Queer Politics of Naming and Figuration of the “Lesbian” in Maja Ma

Abstract

In post-377 neoliberal India, with the emergence and proliferation of subscription-based video streaming platforms, the cultural field has undergone a sea change. In this complex, shifting, and evolving cultural terrain, representation of queer/lesbian women is becoming less uncommon. Maja Ma contributes to this growing cultural landscape by offering the representation of a “lesbian” who is also a Hindu mother, aunty, and wife. In this paper, I explore what the politics of naming—which has largely been avoided by films committed to the representation of queer women in Hindi cinema—offers the film’s “lesbian” protagonist, what it reveals about her complex figuration as aunty-mother-wife, and what naming offers relationalities that are forged, informed, and altered by the private disclosure as well as public revelation of her queerness. Drawing on queer cultural studies scholarship focused on India, as well as scholarship on the complexities of “lesbian” activism in India, I interrogate the shift that Maja Ma engenders in Indian queer cultural landscape, and the queer possibilities it offers this field, while paying attention to dominant norms of representation it aligns itself with.