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Sri Craven

Abstract

This essay contributes to transnational feminist and queer interests in neoliberalism, sexual politics and representational cultures that all circulate globally today. It reads Deepa Mehta’s film, Fire (1996), and Suniti Namjoshi’s literary venture, Goja: An Autobiographical Myth (2000). Each processes the question of lesbian visibility as a question of female labor and class relations among women. By analyzing representations of lesbian life in the context of laboring female bodies, the article challenges the dismissal of queer politics as neoliberal in India. Sexual identity politics, as critics argue, often dovetails with neoliberalism’s project of protecting elite and bourgeois subjects’ interests at the expense the working and the poor. Deploying western and transnational feminist/queer theories, cultural studies and literary critical methods, this essay spotlights two representational forms that enact and provide useful frameworks for radical queer political engagements.

Author Biography

Sri Craven is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. Her scholarly interests are in theorizing transnationalism through representational cultures, and deploying transnationalism as a concept in curricula and pedagogy. She teaches in the area of transnational feminist and queer studies, critical race studies, and South Asia and its diaspora.

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