The Desiring Subject: Female Pleasures and Feminist Resistance in Deepa Mehta's Fire

Abstract

Analysing Deepa Mehta's recent controversial film Fire, which portrays lesbian love between two sisters-in-law, both of them slighted in marriage by their respective partners, as a recourse against and resistance to patriarchal oppression, we find Mehta's portrayal guilty of watering down the politics of lesbian desire—as sexual preference within a larger sphere of sexual choices. Moreover, Mehta's location as an Indo-Canadian filmmaker must also be taken into account when judging Fire's gender politics. In recent Canadian cinema, a considerable emphasis is placed on the sexual agency of female protagonists, both as bearers of the 'look' (famously ascribed by Laura Mulvey to male viewers alone), as well as free choosers of sexual lifestyles. In Fire, however, by contrast, the protagonists' love and escape are matters of necessity, both seem ingly still driven by the male (non-) desiring gaze.