The Representation of the Lesbian Body in Contemporary Indian Popular Culture

Abstract

In this essay, we examine the representation of the lesbian body in two contemporary Indian pop cultural products: Shobha Dé’s bestseller novel Strange Obsession (1992) and Karan Razdan’s Bollywood film Girlfriend (2004). We argue that rather than challenging and undermining the hegemonic modes of representation of lesbian women, both works deploy, and manipulate for dramatic effect, a repertoire of visual/textual stereotypes that have long been associated in misogynist and patriarchal imagination with perceptions of lesbian women as sexual abjects and heterosexual partners as victims of their insanity.