RITUALS OF QUEER DIASPORA IN NISHA GANATRA'S CHUTNEY POPCORN1

Abstract

Nisha Ganatra's stylish Chutney Popcorn (1999) is perhaps the first feature film to focus exclusively on a South Asian American lesbian character as she strives to negotiate a place for herself at the intersection of different communities. The film functions as a text of diasporic queerness and as a rich site for studying the traffic between discourses of diaspora and sexuality. The ethnic diaspora is queered through the physical and emotional journeys of two second‐generation South Asian American sisters – Reena and Sarita – as they struggle to define themselves within and against heterosexist norms and patriarchal diasporic ideologies. The displacement and re‐placement of these characters concludes the film's struggle to present a non‐normative and denaturalized portrait of the ethnic diaspora. The film's project of queering the diaspora is inseparable from its attempt to disrupt a singular and normalized queer subject and constituency, i.e. it seeks to dismantle mainstream hegemonic understandings of queer as white, male or local, diversifying and suggesting contextual multiplicity of queer subjects.