Rahul discusses South Asian Diasporic Sexualities from Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) to Damien O’Donnell’s East is East (1999).
Rahul K. Gairola
Murdoch University
Perth, Western Australia
What can be more heartbreaking and stressful than being a queer migrant adolescent in one’s former colonialist imperium while juggling the marital demands of one’s family? This project engages a retrospective of two popular, British films: My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) directed by Hanif Kureishi, and East is East (1999) directed by Damien O’Donnell. Both British South Asian diasporic films render vital context to socio-political discourses of the digital milieu that reductively flatten gender and sexuality in migrant representations on the big screen. A prevailing sense is that immigration to the UK, British birth and upbringing, modern Anglo culture, and neoliberal multiculturalism mediate against the heteronormative, epistemic violence of arranged marriages that serve as social bedrocks across South Asia.
In contrast to such imaginaries, my project engages in a comparative, filmic genealogy of how queerness disrupts one of the most oppressive family functions in British South Asian diasporic culture – the arranged marriage. For example, advances in LGBTQIA+ policies (like the partial repeal of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 2019) globally suggest that queer rights have upwardly evolved.
I would argue that we must interrogate how we got to this point, and what popular British South Asian diasporic filmic texts from the past can teach us about representations of queer erotics today in the digital milieu. To this end, I focus on Kureishi’s and O’Donnell’s cinematic texts as treating heterosexual matrimony as “glocal” phenomena that are at once grand life milestones to announce across one’s transnational network of family members, on the one hand, while remaining anchored to social formations and neighborly status in local communities, on the other.
Here, both monetary and cultural capital are at stake to the diaspora in both local and global arenas beyond the shadowy depths of the closet. In contrast, non-heteronormative, queer relationships and sex lie beyond the purvey of acceptable glocal love. They transgress the boundaries of the acceptable, even when they delve into neoliberal meritocracy and bourgeois dandyism. This presentation thus engages in focused comparative analysis of both films as precursors to the kinds of sexual liberation narratives, underscored by the prevailing of gay marriage, that litter the internet’s imaginaries. I demonstrate that life as a British South Asian diasporic subject is defined by matrimonial match (as powerfully depicted by Gurinder Chadha in Bride & Prejudice (2004), for example).
I moreover demonstrate that the strategic marital match is underscored by class relations wherein queer sexuality and resistance to heteronormative matrimony is relegated not even to third class status but, rather, must be erased, exiled, and literally made to disappear in both films. This must be the case, even in neoliberal embrace of queerness, because what is at stake is a destabilization of both local and global familial and financial networks. I would argue that the competing imaginaries around sex and love in the British South Asian diaspora in both films foreshadows and informs the ways in which we can view such subjects today throughout the digital milieu.