Queer encounters: film festivals and the sensual circuits of European cinema in India

Abstract

This paper offers a sensual history of queer spectatorship in India by bringing together the circulation of European art cinema in India, prior to the 1990s, and the space of queer film festivals that emerges in the last two decades in India. Through a synthesis of ethnographic accounts that reconstruct film viewing experiences and historical investigations of film festival archives I demonstrate that in the long history of mainstream film festivals in India ‘world cinema,’ mediated by European art-house cinema, has functioned as a repository of queer sexuality. This paper juxtaposes the embodied histories of cinematic encounters in India and more recent accounts of curating queer film festivals to disrupt the conception of cinema as a tool to consolidate sexual identities. It explores the non-cohesive subjectivities engendered through practices of film viewing to argue that queer film festivals have a generative power when they disturb, play with and shake the sensorium of the spectator. Thus, the paper draws on encounters between world cinema and its many publics and between the embodied spectator and the screen to open up the very conception of queer cinema as remaking rather than consolidating identities. This paper is one of the first attempts to explore the transnational cultural circuits that embed queer film festivals in South Asia.