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Desi Dykes and Divas: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema We're proud to present a lecture and film/video clip show by New York film writers Gayatri Gopinath and Javid Syed. Butch women, femme men, the transgendered, the cross-dressed, women kissing women, men declaring their undying devotion for each other: popular Indian cinema is a rich repository of queer images, desires, and pleasures, offering tremendous potential for queer readings and appropriations. Given that the Indian film industry is the largest in the world, and that films produced in Bombay and Madras find their way to South Asian diasporic communities throughout the world, these films are important sites of identification for South Asian queers. Indeed stars like Helen Madhuri, Sri Devi and Rekha, from the sixties to the present, have become queer icons for South Asians in North America, the UK and the Caribbean. In this clip show and presentation, Gayatri Gopinath and Javid Syed unabashedly privilege a queer gaze in order to offer a brief but tantalizing glimpse of what alternative sexualities look like in popular Indian cinema. |
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