Consider the Aunty: The Obfuscation of Desire in My Beautiful Laundrette

Abstract

This essay reads the aunties on the peripheries of Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frear’s film, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), as minor figures, enacting a methodological turn to the seemingly insignificant in analyses of South Asian culture and sexuality. I ask why the aunties’ desire feels so impossible, especially in a film centred on a Pakistani protagonist’s queer utopia. Both ubiquitous and precluded from a complexity of desire, representations of the Pakistani aunty suffer from a deficit of imagination. Aunties tend to be shown as middle-aged women who surveil and police their kin and have a neutered or absent sexuality, as the film’s paradigmatic figuration of the aunty exemplifies. This article argues that such creative constraint derives from the construction of female sexuality as deviance in South Asia, and then tries to look beyond these constraints. While asking what a more capacious imagining of the aunty and her desires might make possible, I offer parameters for reading sexuality in Pakistan and its diasporas by foregrounding deprivation of pleasure and choice.