Queering Expectations, Making Space for Desire

The film Fire teems with a frame in which sexuality and nationalism are brought into inevitable and controversial conversation. In her article, “Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories of Deepa Mehta’s Fire” Gayatri Gopinath discusses the framework of the “queer diasporic positionality” that thrives with agency in the plot of the film. The author uses this conflation of words to refer to how queerness is situated among the hegemonic and nationalist imagination, and seeks to question the impurity and lack of authenticity associated with which non-heterosexual expressions are associated (150). Queerness acts as a de-stabilizer of certain political, economic, and religious structures as born through the gendered and sexualized nationalist discourses (150). This concept also acts to situate sexuality as a marker of corporeal subjectivity and consider its role “within transnational flows of culture, capital, bodies, desire, and labor” (150). It questions the normativity of “heterosexuality” and “nation,” while simultaneously seeking to reopen the borders of conceptualization within the aforementioned economies (151). By employing the lens of the queer diaspora in the analysis of film, new spaces for questioning cultural productions are opened and embraced.

One such film apt for analysis through this lens is Deepa Mehta’s Fire. Critical analysis of this film is particularly intriguing through the lens of the queer diaspora, and this is evidenced throughout the challenges to various normalized socio-cultural practices that are posed by certain relationships and dialogues that ensue between characters. Sita is cognizant of the social constraints that bind her movements, and she does not hesitate to be outspoken about this. In one scene, after Sita unexpectedly kissed Radha, the two women sit at the table in the kitchen to share a meal. They had not yet discussed the kiss that neither woman could forget, and the leftover tension still simmered between them. Sita says, “Isn’t it funny, we’re so bound by traditions and rituals…someone just has to push my buttons and I respond like a trained monkey.” In saying this, Sita is forwardly questioning the cultural dynamics binding both women to their circumstances.

Though Sita’s questioning of her surrounding cultural and social boundaries persists throughout the length of film. Happily dancing to music in her husbands clothes, breaking a fast without his blessing, and beginning a relationship with her sister in law are all active evidences of her discomfort with the patriarchal norms that govern her reality. Looming between a space of desire and expectation, Sita initially navigates this space leaning toward the latter. In the beginning of the film, while on a honeymoon with her husband Jitam, Sita appears to desire his affection. She asks about his tastes in movies and asks if he likes her, to which he offers a cold response. Soon, Sita learns that her expectations are leaving her unfulfilled in numerous. By fulfilling her expectations as a wife, she is left sexually unsatisfied, disrespected, emotionally discontented, cheated on, and undesired by her husband. She derives great pleasure, however, when she acts upon her true desires, despite their displacement within the frame of cultural expectations. By creating her own space within the queer diaspora, she is able to freely explore new aspects of her own desires, apart from the boundaries set upon her. Within her culture, there is no space for breaking the expectations of a dutiful wife. However, flashbacks to a moment of her childhood in which she was overcome with a desire to see the ocean remind Sita that, “what you can’t see, you can see, you just have to see without looking.” Before their first kiss, Sita and Radha share a similar conversation on the balcony that alludes to the cultivation of a new space in which to exercise their desires. Calling upon the ocean as a metaphoric representative for their desire, such is invisible, but can ultimately blooms with the potential to be seen and created.

Such imaginative practices are not necessary for the men who live through their desires, as there is a cultural space in which they can be exercised. In her article, Gobinath points out that queer female desires are silenced, while men in the family have a place to access pleasure and fantasy that drift from their heterosexual, domestic home lives (154). While Ashok is consumed by the homosocial bonding offered through his religious practices, Jatin sells porn and frequently visits his Chinese girlfriend Julie, and Mundu masturbates to porn in front of Biji, male desire is preserved and fostered by the gender and class boundaries governing the household (155). The women, however, are denied access to such economies of desire, and are left to witness the pleasures exercised by men (155). The severity of these structures of patriarchal desire and heteronormativity are pulled too taut, and as the seams rip, female queer desire is imagined and emerged, and through it, Sita and Radha are able to nurture their love.



Deepa Mehta offers a deeper discussion of Fire in this informative interview. Fire is part of Metha's "Elements Trilogy," that also includes Earth (1998) and Water (2005). I encourage you to check out the interview as well as the trailers for Mehta's other two films in her trilogy!



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