The ‘Good Indian Queer Woman’ and the Family: Politics of Normativity and Travails of (Queer) Representation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (dir. Shelly Chopra Dhar, 2019) is touted as the mainstream commercial venture that cemented Bollywood’s journey from creating queer homosocial and homoerotic moments on screen to representing a queer relationship between two women for the first time. This paper tries to understand how the film’s liberal messaging about queer acceptance and anti-discrimination, through the coming out narrative of its queer protagonist, is made possible through the embodiment of sanitized class and caste markers, how Indian queer femininity is encoded in the film and what its relationship with the heteronormative biological family reveals about the film’s messaging. It also tries to explore the figuration of Sweety, an upper-class feminine queer woman in small town Moga (in the North Indian state of Punjab), who is portrayed as the quintessentially ‘good’ queer woman. Even though Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga offers a queer visual and imaginative landscape, it limits itself by constructing discursive, narrative, and visual terrains where Sweety’s dissidence is deemed acceptable on grounds of her class privilege, her reverence for her family, her respectable femininity, and the embeddedness of her queer subjectivity in the family and culture. This paper interrogates the nature of queer representation in the film, how it tackles anxieties around acculturation, queer opposition to the nation-state and the visual and narrative means by which it domesticates queerness by sanitizing and inviting it into culture, family, nationalism and the nation-state.