Curating Queer Culture: Negotiating Opposed Sensibilities and Goals

- Vishal Tondon

Presentation done at the Workshop on Curating Visual Culture, organized by ACUA, IFA and Jamshetji Tata Trust. Jammu University, February 2012

I recently read the article “Culture Wars: Race and Queer Art” by Sunil Gupta. A very interesting article, it brings two important issues to the fore: of superimposed identities, where identities of color and race will have power over negotiation for gay rights and for the possibilities of a gay sensibility in the arts. So, we see that the black gay sensibility in the arts would be different from the white gay sensibility.

I would like to reflect on how the issues mentioned in this article are applicable in the Indian context.

The article speaks of conferences on ‘gay sensibility in the arts’ coinciding with the very influential Black Arts Movement. In the context of Indian gay practitioners of the plastic arts, the politics of representation hasn’t really taken the form of a movement where groups of artists form affiliations or collectives in a bid to tackle class or race issues. Until the 1990’s, it was only through their individual efforts that artists like Bhupen Khakhar and Jehangir Jani had taken into consideration class and caste issues consistently while tackling homosexuality.

Coming back to the article…

The article begins with a review by Scott Watson on the movie Pulp Fiction. Watson describes the movie as “vilely homophobic”. The two male protagonists in the movie, the Bruce Willis character and the crime boss, enemies at first, are able to come to a truce after the Bruce Willis character rescues the crime boss from being raped by a couple of homosexual and S&M inclined rapists. The review says, “Murdering queers and the satisfaction it brings is the ground on which the characters establish their truce.”

 Pulp Fiction (1994)

This is a queer reading of the movie. This reading may not be universally accepted. Yes, the protagonists – the Bruce Willis character and the crime boss – in the movie might have been homophobic, but that need not imply the movie was ‘vilely homophobic’ too. In the true spirit of pulp fiction, two characters that don’t get along are brought together in times of adversity; does it matter that the one rescued from rape was a man and not a woman? So, the mortification of the queer reader clearly owes to a kind of a gay sensibility. Should it not be possible for an artist/critic/viewer to look at artworks from the vantage point of multiple gazes? Artworks are layered and the reading of a movie like Pulp Fiction solely from the view of a monolithic gay male gaze would come in the way of a full appreciation of the movie.

The review further goes on to establish that sex with a man without his consent might not be so awful after all. The review says, “This awful torture is, as I’ve already revealed, a little anal penetration. A scene more or less like a Tom of Finland drawing – except for the withdrawal of the passive actor’s consent.”

In an instance of over-reading into the text of the movie, the review gives a Freudian twist to the relationship between the two male protagonists. The S&M sadists “are surrogates to act out the suppressed passion the men have for each other (which has led them to want to kill each other) and their murder of the queers is a kind of rite by which they take the passage back from the dark chamber where they’ve made love to the world of light and men.”

Clearly, the political aim of this review is to push the gay cause. But the movie Pulp Fiction could be read variously as homoerotic or homophobic. Clearly, reception of a work of art is a matter of sensibilities.

The article also speaks of a ‘gay sensibility in the arts’ in relation to the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe’s muscular male models were sometimes engaged in sexual activity or posed with sadomasochistic props such as leather and chains. So here we have one suggestion as to what the gay sensibility would entail. Mapplethorpe’s clear, unflinching style challenged viewers to confront this imagery. Clearly the average gallery hoppers – a large chunk of whom were not yet sensitized to gay life in everyday situations – was not prepared to receive such representations. Moreover, one saw in his work a tension between pornography and art. A posthumous retrospective exhibition of his work in 1990, funded partly by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), stirred a debate about government subsidies of "obscene" art and provoked Congress to enact restrictions on future NEA grants. 

 A photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe

Also, what held my attention in the article was that minority groups, given an atmosphere to work, will vie with each other under the twin pressures of the politics of representation and opposed sensibilities. Moreover, as has been explicitly stated in theories related to Sublatern Studies, one minority group – lesbian or gay in the context of our discussion – cannot stand in for another. Each minority group will have its own problems and politics and in the long run each will have to lay a claim to its own kind of transcendence.

The process of curating queer cultural fests would require beginning with the negotiating of problems from within the queer community. It would be naïve to assume that artists would cooperate on the basis of their shared empathy for one another’s sexual orientation alone. Superimposed identities and hybridizations may caste a veil between micro-communities within the larger queer community, and this leads to opposed sensibilities.

In October 2003, Humjinsi, a lesbian and bisexual women’s group organized Larzish, India’s first International Film Festival of Sexualities and Gender Pluralities. Everything that had any potentiality for activism was included in the list of themes and concerns that would be addressed; youth, child sexuality, women’s issues, sex workers’ rights, intersex recognition, campy takes on mainstream media, autobiographical sketches of transgender and transsexuals, LGBT fiction, and along with all this, masculinity and anti-globalization resistance too. Then how come, Vishwas Kulkarni, one of the participants who had submitted his short film for screening, came to accuse the Larzish team of gender discrimination?

Four years later, in the 2007 Art India issue on Censorship, Vishwas accused that his short, ‘Main Shayar Badnaam’, had been censored out of the festival ‘for its explicit content.’ Apparently, sensibilities were at clash here. It is possible that Larzish had reconsidered some of its policies; they had all the right to do so. It was not the end of the world for Vishwas either. He went along with his badnaam shayar to other parties, where they were welcomed. But what this episode foreground is very important. The process of transcending their social condition is not the same for the lesbian and the gay male community. Each one does it at their own pace, in their own ways, with consideration to the hurdles they may have to surmount. 

Main Shayar Badnaam (2003) 

Vishwas accused the lesbians of censorship at a time when the word “censorship” had assumed exceptional notoriety and the word “censor” had almost come to be used as a slur. We are talking about the outfall of the May 9^th incident at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda. The whole country was united in its outrage against violent acts of censorship. Vishwas chose to address the rejection of his film in a similar context of censorship.

In the next issue of Art India, Tejal Shah and Natasha Mendonca, co-founders and curators of the Larzish Film Festival, presented their position and the reasons behind the exclusion of ‘Main Shayar Badnaam.’ They clarified that they were not opposed to the content of the film or it’s ‘explicitness.’ On the contrary, they asserted that the closing section of the festival would have discussed pornography and queer desire, if things had gone well for the festival. The curators state, “We realized that while it used found pornography, ‘Main Shayar Badnaam’ did not conceptually or politically fit into the pornography section.” Moreover, the Larzish team claimed that they had to call off the entire pornography package; given the political situation then, they apparently could not easily show or have healthy and safe debates around pornography. 

In his article, Vishwas’s description of the lesbian as “An Amazonian woman – macho and managerial…”, even though used in good humor I would presume, has an undercurrent of stereotyping. To this, the curators at Larzish responded by saying, “Kulkarni’s article is problematic because of its antagonism towards lesbians and feminists. Unfortunately, his tone is symptomatic of the animosity that often prevails between political queers and non-politicized homosexuals. In particular, gay men fail to question their male privileges and internalized patriarchal attitudes, despite their minority status as homosexuals.” 

We see opposed sensibilities and goals between the two parties here. Also, it becomes apparent – as I have already mentioned earlier – that the process of transcending their social condition is not the same for the lesbian and the gay male community.

This brings us to the question of what kind of gay sensibility in movies are we talking about in the Indian context? Will it be different for mainstream screenings like at Larzish and Kashish, as from semi-private screenings enjoyed by social networking groups like GayBombay? This can only be resolved once the war against the censorship of pornography has yielded result. But there is also the social aspect to the development of the gay sensibility that is not homogeneous right now. Many from the gay community, especially youngsters, are seen to superimpose the heterosexual marital structure on gay relationships. The idea is to push their homosexual relationship in a least provocative manner, and to make it appear as stable and gracious. On the other hand, a high regard for sadomasochistic activities in the gay male community – probably owing to the conception that gay relationships are essentially embattled – finds manifestation in a lot of gay art, and its expression in cultural spaces makes a large chunk of the community queasy. If cultural festivals are to make any claims to social responsibility, then curating will have to take in consideration opposed sensibilities.    

 Film screenings at social networking groups like GayBombay          

Sensibilities came to a clash once again on the third day of screening during the Siddhartha Gautam Film Festival in Kolkata in March 2010. Here I speak of sensibility in terms of receptivity. Jhuma Basak, a mental health professional, was invited to the podium to comment on the movie “Assume Nothing” which had been screened just then. “Assume Nothing”, directed by Kirsty MacDonald, brought forward the concept of ‘performing bodies’ as compared to that of ‘biological bodies.’ So when Jhuma Basak spoke on how gender is performed, and to the mortification of the all-gay audience that even homosexuality is performed rather than purely biological, there was uproar. A larger portion of the audience, mainly students and working class men, found the proposition all the more objectionable because in their minds and their social circles, they had conveniently ascribed their homosexuality to biology; something beyond their control. The speaker found it an uphill task to have her point arrive home.

 Assume Nothing. A film by Kirsty MacDonald

On a different note, when it comes to the question of sensibility, some panelists on the selection committees of major Indian LGBT film festivals have lamented the quality of production as well as narration in the Indian entries.

That brings us to the sensibility of the practitioners themselves. The sensibility that determines a queer aesthetic. What is the basis for a presumed queer aesthetic? Is it just shared empathy for one another’s ‘queer’ sexual orientation? Or would the queer aesthetic allow plurality of styles so as to be able to express different cultures, traditions and socio-economic backgrounds?   

Do lesbian and gay male artists, or for that matter, even gay male artists amongst themselves, subscribe to a common gay sensibility?

The Larzish episode is an indicator that lesbian and the gay male communities would like to negotiate the implications of the term ‘gay sensibility’ on their own terms, and according to the dynamics of their own social conditions.

Lesbian and gay male artists are averse to function solely under the constraints of a shared ‘Queer’ identity. They might not like to be party to the strategic essentialism garbed as identity politics, as they are well aware that such positioning aligns them with hegemonic discourses that aim to achieve collective goals.

It is a paradox. While identity politics is the fountainhead of queer art practice, the practitioners might be queasy about being clubbed together solely on the basis of their sexuality or a forced common gay sensibility. Any judicious curating of queer culture would thus have to negotiate these opposed sensibilities and goals.