Fire and Desire

In viewing Deepa Mehta's film, Fire, concepts of sexuality, gender roles,culture arose as this film took place in contemporary New Dehli in the mid 1990's (Gopinath, 169). In terms of a queer diaspora positionality, Gopinath states that this first "situates the formation of sexual subjectivity within transnational flows of culture, capital, bodies, desire, and labor" (Gopinath, 170). I'm not exactly sure what she means by this but I interpret it as the perspective of sexuality and expectations there of male and female roles are embedded in culture, capital bodies, desire, and labor. There is much importance placed on tradition in the film and Sita states that she feels like a performing monkey when it comes to culture and that their lives revolve around it. People are told not to question but only to obey in this sense, to obey in the name of your family and tradition. In terms of the film, capital bodies may refer to the roles within the business of the family as well as the determined roles of husband and wife. Radha's husband continuously states duties of husband and wife and son and so forth. There are certain expectations to be upheld and not to be questioned. These duties that Radha's husband is discussing deal greatly with desire and his battle with fighting the urges of sexual temptation since Radha is baron he feels there is no purpose to sex and must become closer to God. Radha expresses to Sita that she has not had sex for thirteen years and her Husbands apology earlier on in the film starts to make sense. Transnational flow and culture do deal with queer diaspora in that this is a national concept and places importance on culture. Gopinath then goes on to state the second function of queer diaspora in that it "contests the logic that situates the terms 'queer' and 'diaspora' as dependent on the originality and authenticity of 'heterosexuality' and 'nation'" (Gopinath, 170). This also pertains to tradition and expectations within sexuality. What makes sexuality authentic? Sita and Rahda spend much of their time on the roof, gazing out over the city, discussing their husbands, and personal stories and wishes. Sita expresses all that she wants outside of marraige and her husband expresses to his brother all of the pressure he was under to be a certain way. Sita and her husband do not share a mutually happy relationship, but they have a sort of mutual understanding in that he will be with his girlfriend who he is truly in love with even though he is married. Gopinaths statement above is reflective of the last scene with Rahda and her husband as she confesses her love and desire for Sita. This moment in the film is the most authentic Rahda ever is with her husband throughout the film. The last function stated by Gopinath on queer diaspora positionality is that "it disorganizes the dominant categories within the United States for sexual variance, namely 'gay and lesbian,' and it marks a different economy of desire that escapes legibility within both normative Indian contexts and homo normative white Euro-American contexts (Gopinath, 170). The notion of sexual variance is important here in that there are categories that receive more attention than others and this is also dependent geographically speaking. The idea of disorganization is interesting among the normative standards within a culture. In the film. Sita tells Radha that in their culture there is no name for what they are and the relationship they have. This is very blunt and straightforward in terms of the connotation the film portrays regarding Indian culture and gender norms. Deepa Mehta created large controversy within India regarding the film and attached is an interesting article regarding her latest work and response to the controversy over Fire.