exactly,
so the concept still has the potentiality to disturb or complicate ways of
seeing gender and sexuality, as well as the related areas of race, ethnicity
and class ( Dothy 7).
Introducing the
theory in the film genre the discourse becomes both active and passive simultaneously.
The complexity and the overlapping of the subjects may puzzle the scholar
theoretically, but the application of the theory on the screen prevail the
complexity of the subject matter. In the cinema, the examination of the theory
extends to the making about queerness by the filmmakers. Queer theory can open
up film/texts and lead us to read texts that seem straight differently or view
them from a new and different angle. Thus, a queer reading of the text can
reveal that the audience is watching something far more complex than they
originally thought they were. The examination of the Buddy films reveal that
they are not what they are normally projected, but there may be some explicit
queerness behind their diplomatic projections as Hayward places forth:
The actor or film
maker does not have to be queer, but the text or performance may offer itself
up for a queer reading ( Joan Crawford as the cross-dressing gun-toting but
butchly feminie Vienna in Jonny guitar, Nicholas Ray, 1954) (309).
.
In the last twenty
years, the study of gay and lesbian cinema has expanded greatly beyond
simplistic image analysis. Within academia, the development of third wave
feminism and queer theory across many disciplines in the humanities has sought
to rethink basic concepts about human sexuality, demonstrating the complexity
of a subject that encompasses not only personal orientation and behaviour but
also the social, cultural, and historical factors that define and create the
conditions of such orientations and behaviours. The term ‘queer,’ once a
pejorative epithet used to humiliate gay men and women, is now used to describe
that broad expanse of sexualities. Queer should thus be understood to describe
any sexuality not defined as heterosexual procreative monogamy that once the
presumed goal of any Hollywood coupling; queers are people including
heterosexuals who do not organize their sexuality according to that rubric.
Recently many of
the theoretical issues raised by queer theory have found their way into gay and
lesbian independent filmmaking, within a movement known as New Queer Cinema.
Queer theory also helps us interrogate and complicate the category ‘gay and
lesbian cinema.’ For example, the very meaning of the words ‘gay’ and
‘lesbian’—how they are used and understood—has changed greatly over the
decades, as have the conditions of their cinematic representation. The
characteristics that mass culture has used to signify homosexuality have also
changed. While present-day films can be relatively forthright about sexuality,
older films could only hint at it in various ways. Thus, many classical
cinematic performances, directors, and genres might be considered queer rather
than gay, in that they do not explicitly acknowledge homosexuality, but
nonetheless allow for spaces in which normative heterosexuality is threatened
or shown to be an unstable performative identity.
New Queer Cinema is
a term first coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in Sight & Sound magazine
in 1992 to define and describe a movement in queer-themed independent
filmmaking in the early 1990s. The term developed from use of the word ‘queer’
in academic writing in the 1980s and 1990s as an inclusive way of describing
gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity, and experience, and defining a
form of sexuality that was fluid and subversive of traditional understandings
of sexuality. Since 1992, the phenomenon has also been described by various
other academics and has been used to describe several other films released
since the 1990s.
Films of the New
Queer Cinema movement typically share certain themes, such as the rejection of
hetero-normativity and the lives of LGBT protagonists living on the fringe of
society. In her 1992 article, Rich commented on the strong gay and lesbian
presence on the previous year's film festival circuit, and coined the phrase
"New Queer Cinema" to describe a growing movement of similarly themed
films being made by gay and lesbian independent filmmakers, chiefly in North
America and England ( Aaron 3). Rich developed her theory in the Village Voice
newspaper, describing films that were radical in form, and aggressive in their
presentation of sexual identities which challenged both the status quo of
heterosexual definition, and resisted promoting "positive" images of
lesbians and gay men that had been advocated by the gay liberation movement of
the 1970s and 1980s. In the films of New Queer Cinema, the protagonists and
narratives were predominantly LGBT, but were presented invariably as outsiders
and renegades from the rules of conventional society, and embraced radical and
unconventional gender roles and ways of life, frequently casting themselves as
outlaws or fugitives.
This paper is an
attempt to bring out the possibilities of queer readings in Malayalam cinema.
From 1970s, Malayalam cinema traced the elements of queer readings. With the
global awareness around the issues of gender, sex and sexuality Malayalam
cinema also attempted the glimpses of sexual identity politics, which might
lead us towards the politics of erotica and desire of Malayalee cultural as
well as the visual psyche. The queer attempts made by the middle stream and
parallel filmmakers of Malayalam cinema left an open platform for the
discourses that may potentially escort the given elements of ‘deviant sexual
identities’.
The films which
will be discussed in the following chapter are the projections of Malayalee
cultural psyche. Since the cinema reflects each pulse of the society it is to
be stated that the structural patterns of normative visual culture conspires
the silence behind the projections of ‘events’. The ‘events’ are the elements
of homosexual discourses which are made subtexts in the ‘hetero-normative’
patterns of social living. The films mention the ‘events’, but they hesitate to
make it a major discourse. Though they are presented, they are under the
shadows of the heterosexual identities. Recent trends in Malayalam cinema shows
a shift in the usual track of heterosexual constructive life patterns, where
everything other than hetero-normative is conceived to be deviant and not
normal. The construction of this normalization begins to shake with the queer
thinking that takes place in the contemporary visual culture world. Films,
which are mentioned in the next chapter, are soft and diplomatic towards the
issues of queer elements. The paper goes through the potentiality of the queer
discourse over the non-queer normative structural pattern, which may threat the
hierarchical order of the sexual identities and the normalization of the
non-queer.
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