Abstract
Male erotic video (gay pornography), an influential cultural practice in the US, reflects White queer society's strategy of curtailing Asian American sexual subjectivity by positioning us as invisible on one hand, and as exotic sex objects on the other. Romeo & Julian, an all-White video by Desi (South Asian American) director Sam Abdul, demonstrates how a Desi queer male subjectivity might be enabled in ways that look beyond visibility, by expressing a Desi sensibility instead. I persuasively read this video ‘against the grain’ in light of Hindi film conventions and their origins in Sanskrit drama, in order to display its continuity with South Asian traditions of performance and same-sex love. The covert nature of Abdul's Desi address allows the video to circumvent the marginalisation or racialised objectification that an overtly Desi video would have been subjected to.
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