Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Perverse Modernities) [Paperback]

This is one of those books that has wonderful "multi-tasking" powers! I taught it in two courses, one an undergraduate portal course for women's studies majors and an interdisciplinary graduate course on queers and theory. It worked very well in both courses, and as the teacher I learned so much myself using this book in both venues.

I also myself love this book!

For my own experience and pleasure I downloaded and watched as much of the music and as many of the films as I could get a hold of. I did play and show elements of these to my classes, and urged them with some success to connect with these materials themselves.

I was excited when both classes used these contacts to then enlarge their own interests along new lines having once seen or played songs, music, films, literatures. References to more of this stuff were especially common in the undergraduate course for the rest of the semester. Interestingly enough it was students from former republics of the former soviet union who were especially interested in some of this South Asian diasporic cultural work.

I was quite envious of the straightforward and yet elaborated structure of argument of this book: it centers around, although extends beyond the film Fire and all the ramifications and contextualizations one needs to grasp in order to engage queer diasporic female subjectivities. I was able to outline this structure carefully in the undergraduate course, and the students were able to follow it pretty well; I was pleased with the sophistication it helped them develop.

But when I took for granted the graduate students would themselves see and analyze this structure - it seemed obvious in the nicest way - I found I had misunderstood what they would focus upon. They loved all the details and were less willing or maybe less interested in managing the threads of interconnection. I am still not sure if they were onto something I was not, or whether I just didn't prepare them properly to see how it was put together.

You could say this is a great "text" for a class (not textbook of course), but it is also a lot of fun to read if you are interested in knowing more about or analyzing yourself South Asian diasporic art and literature, film, and music, and want to ponder the travels of these materials.

It is also quite profound in its analysis of many layers of the what the term "queer" could mean, does mean, has meant, should have meant, might mean in the future, means to many disparate folks in a range of places, disciplines, politics, art worlds, analytic frameworks, cultural studies and so on. It's not that it analyzes such positions exhaustively - although there are some pretty thorough examinations of the play of such meanings across a set of works - but rather that it models a kind of analysis that is, as I say, profound, and also, dare I say, fun.

I have been following Gopinath's work for many years now -- from her lucid essay in Russell Leong's "Asian American Sexualities," to her review of Deepa Mehta's "Fire" and her brilliant and lucid analysis of Shyam Selvadurai's "Funny Boy." Not only is Gopinath a brilliant scholar with urgently insightful readings, but she writes with an exemplary prose that is worthy of worldwide applause. Her studies of music, film, literature, and social events coagulate to form a powerful and cogent argument for thinking about race and sexuality in what she calls a "South Asian diasporic" sensibility. What is the use of such an interpretational tool? It immediately highlights weaknesses in both feminist and postcolonial scholarship while simultaneously bringing these fields' insights to assist in her readings. "Impossible Desires" sparkles with sagacious scholarship, and makes clear the cultural stakes for all who see the identity politics of gender and sexuality as inextricable from South Asian cultural production. I am thankful that this book exists, although I am not yet finished with it. I have waited many, many years for something like this, and can say with much gratitude that it will continue to inform my own studies for many years to come. Anyone who wishes to think outside of the box of what they consider their most radical thinking should not only seriously consider purchasing this book, but should also gift a few copies to others they know who are passionate about the cultural politics of women, queers, and South Asian diasporic culture around the globe.

University of California Davis's Women's Studies Professor Gayatri Gopinath, has written an impressive academic text entitled, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Gopinath combines her knowledge of women's studies with her interests in a variety of academic fields on popular culture, race-sexuality, migration and South Asian cultural literature. She introduces several ways of identity formation and mediation of the "racialized" and Queer South Asian body by incorporating both feminist and queer theory within her analysis. In critical theory, the term "Queer" is a signifier of a complex defiant attitude that destabilizes any and all traditional notions of identity. It works to disrupt anything that appears too heteronormative, too "commonsensical," and too constructed. Gopinath explains that it "works to name the alternative reading of the diaspora and to dislodge it from its adherence and loyalty to nationalist ideologies that are fully aligned with the interests of transnational capitalism" (11). As a South Asian Queer feminist, Gopinath not only possess valuable critical insight, her identity gives Impossible Desires its authenticity.

The first chapter is an introduction in which Gopinath immediately brings the reader into a specific moment during the film entitled, "My Beautiful Launderette" (1985) a controversial and "groundbreaking" movie about two gay men in an interracial relationship; one male is white, Johnny and the other, Omar, is Pakistani. The movie's representation of Omar's body reverses the spectators gaze by re-situating Omar into a position of the subject and Johnny becomes the object of the spectators gaze. She describes the "queer diasporic body," as a text-- where the histories of rampant discrimination and colonialism are clearly "written" on the body. According to Gopinath, "Queer and diasporic cultural forms and practices point to submerged histories of racist and colonialist violence that continue to resonate in the present that make themselves felt though bodily desire"(4). This is an interesting statement because she describes the unstable relationship between the external and the internal parts of the "material" body, which she addresses again in the next two chapters. For Gopinath, the body they experience and conceptualize is continuously mediated by heterosexual and nationalistic constructions and popular images of culture.

Chapter 2 entitled Queer Communities of Sound examines the ways in which popular Bhangra Music and Post Bhangra Asian music allow her to situate "gender and sexuality at the very center of our understandings of diaspora, nation and globalization"(31). During the 1970s through the 1990s, Bhangra music, resonated across the world's national borders. Their songs revealed a sense growing resentment against the growing cultural conservatism in the United States and Britain and they also revealed a desire to find a homeland. Despite their radical message, Gopinath argued that their "nostalgic evocation of the homeland was mobilized through the fixed, static figure of the female, the emblem of tradition and (sexual and moral) purity." Their problematic message of an idealized woman reinforces "patrilinity and organic heterosexuality." She works in opposition to this tendency by applying Queer theory to the dialogue in order to draw attention to the "feminist diasporic cultural practices" that offer an alternative perspective.

In Chapter 3 Surviving Naipaul, Gopinath dissects three different texts:

Surviving Sabu (1996), a film by Ian Rashid, a gay Indonesian/Canadian from the UK; A novel entitled Mr. Biswas (1961), by V.S. Naipaul and East is East (2000) a film created by Damian O'Donnell. She explains how such films rely on the invisibility of a female subject in order to distinguish the gay male diasporic identity (64-65). Gopinath transfers the attention to the women by employing both feminist and queer theory in her analysis. Much of this chapter focuses on the different "modes" of producing an identity of subjectivity. Perhaps the most important concept in this chapter is that of "disidentification" which is defined as the "third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; [...] a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology" (68). According to

Gopinath, this strategy is not repression, but rather an awareness of self-- that people can define who they are, by who they are not and their social and individual identities overlap resulting in multiple identity formations.

Gayatri Gopinath addresses the various ways in which a queer diasporic female subjectivity can surface within a heteronormative, nationalistic environment, through her critique of South Asian popular cultural representations of the female body. South Asian films, novels and music, as revolutionary as they are, depend on the "erasure" or "invisibility" of the female subject. In Impossible Desires, Gayatri Gopinath offers a systematic critique that aims to deconstruct the knowledge and values of a dominant heterosexual nation.