Staging sexuality through the familial, the performative and the activist: Bollywood’s queer repertoire in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Bollywood’s queer representational project in the twenty-first century has mostly been understood through a focus on cinematic images and stories and in linear terms of the closet and coming out. This essay considers the idea of queer visibility in Bollywood in embodied terms through an analysis of two eminent filmmakers, Karan Johar and Onir. While Onir’s social advocacy films are an extension of his own openly gay position in Bollywood, Karan Johar as a mainstream, commercial filmmaker has consistently maintained a silence about his sexuality in the media. However, Johar’s queer performances on his chat show, at award shows and the All India Bakchod (AIB) Roast suggest the staging of sexuality in ambiguous and contingent terms without recourse to global identity labels of LGBT. Through an analysis of these performances, the essay argues that Bollywood’s textuality is far too rich and complex to be reduced to any singular logic of queer visibility.

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