August 9, 2006
Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.
Gayatri Gopinath ends the first chapter of Impossible Desires with a disclaimer of sorts regarding the cultural texts through which she analyzes queerness and diaspora: these “objects of inquiry,” she writes, “appear to be excessive, tangential, or marginal to recognized traditions” (28). She focuses on the margins because, she goes on to write, it is precisely at those margins where representations and ideologies of sexuality and diaspora are created and negotiated. Yet these marginal, tangential objects are often, she argues, parts of largue, more traditional texts–music, films, and novels (to name a few cultural forms) that represent and thus work to sustain “conventional gender, sexual, and nationalist ideologies” (28). Impossible Desires is indebted to the diasporic cultural studies work of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, and in keeping with this strain of cultural studies, Gopinath bases her analysis of queerness and diaspora on mainstream cultural objects and activities.
In Chapter Three, “Surviving Naipaul: Housing Masculinity in A House for Mr. Biswas, Surviving Sabu, and East Is East,” Gopinath performs two cultural readings. The first illustrates the way Ian Rashid’s film Surviving Sabu is a kind of critical rereading of Naipaul’s novel A House for Mr. Biswas, one that complicates race and masculinity from a postcolonial standpoint. Gopinath’s reading of the film and novel makes a cultural studies argument, for by analyzing these two popular texts, she intends to show the ways in which idologiy is both represented and contexted in venues outside more “official” discourses such as law, science, history, or social science. Her second reading complicates this first analysis. She goes on to write that for all the revisions Surviving Sabu effects in the name of alternative sexuality, such work is done at the expense of queer female diasporic subjectivity. Instead of rejecting or accepting queerness, contemporary Bollywood cinema, for example, “manages queerness” by “simultaneously acknowledg[ing], contain[ing], and disavow[ing]” that queerness as specifically queer male desire (190).
Impossible Desires makes a cultural argument about the marginalization of queer female diasporic subjectivity and bases this claim on evidence extracted from popular cultural forms. Noting how this female subject position is absent from cultural representation, Gopinath undertakes in her book to formulate, through her critical re-readings of these popular texts, “a diasporic frame of analysis that is at once queer and feminist” (91). Gopinath reads her chosen texts for those brief, apparently inconsequential moments where impossible/invisible queer female desire can be detected. Using absences as evidence, Gopinath works to formulate ways of reading that will “transform” such “impossible” or absent representations into “vibrant, livable spaces of possibility” (194).