4th Global Conference
Monday 19th November - Thursday
22nd November 2007
Salzburg, Austria
Session 1: Representations
Chair: Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
(Un)Familiar Spaces: The Erotic Geographies of the Contemporary Lesbian Indian Novel
Aneeta Rajendran
The Centre of English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
A cursory survey of the field of lesbian/queer writing by “Indian” women will reveal a very queer fact: some of the most substantial contributions to the corpus have come from almost anywhere but India. The sheer volume of this literally transnational body of writing requires that one examine the spaces, cultural and social, that make possible, in such diasporic locations, an articulation of one’s sexuality, especially lesbian sexuality, in a manner that was denied most writers when they were still in India, Suniti Namjoshi’s oeuvre being a case in point here. This paper will examine treat these locations as a queer space, and map the creative topography of Indian lesbian writing, via select authors and texts, problematising the term "Indian" to understand better the nature of the subjectivities that emerge.
The micro-location of this corpus, this “unlit stage … where so much of our inner theatre takes place,” to quote Sudhir Kakar, is also unsettlingly “local,” very “familiar” after all. Movies like Fire and novels like Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee’s Sister of My Heart or Anita Nair’s Ladies’ Coupe, to name but two novels at random, have “domesticated” lesbianism in India by locating their works in the life-spaces of ordinary households, within the very reassuringly traditional, “familiar” spaces of the home, especially the kitchen and the bedroom, conventionally and almost exclusively “female” spaces in India. Is this part of a larger strategy? I argue that it is, placing these intimacies – and the very “domesticated” strategies, such as writing about cooking, gardening, washing clothes – employed by these writers in delineating this eros, within the larger, more theoretical context of how Thadani, Vanita and Kidwai, and Sukhthankar have domesticated the same eros by demonstrating through their scholarly work that a lesbian tradition, in terms of textual production and cultural visibility, exists/used to exist in India, and that it was not a foreign import.
Using the metaphor of the “familiar,” which connotes both the reassuringly familiar, but also the “(un)familiar,” as in devilish, uncanny or evil, I shall examine how these texts characterise intimate spaces, studying how their homoerotic intimacies restructure, radicalise and invest these spaces with new, dissident symbolism.
This paper will, thus, examine how spaces create sexuality, as it were, via the following questions: How does this intimate or sexual space relate to larger questions of identity? Does space travel? Is the kitchen occupied by two lesbian lovers in New York the same as the backyard inhabited by lesbian familiars in the heart of the Tamil country in southern India? What, then, are the implications of locating subversive longings in very conservative spaces? How do these texts navigate the difficulties of showing any erotic charge – heterosexual or homosexual – in Indian “public” spaces, within those that enclose the traditional family and those that the modern “individual” woman inhabits? And finally, does space create the self? How does the abstract narrative of space relate to the seemingly more tangible narratives of the self?
What's My Age Again? - Inaccurate Depictions of Child Sexuality on Stage and Screen
David White
Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, Canada
Creating works that depict themes involving sex and the sexuality of young people is typically more problematic for stage or screen productions than it is for writers of novels or short stories. In both cases there can be a resistance based on the perceived inappropriacy of even discussing such matters. But with plays, film, and television the need to have child actors play characters involved in such depictions has been regarded as especially problematic. If the story is about a child who is sexually active, pregnant, a transvestite, gay, transsexual, intersex, a prostitute, or a rape victim the role can be particularly difficult for young performers.
One standard way to avoid the problems of casting children has been to have actors who are older than their characters play the roles. Even in productions that do not involve controversial themes there often are good reasons to hire older actors. When it comes to portraying characters who are older teenagers, such casting can successfully be done without being visually unrealistic. But when it comes to casting characters who are younger teenagers or even preteens, often casting older actors to play younger characters comes at a significant cost.
In this paper examples from very recent productions on stage, in film, and on television will be presented to show that even with material that deals with the difficult issues of sex and sexuality, age-appropriate actors can and have been used successfully. Then the recent hit Broadway musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening will be discussed in some detail as an example of how casting actors older than their roles not only detracts from the artistic goals of a production, it can completely destroy the social significance of the author's original vision. It can actually do more harm than good in furthering our understanding of sexual issues that are a part of children's lives.
Turkish Hamam as an Oriental Representation of the Sexually-Coded Otherness in Contemporary Turkish Metropolitan Life
Burkay Pasin
Department of Architecture, Faculty of Fine Arts and Design, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey
Since the 18th century, the Western understanding of the Islamic world, both Asian and African, have focused on a kind of ‘eastern trope of sexuality’ formed by the figures of lustfulness and ethical indignation those encountered in the diaries of the Western travellers. This typical framework, covering the oriental concepts of ‘hareem, hammam, slave market, concubine and polygamy’, differs from the European diversification of spaces to identify the sexual otherness. Among those, ‘the hammam’ as a multi-cultural figure adorned by sexual secrets still functions as a public bathing place mostly used by externalised personalities striving to survive in the post-industrial city, while its Western equivalents is represented with spatial typologies including ‘boilerhouses, saunas or spas’. Compared to Arabic or African baths where homosexual tendecies are legally forbidden, the Turkish hammam, placed in the center of a moderate conservatism, serves as a ground for the others’ modes of expression and a pure sexual activity space, the secret ambience of which is substantially enhanced by its architectural character. In spite of current trendy transformations of similar traditional building types imprisoned in the post-industrial discourses, the Turkish hammam also exists as a stagnant space, not restorated and cultivated, keeping its role as an urban bathing and meeting unit for the sexual others. This paper argues the position of the Turkish hammam in contemporary Turkish metropolitan life in three different aspects: the functional and aesthetical roles of the hammam space for Turkish gay culture, the personalised masculine character of the hammam life in the Turkish gay scene and the representation of the hammam figure in the conservative public discourse of dissimilarity. In this respect, three hammam spaces, each located in one of the three metropolitans in Turkey, are examined and interpreted via a socio-cultural analysis of the sexually-coded otherness.