Fire's Queer Diasporic Positionality

In her essay “ Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories of Deepa Mehta's Fire,” Gayatri Gopinath utilizes Mehta’s film as a context to begin illustrating some of the complexities inherent to cultural forms that delve into both queer and diasporic sensibilities. Gopinath uses a “queer diasporic positionality” to disrupt particular and essentialized identities of both nationalism and diaspora. She suggests that it is the fluidity of gender and sexuality, in addition to the elastic relationship between nation and diaspora, that prevent the legitimacy of hegemonic discourses.

In defining “queer diasporic positionality,” Gopiath first notes that sexuality and the contexts within which individuals are placed and subjected into particular constructions are based not in one-dimensional values but rather in “transnational flows of culture, capital, bodies, desire, and labor” (150). Gopiath also defines queer diaspora as a contestation of everything within the hegemony of patriarchal heteronormative nationalism of India and Hinduism, while also contesting normative narratives of queerness that are set against and localized exclusively to “both normative Indian contexts and homonormative white Eruo-American contexts” (151).

One of the most thought-provoking discussions Gopiath introduces is how “the attraction between Radha and Sita is enabled by [the] spaces of female homosociality that are sanctioned by normative sexual and gender arrangements” (155). She talks about how the construction of responsibility and duty for Indian wives is inherently queered and allows for particular desires to manifest and thrive within the very system that, in theory, supports patriarchal heteronormativity. It is these relationship that transgress normative understanding not only of queerness but also of geography as these traditions, customs, and systems are then established as mobile between nation and diaspora.

Gopinath also puts the film into a conversation with a falsified paradigm of modernity that has been tied to a particularly Western conceptualization of gender and sexuality. She talks specifically about film critics in the United States that have articulated the film’s queer content as beyond the capacities of understanding for Hindu cultures, noting the scene when Radha says, “There is no word in our language to describe what we are to each other,” placing Hinduism as underdeveloped within the hierarchy of modernity. Furthermore, Gopiath then suggests that, by doing so, these critics place inherent “modern,” Western values and associations to a queer identity, that by subverting their Hindu culture and traditions, Sita and Radha are the ultimate in Indian modernity while also ignoring other queer identities that may not have had the agency to be voiced.

By constructing such frameworks that incorporate queer and diaspora into established ideals of nationalism and patriarchal heteronormativity, Gopiath not only perceives Fire through critical analysis but also reprimands mainstream media - both in India and in the Euro-centric United States - and the extremist Hindu nationalists that protested the film. She does so by deconstructing the assertion that the film, and other instances of queer diasporic visual culture, are inauthentic. She uses queer diaspora positionality to simultaneously prove agency for such context and sensibility and also critique the hegemonic ideologies that are constantly working to silence the existence and struggles of non-normative lived experiences, in this case for a lesbian relationship in contemporary New Delhi.

Here is Roger Ebert’s review of the film that paints a much fuller portrait of Gopiath’s understanding of “queer diasporic positionality” as it relates to homonormative white Euro-American contexts.